Are New Downtown Developments Good For Old Town Noblesville?

The Village At Federal Hill is set to break ground in 2022

I see folks on social media claim new high-rise apartment buildings are “destroying downtown Noblesville.”

 

I disagree.

 

Some eight years ago I was guest speaker at a local civic group. Asked to name the biggest change I’d seen while living in Old Town, I answered that because of rising population, rising economic activity, and increased traffic, it was becoming less a small town environment, like Tipton or Lebanon, and more an urban environment, like Fountain Square. 

 

That didn’t’ go over well. A Noblesville Common Council member in the crowd scoffed that traffic congestion in Old Town was no different than when he was a teenager in the 1980s. That astonished me. The next day I called the Indiana Department of Transportation and got 30 years of traffic counts for Conner and 10^th streets. The data showed a nearly 300% rise in traffic since the late ‘80s.

 

Perceptions have to meet reality.

Village At Federal Hill looking west. Conner St. is at left and
existing amphitheater green space is out of view to the right.
The existing playground remains in middle of this rendering.

 

I’m fine with Old Town’s increasingly urban environment. Two years from now when four more planned apartment complexes are complete, any debate on the topic will be over.

 

I was the first president of Noblesville Main Street back in the early ‘90s. Main Street is an economic development entity that works to revitalize historic downtowns. At Main Street’s founding, we got a year of consultation from experts on that very subject thanks to the National Trust of Historic Preservation. They examined Noblesville back then and made two big observations.

 

First, Noblesville was developing a surface “parking doughnut” around downtown, an asphalt desert between commercial and residential Old Town. They warned that this tends to destroy downtowns, that people don’t like to move through an ugly, barren environment to get to a pleasant destination. The pleasant destination will just wither. No one in power listened at the time. The City, the County, a law firm, and a developer all torn down historic structures and made more ugly surface parking. So I’m thrilled now to see these asphalt deserts turned into something that can both increase population and intensify economic activity, which will help sustain downtown restaurants and retail and make for more compelling night life. 

 

Their second observation was that we Noblesville folk saw the river as the edge of downtown and should reimagine it as the middle. At the time, the Kroger strip mall was under construction. They argued Noblesville should have zoned the west side to work like the east side: buildings right up on the sidewalk, put parking behind, and add wide sidewalks along bridges to encourage pedestrian movement across the river–in other words, an urban environment. Instead, we let the Kroger mall, including the street width out front, be built like a suburban environment designed for cars.

The Bridge of Flowers, the brainchild of Dick Gordon, seeks to transform the new, wide Logan
Street sidewalk over White River into a lush, green connection between east and west downtown.

 

Those consultants were 100% right. And the current City leadership appears to be in the process of undoing that mistake. And I say ,“Hell Yes!”

 

With the construction of a new 3-building complex at Federal Hill, we lose a Wendy’s, a Mexican restaurant eyesore, and the parking area next to Federal Hill Park. Ninety five percent of the park’s green space will remain. The buildings will have apartments, garage parking, retail and offices. The City intends to narrow Logan Street there so it’s more like a neighborhood and less like a highway. Hopes are the Kroger outlots will get redeveloped and better fit what those National Trust consultants argued for 30 years ago.

 

I’ll admit, we’ve got a developmental tiger by the tail, one that might turn on us and our goals, but at the moment, that’s not what’s happening.

 

Do I wish the Levinson was one story shorter so it fit in downtown better? Yes. Do I wish the county had put two stories of their new parking garage underground so it wouldn’t loom over downtown? Yes. Do I wish the historic structures at 10^th and Clinton could have been restored rather than a new apartment building put in their place? Yes. But I’m tired of waiting for downtown to be transformed into a compelling, energetic place, so I’m not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

 

Downtown projects have faced simmering resentments. On the morning
of the groundbreaking of the County's parking garage last May, this awaited.

Having said that, compromise isn’t limitless. The city needs a moratorium on the demolition of pre-1960 structures in Old Town. Most of the lovely homes and historic buildings we see now and love looked terrible at some point in the past 75 years, but they were reclaimed. Just because something looks bad today doesn’t mean it can’t be made beautiful. If we’d torn down everything when it looked bad, we’d be . . . well, Fishers or Westfield.

 

For those disheartened by these new developments, be prepared for 2022. There are more new buildings coming. If you see a surface parking lot in or around downtown, assume someone is planning to build something new.

 

 

 

 

What Trump's Election Taught Our Children

Image by B. Kenley

When my children were small a wise older parent told me, “Don’t worry so much that children do what you tell them to do, worry that they’re watching everything YOU DO.”

