Feature
Indianapolis Cultural Trail already paying off 3.7.11
INDIANAPOLIS STAR
More than a year of construction kept some customers away from stores and restaurants along Massachusetts Avenue, but businesses are beginning to see the Indianapolis Cultural Trail's payoff.
Even during this winter's frequent snow and ice, people using the walking and biking path have found their way into unfamiliar shops.
That's the kind of new exposure Craig Von Deylen hopes to see in Fountain Square, the terminus of one of several sections on which construction will begin soon.
"It's about time the city of Indianapolis had some kind of connection to the culture and arts going on down here in Fountain Square," Von Deylen, president of the Fountain Square Merchants Association, said at a kickoff celebration Friday.
At Friday's final "ground-breaking" for the $62.5 million project, attendees huddled under umbrellas and rain tents in a bank parking lot in the Fountain Square Cultural District just southeast of Downtown. Organizers and others playing a role in the last sections posed for a photo with an idle jackhammer.
But before the trail opening comes a year of construction.
Work will begin in coming months on the last four miles of the Cultural Trail, which by mid-2012 will snake eight miles through Downtown.
Most work on the last three sections -- along Washington Street in the central corridor, Virginia Avenue to the southeast and Blackford Street on the west -- will be finished by December, with some landscaping waiting until 2012.
The Washington Street portion from Senate Avenue to West Street will take longer, with completion set for July 2012.
When finished, the new sections also will provide connections to White River State Park and the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Private donations and federal grants are paying for the project, which was launched by the Central Indiana Community Foundation; construction began in 2007. Its formal name is The Indianapolis Cultural Trail: A Legacy of Gene & Marilyn Glick.
The trail has drawn national notice for revitalizing public space and building neighborhood connections. Its northeast section was finished in November, linking to the start of the Monon Trail at 10th Street.
Since then, Lisa Cunningham, manager of Mass Ave. Wine Shoppe, has observed the trail's effect on the low-profile block east of College Avenue.
"On those really awful, snowy, icy days we've had, there were some dedicated joggers out there. They must have had cleats on their running shoes," she said. "And we've had some people stop in who said they didn't even know we were down here."
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