Q&A: Architect Stephen Alexander talks about Stadium Village

Stephen Alexander, owner of Prince Alexander Architects, is helping to revitalize the Old Southside neighborhood. Alexander’s office lies in the shadow of Lucas Oil Stadium at 850 S. Meridian, and he’s worked with other dedicated developers and community members to fill empty parcels in the area.

His company was the architect on TWG Development’s newly opened Rise on Meridian apartment complex, and he worked to assemble land to sell to the developer. And he was also the architect for a BWI LLC apartment building under construction at 1202 S. Meridian St.

As a developer, Alexander had a hand in Towne Place Suites by Marriott, Tru Hotel by Hilton, Union 525 and Back 9 Golf and Entertainment. And he’s currently working to assemble land to create additional desirable parcels for developers to fill in the area around Lucas Oil Stadium.

The longtime architect said he wants to see the neighborhood replicate a sort of Olympic Village surrounding Lucas Oil Stadium. He talked to IBJ about the progress he believes the neighborhood has made toward that goal.

When it comes to land that you’re looking at, what do you own and what are you interested in?

Well, the one that I can disclose to you is the real estate that we’ve been acquiring over the years next to Shapiro’s Deli. We’re seeking an apartment developer right now for this property to be similar in size and scale to the Rise on Meridian. We also have recently worked on assembly of land at West and Morris streets by the Marathon gas station for a new proposed hotel. It’ll be an IHG flag hotel.

How have development prospects changed for the Old Southside over the last few years, especially with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic?

It was nothing less than a gut punch to the economy when the pandemic took the wind out of the sails of everything. But I really think we’re getting back to a more normalized economy. The travelers are traveling, and homeowners are owning and the renters are renting. The things that we need downtown that aren’t down here right now are starting to come back, too.

I think a lot of that [credit] goes to Visit Indy, Chris Gahl and the Capital Improvement Board for all the work that they do to promote convention traffic. It creates so much ancillary development for peripheral sorts of projects and merchants that are in the area.

We still need office workers to come back downtown. I don’t have a real strong feeling that that’s going to happen, but there are a lot of other load centers that continue to grow. Obviously, Lilly and Elanco are a gigantic part of our downtown economy, but the economic engine that is Indiana University and Purdue University is really still in their early stages of growth.

I think Purdue will see a footprint in some number of years that’s going to be equal to the former IUPUI campus that’s now IU Indianapolis. Purdue will have a similar presence downtown, and it’s going to be good for all of the businesses and all the merchants.

We have reported that you occasionally have had a contentious relationship with the city. Has that changed at all?

I think we characterize part of the problem that we—a lot of the developers—have as: Our vision of how great the city could be downtown gets ahead of the skis on the city’s ability to accommodate or understand the vision. But quite honestly, a lot of the new people that have come into economic development or the Department of Metropolitan Development are really part of that vision.

In any city it takes time for government entities to catch up with the free market, and I think the city has done a pretty good job catching up with that vision, understanding what it means when we’re trying to develop walkable areas, if you want to reduce pavement, reduce parking. All of those things that we fought for for 20 or 30 years may not necessarily be in the zoning document, but they’re in the heads of people who are in DMD now and in Develop Indy. They’re up to speed on all that.

Probably the biggest hurdle that I think all the developers are experiencing is trying to get through the permit process. And there’s been several meetings about trying to figure out how to solve the permit crisis in Indianapolis.

You’ve said previously that you have an image in your head of what the south side of downtown could be. Do you feel like that’s come to fruition? Or is that something that’s still in progress?

It’s well on its way to coming to fruition. For a full build-out of the Old Southside, like from Lilly’s headquarters on Madison Avenue and Delaware Street over to the tech center on Morris and Kentucky Avenue, there’s enough real estate there for another 20 years of development.

Is the current mixture of uses in the Old Southside where it should be?

On Mass Ave, the northeast quadrant [of downtown], there’s one really small hotel, Bottleworks. On the southeast quadrant, Fountain Square, there are all those dining, food and beverage facilities and thousands of apartments. There’s no hotel there. There’s no hotel in the northwest quadrant, which is IUPUI and 16 Tech.

So what we have around Lucas Oil Stadium and the Downtown Central Business District is that we are the hospitality district for downtown. Or for Indianapolis, really, for all of Marion County.

[We have] the ability to build in with a high density, walkable community. … Imagine the Olympic Village in Munich or in Montreal or any other city. That’s my goal, to make the Old Southside the Olympic Village of the Midwest.

Indianapolis leaders are looking at downtown with more focus on residential development and walkability. When you look at filling in these gaps on the Old Southside, it does sound like apartments are a priority.

I think that whatever that filter was that we went through [with the pandemic] got a lot more people to not own cars and want to be in walkable communities and rely on Uber and Lyft for a great deal of stuff. [The ability to] not have a car is a huge asset to younger people and to older people that don’t want to drive or aren’t comfortable with driving. A walkable community is just critically important to a bunch of different demographics.

Are there any other areas of development that you think the Old Southside needs to succeed?

We’ve been getting a lot of cooperation from the city recently. The best example of that is the Meridian Street repavement and the repaving of McCarty Street from Lilly’s headquarters over to Lucas Oil. That’s really important.

I think we’re going to continue to want through the Stadium Village Business Association to brainstorm ways to get closer to the Olympic Village kind of presentation.

I think that one of the biggest, hardest things is connectivity. I think we have five exit ramps come off of Interstate 70 on the Old Southside. They’re a great asset because we have traffic coming in, but we need to be able to accommodate better pedestrian traffic and connectivity [and] access to the [White River]. I’d like to see a trail so you could walk from Fountain Square to the White River, a cool pedestrian, half-wooded pedestrian path.•