There is great truth in that maxim. If kids ignored our stated values and simply watched our behavior, what did they learn from Donald Trump’s election?

Your Vote Does Not Matter

At least in presidential elections.

Twice in the past 5 presidential elections, the candidate that a majority of Americans chose didn’t get to be president; Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. In fact, Clinton got 2.5 million more votes than Trump, but Trump will be president.

When supporters of the Electoral College argue that all those red states show a country that didn’t want Hillary Clinton and that highly populated coastal cities shouldn't be allowed to pick the president, American teenagers in government classes across America know that’s bullshit. They see through the suggestion that reds states are totally red. In Michigan, Trump got 47.60% of the vote over Clinton’s 47.33%. So virtually half of the voters in Michigan wanted Clinton as president, but because it was a quarter of one percent less than those who wanted Trump, they’re votes were not added to those of the big coastal cities. It’s like they never voted at all. In my state of Indiana, 43% of presidential votes (Clinton votes) were thrown in the trash and likewise, not added to those of the coastal states.

Our young people know that the Constitution once forbid women from voting and enshrined slavery in its text. It was far from an infallible document. The Electoral College has the power to erase the will of the majority and has done so in 40% of the presidential elections since 2000. Our children know that, too, and it’s the most powerful evidence any cynic ever needed to argue that voting doesn't matter.

The Truth Doesn't Matter
Politicians have been called liars from the days of ancient Greece. But with Donald Trump there needs to be a term bigger than "pathological liar." To Trump, the truth is a matter of expedience. What is the most manipulative version of reality he could express in a particular moment? He just says it. If he needs to say something utterly contradictory later in the day, he will. And he never, ever, admits he lied. You could literally spend a day watching YouTube videos of Trump saying one thing and then another video in which he claims he never said it.

Adults develop beliefs and get emotionally attached to them, the beliefs become part of our identity, such that we'll relentlessly ignore proof we're wrong. Children are less stone and more clay. They watched their parents ignore Trump's relentless contradictions and hipocracy and internalize that incongruity as an acceptable norm.

Our children were watching and saw this: What is true does not matter. Say whatever serves your personal needs and never, never admit you're wrong. Then, attack, defame, insult anyone who catches you in a lie. That's called, "Tellin' it like it is."

Sexual Assault And Bullying Don't Matter

It’s not surprising that a politician would have multiple accusations of unethical or illegal behavior. But Trump is markedly different in a unique way. From the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry to many of the accusations about Hillary Clinton, there were no confessions or video-taped hard evidence to verify the accusation. They were simply accusations with varying amounts of conflicting evidence. But in Trump’s case, most of the ugliest accusations about his character can be verified in a video clip of him on YouTube, IN HIS OWN WORDS!

So when you hear someone say Donald Trump is disrespectful toward women, worse yet that he’s repeatedly committed sexual assault. You don’t have to believe them. Just go to YouTube and watch an endless stream of videos of Trump across three decades, bragging about womanizing, mocking older women for not being young and sexy, or offering a bizarre endless stream of leering sexual comments to women, such that he makes Bill Clinton look like a virgin choir boy.

In fact there is such a breathtaking mountain of evidence of Trump’s disrespect of women online as to make denial idiotic. This all culminated in the release of a recording in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. Today, there are a total of 16 women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual assault.

Yet, American parents still elected him president.

Consider this troubling statistic: 1 out of every 5 women is sexually assaulted while in college.  I have a daughter in college, so this isn't idle supposition. I wonder about the boys who sexually assault those girls. How did they come to believe that if you're attracted to a woman, you just wait for the right moment, then reach out and grab her? And rape? It's the most under reported crime. Afraid of the turmoil and embarrassment of pressing charges, girls often remain silent. It's heartbreaking. There's a thread in our culture that whispers to boys, "You know she wants it." Companion strands in the same thread tells our girls, "You better just keep your mouth shut about it." 

A new, big strand in that thread is the election of Donald Trump. You can admit to sexual assault and 16 witnesses can confirm it, and American parents will still elect you president.

A friend told me her 8-year-old granddaughter had been watching TV this fall when her kid show ended and the news came on. Without her mother realizing, the little girl listened to a news report that played the tape of Trump bragging about assaulting women, and then interviews with several women who claim he assaulted them. When that little girl woke up the day after the election and found that Trump had won, she was inconsolable and sobbed, "Why would people choose him?" 

