From Railyard to Parking Lot to Stadium?

As many readers may know, here has been quite a bit of discussion over the past year about Indianapolis obtaining a Major League Soccer franchise sometime in the future. I’m not going to go into the details about the issues between the city and the ownership of the Indy 11, the city’s minor league soccer team, and the latter’s desire to construct a stadium on the site of the original city cemetery in this post. However, I will note that the city’s tentative plan has been to pursue construction of a stadium on the near southeast side of downtown.

Currently, the status of the Major League Soccer plan is unknown to the public. Perhaps it goes the way of the proposed Indianapolis Arrows baseball team, or perhaps not. Whatever happens, the site being looked at by the city is a piece of land which includes the Indianapolis heliport and a large surface parking lot, among other structures and smaller lots, directly east of the garage for Gainbridge Fieldhouse, where the Indiana Fever and Pacers play. The history of the heliport will be dealt with in an upcoming project, but the focus of this post is the parking lot, which I believe is owned by the Simon family, or one of their companies, which appears to be in the midst of the area identified for a new soccer stadium.

If you have ever parked in that garage or looked at a Google satellite aerial of the area, you may have noticed what appear to be diagonal lines crossing the lot where the asphalt is cracked and was replaced. An aerial image is below.

A street level view of these lines can be seen below.

These lines are the remains of a rail yard, which once occupied the space now used for a parking lot. The rail yard had been part of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway, more frequently called the Big Four, although it had also served various other railroads during its history. Located just east of the Union Station, the yard was adjacent to the main rail corridor through downtown, a corridor which had hosted rail lines since the first railroads began to run into the city from the north and northeast in the 1850s.

By the late 19th century, the area around this yard was crowded with railroad infrastructure, with not only numerous lines converging on this side of town, but also many depots and maintenance facilities, some of which stood on this property. While the Union Station, or Union Depot as it was known earlier in its history, handled the passenger traffic for the city, regardless of which company's train was coming into town, the individual railroads still maintained separate freight depots. These were scattered around the city, but heavily concentrated along the rail lines on the east and south sides of downtown. The Sanborn maps below from 1887 (left) and 1898 (right) for the site of the parking lot shows some of these depots in place in this railyard. Compare these maps to the aerial image at the top of the post. These maps are from the IU Indianapolis University Library's Sanborn Map and Baist Atlas Collection.

The depots were all gone by the 1930s, although by this time it appears the railyard had been elevated, as part of the massive project in the late 1920s where the railroads on the south and southeast sides of downtown were elevated above street level to reduce the road crossing and congestion problems with the numerous trains in that area. If you look closely, you can see the changes resulting from the elevation of the tracks and the railyard in the 1916 and 1941 Baist maps below.

The yard as it appeared in 1937 appears below. The tracks can be seen, along with quite a few train cars parked in the yard. Again, compare this to the Baist maps above.

Map Indy GIS Site, 1937 Aerial Image

The now elevated land remained as a yard, or train parking lot, until the 1960s, when the various lines began to be phased out, part of a general decline in the amount of rail infrastructure through downtown. The yard began to host parking for vehicles, which can be seen in the 1972 and 1986 images below.

The image below from the Indiana Historical Society shows the railyard/parking lot (red arrow), along with the now demolished Marion County jail at the bottom of the image. This image is dated sometime in the 1990s, likely pre-1998 since the garage for Gainbridge Fieldhouse has not yet been constructed.

Credit: Indianapolis Bicentennial Collection, Indiana Historical Society

I'm guessing that the railroad tracks in this yard were paved over at some point and then later removed, resulting in differences in the color of the asphalt, as shown below.  Assuming this lot will be eliminated should a soccer stadium be constructed, it will be interesting to see what, if any, old railroad tracks lay beneath.

Sources

Various Aerial Images as noted above, Map Indy GIS, https://maps.indy.gov/MapIndy/

Virginia Avenue Aerial, Indy Bicentennial Collection, Indiana Historical Society, https://images.indianahistory.org/digital/collection/p16797coll53/id/1920/rec/2

Indianapolis Sanborn Map and Baist Atlas Collection, University Library, IU Indianapolis, https://library.indianapolis.iu.edu/digitalcollections/sanbornjp2