Two office buildings and a beautiful limestone-skinned J. C. Penney store by Skidmore Owings and Merrill were already completed or under construction; a glass curtain-wall City-County tower with limestone wings would open in 1961; a new State Office building by the Chicago firm, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White was scheduled to break ground, a complex of high rise apartment buildings by Perkins + Will, and a handful of other great projects were in the works or recently completed in the city.
Here's how we felt about our new buildings in 1958. [double-click on images to enlarge].
Sadly, by the early 1960s the excitement over urban renewal, and apparently the federal dollars that helped pay for it, were drying up, leaving Indianapolis with a few good buildings but not much architectural future to count on. I'm not a fan of disrespecting Indianapolis, which is a trendy thing to do among the people who live here, but I'd like a good reason, like a few interestingly modern buildings, to make me and others feel really prideful in the city's architectural future again. Maybe that will happen.