That little girl learned her lesson; "If it happens to you, you better just shut your mouth." And what her male contemporaries learned? Well, we know what they learned.

Our Children Are Watching
We wife and I don't preach politics in our house, but the news is on from various sources. Kids listen, often not when we want them to, and other times, they're listening when we think they're not. As we know, that's how kids learn.

In church one Sunday in the months before election day, our pastor was explaining Revelations, reading through a list of human qualities that God detests. "The arrogant. The self-satisfied. Those who love money above all else" he ticked down the list on a video screen. "Narccissits who see themselves at the center of the world . . ." My wife's 11-year old son leaned toward us and whispered, "Donald Trump."

Oh my, how our children are watching.

Buy a copy of Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

“Kurt Meyer’s The Salvage Man is a gentle Midwestern fantasy made up of one treasure after another. Part historical fiction, part love story, and part rumination on modern day life, this novel asks hard questions about the world we live in and the world we leave behind. I couldn’t put it down.”

Larry D. Sweazy, author of A Thousand Falling Crows

Buy a copy of Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard

The Contrarian's Favorite Music of 2016

My appetite for new music is as strong as when I started buying albums and 45s at the age of 8 (I think it was a Monkeys album). Now, after 48 years that have included acquiring some 2,000 albums, 1,500 CDs, and a private 22,000 track digital database (and now streaming services), there’s no denying that my new favorites reflect I’m in my mid-50s and gravitating toward music that echoes the sounds I grew up with.

C. W. Stoneking: Gon’ Boogaloo

As a kid, I hated the blues, even dismissed Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Texas Flood” when it came out during my college years (it would later become one of my favorite albums).  Now, other than Americana, blues is generally what I listen too. C.W. Stoneking’s latest album speaks to those preferences.

Upon first listen to Gon’ Boogaloo, you might think you’re hearing a long lost 1950s gem recorded on primitive equipment, showcasing an overlooked Chicago or Delta bluesman. But Stoneking is a white Australian and the album was recorded in 2015. This album is a buoyant celebration of roots blues.

The song that first grabbed me was The Thing I Done. Its rhythm says ska, but the raw power of the feral guitar snarls the blues. The call and response of Tomorrow Gon' Be Too Late will easily put a big fat smile on your face, and while the chirpy female harmonies opening Good Luck Charm are reminiscent of early ‘60s girl groups, Stoneking’s voice arrives to steer the vibe toward gospel. The Zombie, is a fun number that should make your Halloween playlist. And the final track, We Gon’ Boogaloo truly could have been recorded in the mid-‘50s, a rock n’ roll rollercoaster delight about the giddy pleasure of buying a new record that makes you wanna dance. And this one certainly does!

Jayhawks: Paging Mr. Proust

My first introduction to the Jayhawks was in 1995 with their now signature song Blue, back in the days when we called their sound “Alt-Country.” And though nowadays they’re categorized as “Americana,” many thought the groups’ best days lay back in the 90s and early 2000s. Their last reunion in 2011 resulted in Mockingbird Time, a huge disappointment. So I wasn’t expecting much. But Paging Mr. Proust ranks in the top 3 albums of the Jayhawks 30-year output. It finds frontman Gary Louris catching a 2nd wind in mid-life, regaining his song writing, singing and guitar playing pinnacle. It’s simply astonishing to find a group well past its prime producing like a band half its age and eager to make a statement.

In the late ‘90s the band left behind their raw, stripped down, folk-rock picking and added polish to the songwriting and production. In doing so, they created a sound on albums like Smile and Rainy Day Music that would have put them on top 40 radio and on arena tours had they been a band of the 1970s. This newest effort is in that vain; harmonies that are at times romantic, then melancholy, then soaring, and guitar driven songs that could be strumming, sing-along soft rock, like Lovers Of The Sun and Pretty Roses In Her Hair, or grinding, feedback blowouts like Lost The Summer and Ace.  

Louris’s reenergized songwriting is crystalized on The Devil Is in Her Eyes. It's like he's fallen in love long after losing his innocents, elated to find such joy is still possible. Over an infectious jingle-jangle guitar, his strident tenor calls:

"Hail stones and butter scotch,

Firewalls and forget-me-nots,

Baby won’t you take a chance on me.

Heels dug in and braced to fall,

Hung my holster on your wall,

Baby won’t you take a chance on me.”

And as the song’s chorus arrives you’ll be cranking up the volume just when the band’s signature harmonies lift it to a new high that soon gets punctuated by a blistering guitar solo.

This was the soundtrack of my 25 mile summer bike rides in the Hoosier countryside in 2016.

Hinds: Leave Me Alone

Speaking of young bands eager to make a statement . . . This lo-fi, garage rock, girl group from Madrid, Spain got noticed by lots of music fans this year. Their debut album, Leave Me Alone captures a unique style that is at once familiar, and yet totally their own. Quite a feat for young rookies. The sassy/half-drunk vocals and surf-guitar echo paints the picture of a band literally learning their craft in the garage, and spilling some beer along the way.

The track Bamboo is a great place to start, and follow that with Chili Town. Also worth a listen, just to get a sense of their depth, is the instrumental surf-ballad Solar Gap. Will be fun to see where these girls go next.

Great Songs & Honorable Mention:

-The Cactus Blossoms: Another band with a retro sound. In this case, think Louvin & Everly Brothers. Their album, You’re Dreaming has flashes of brilliance, including the title track and Travelers Paradise. If you like those, try their remake of the Beatles’ This Boy.

-Sturgil Simpson: I wanted to like the entire A Sailor's Guide To Earth album from this renegade alt-country hero, but the Jerry Reed-esque jive-country-funk that finds it’s way into a few songs just doesn’t work for me - like a dude who shows up at your 2016 party wearing clogs and bell bottoms. It just doesn't feel right. But there are true gems included, like Breakers Roar, Sea Stories, All Around You, and the inexplicably brilliant Nirvana cover, In Bloom. I won't spend much time listening to the whole album, but onto my Americana playlist those happily 4 songs go.

-Ray LaMontange: I just can’t get into LaMontange’s recent attempts at the blues, but half of his 2016 album Ouroboros is wonderfully atmospheric. It’s another half great album. Try In My Own Way and Another Day.

-Emeli Sande’s song, Breathing Under Water: Because I’m a sucker for a good pop anthem.

-Wildfire by Mandolin Orange is a brilliant, beautiful song.

Concerts:

My favorite concert moments of the year include Shovels and Rope opening for Jason Isbell in a smallish theater show in Indianapolis. It was my 3^rd Isbell concert and he didn’t disappoint. The Shovels and Rope set was marred by sound issues, but they powered through it admirably. Isbell is at the top of his game, at his writing and performing prime. His confidence and showmanship are exhilarating!

My wife and I on the Ferris Wheel. In the distant background
The Who were opening their show with Substitute.

In October we flew to Palm Springs for Desert Weekend. I’m generally impatient with oldies shows, but I’d never seen the Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney. Over 3 nights all the acts but one put on stellar shows. While I actually love Bob Dylan’s blues outfit in smaller venues, it didn’t work at this massive festival with 100,000+ in attendance looking to take a walk down memory lane. This moment called for big sounds and crowd-pleasing, not self-indulgent noodling. This was the event that called for Dylan to do what he has no intention whatsoever of doing - play a guitar and sing Blowing In The Wind and Like a Rolling Stone, straight, so the audience could recognize them.

The Stones understood this, following Dylan with a rousing, high-energy show that included only one song from their new blues album (they knew it was also no time to promote unknown music). The next night both Neil Young and McCartney wowed with lots of big hits and highly professional backup bands. Young opened with a perfect acoustic set, then brought on his full band, nearly outshining McCartney. On Sunday night The Who surprised by providing my favorite performance of the weekend. Townsend and Daltry have still got it and know how to build tension and deliver big payoffs.

I left Desert Weekend marveling at how far concert events have come since my first concert (Chicago, at the Indiana State Fair) in 1975. The promoters managed to bus over 100,000 people out into the desert and provide ample, 1st class food and drink venders and clean, plentiful restroom facilities over the course of 3 days. Astounding!


Buy Kurt's latest novel The Salvage Man

“Kurt Meyer’s The Salvage Man is a gentle Midwestern fantasy made up of one treasure after another. Part historical fiction, part love story, and part rumination on modern day life, this novel asks hard questions about the world we live in and the world we leave behind. I couldn’t put it down.”

Larry D. Sweazy, author of A Thousand Falling Crows

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard

My White Privilege

The founders of my personal affirmative action program: Alvie &
Marguerite Meyer, in the 1920s, around the time they began transforming
their poor, Hoosier farming upbringings into middle class success.

Most white folks I know deny white privilege, refusing to apply American history to their own success and comfort. But I recognize full well my own personal affirmative action program.

My grandfather Meyer grew up in a poor German-speaking farming family in northern Indiana in the early 20^th Century. In fact, though he and all 12 of his siblings were born in America, they didn’t bother speaking English until they went to school – good schools. As a young man he took a solid work ethic and education to the nearest small town, married my grandmother and got a job at the post office.

I imagine the African American version of my grandfather. That man’s grandparents were slaves. His ancestors' culture, religion, and language were substantially suffocated by slavery, then Jim Crow. If he had a school, it wasn’t as good as my grandfather’s. He too probably grew up in hard circumstances, but there was no postman's job for him. Though he might have been a janitor at a post office earning far less than my white grandfather.

I once interviewed a Hoosier African American woman whose husband was the rarest of 1930s black men. He got a degree in chemistry at IU. After graduation he applied for a job at Eli Lilly, but was told, “The only job we’ve got for you involves a broom and a mop.”

Buy Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

My grandfather wasn’t ambitious enough to get a degree at IU, but qualified for a better job than his black IU peer. That IU chemistry grad never used his degree.

My grandfather learned that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll be rewarded. What did the black IU grad learn? I’m guessing he didn’t learn the same lesson from his experiences that my grandfather learned from his. He might have learned a bitterness that my grandfather couldn’t understand.

After their sons entered school, my grandmother worked as a secretary. They bought a house in the 1930s and built equity with each payment. As they approached retirement, they paid cash for a new home. The number one way American families have built wealth in the past century is through homeownership. During the years my grandparents bought their homes, banks drew lines around minority neighborhoods, systematically denying loans to African Americans, and if giving them loans at all, did so at elevated interest rates. It was legal and called “redlining.”

My grandparents were good, hardworking people. There’s nothing in the rewards of their labor to apologize for. But that opportunity to build wealth was systematically denied to their black counterparts.

The two hardest working people I've ever known: My father, Jim, in
1951, and my mother, Nancy, in 1952, in their graduation photos.
They were about to set off for the middle class success that would
make all things possible for me and my siblings. I was slapped in
the face just once as a child, and it was by that sweet looking
woman on the right. I'd said the word, "nigger." While my face was
stinging and tears trickled down my cheeks, she gave me a
clenched-teeth explanation of what that word meant and why I
should never say it again.

Jim Crow laws were still in affect when my father went to college. It didn’t just keep the black versions of my father and uncle from white lunch counters and bus front rows, in their alternate American universe, blacks were segregated in poorly funded schools. Few made it to college, because of course their parents hadn’t built wealth from home ownership, wealth that could be turned into college degrees for the next generation.

Still, there's nothing about their Purdue engineering degrees for my father or uncle to apologize for. Degrees weren’t handed out like candy. They worked hard for them. But they got opportunities kept from their black counterparts, black men who likely lived with a bitterness that I know my dad and uncle didn't understand.

In my little Indiana hometown in the 1960s and ‘70s I went to safe, nurturing schools. I was blessed; born white and middle class in 1960 in an all-white town, attending an all-white school and learning along side kids whose families had not-so-different backgrounds from mine. I say "blessed" because these were places with the best resources, where the spoils of earlier generations were concentrated so that even if you were white, poor, and uneducated, there were radiating waves of economic activity that provided decent jobs.

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

My father's engineering job put me in a big house on a nice, crime-free street. And there was enough money to send my mom to night school and summer classes. She got a teaching degree and taught elementary school.

In the late 1960s I saw black people rioting on the evening news, behaving with a bitterness I couldn’t understand. Though I didn’t try very hard in high school, I still got into college. I wonder how many of my African American counterparts could say they day-dreamed their way through high school and still got into college in the 1970s.

As an adult I worked hard to build a successful career as a school teacher, then Realtor, working both jobs for years, often 7 days a week. There’s nothing in my success to apologize for. 

Me in 1976: Slouching toward graduation.

Around my 40th birthday, a couple years after my grandmother died, I received a check for $60,000. It was my cut of the estates of that frugal postal worker and secretary. I’m not sorry I got it. I’m proud of my family heritage. But I’m Christian-enough to wonder about my African American counterpart – the grandson of the man who couldn’t get a post office job in the 1920s because his skin was black – the son of a man who didn’t go to college in the 1950s because his skin was black, the same guy who didn’t get a check for $60,000 like I did.

I invested that money in my home and my kids’ college funds. And so our white family’s affirmative action program continues echoing down a full century, long past the passage of the Civil Rights Act and to the end of the first black president’s two terms in office.

Two of my kids have college degrees – the youngest is still in college. They have no apologies to make for their opportunities. But I suspect, like the 3 generations of Meyers before them, they encounter black peers who harbor bitterness. With pride, I see them trying to understand.