Thomas Ridley grew up amid the clanging cash registers of shops, laughter flowing from restaurants and the music and applause welling from clubs along the famed Indiana Avenue.
Born in 1922, Ridley lived just blocks from the historic street. Businesses spilled off from the Avenue onto neighboring streets. In nearby neighborhoods, children would play in the middle of the road. They rode on tricycles by yards lined with flowers while people escaped the heat by lounging on swings on their front patios. When the front doors were open, you could often hear music as people in homes played pianos and guitars.
Ridley ventured from surrounding neighborhoods onto the Avenue to deliver newspapers as a teenager. He had part-time jobs at the grocery stores and drugstores of the Avenue and often stuck around after hours to socialize.
Young men spent hours dressing up in suits custom made by local tailors so they could stand on the corner by the famous Madame Walker Theatre, hoping to catch the attention of women walking by. Ridley would meet friends at the same corner on Indiana Avenue and West Street for nights spent crowded into packed clubs, theaters and cafes. Some days, he’d drop by the Walker’s basement shop, the Coffee Pot, a popular hangout for his friends.
Saturday mornings, Ridley would watch cowboy movies at Two Johns Theatre on the Avenue before heading to Ergenbright’s Drug Store next door for hot dogs and ice cream.
“That is, if we had any money left after the movie,” he said with a chuckle.
But Ridley’s favorite spots on the Avenue were the famous jazz clubs. Some of his favorites were the Palm Room and the Sunset Terrace, where he’d listen to local favorites and jazz greats including Duke Ellington. His father-in-law, a musician on the Avenue, played alongside artists such as Reginald “Reggie” DuValle and Hoagy Carmichael.
Ridley often ran into old friends at the Avenue’s stores or on the dance floor, stayed for chats and said goodbye before moving onto the next club. But goodbyes were never really goodbyes. You always expected you’d see them on the dance floor the next weekend when you dropped by again.
‘But now it’s dead’
In its heyday from the 1930s to ’70s, Indiana Avenue went by many names: the Yellow Brick Road, Funky Broadway and the Grand Ol’ Street. But its simplest name is the one that has survived — the Avenue.
In those golden decades, jazz music spilled from more than 30 clubs along the Avenue, where cabarets, burlesque shows and drag performances also attracted crowds. The street was home to shops, restaurants, doctor’s offices and shoe shine stands. It was the center of Black life in Indianapolis during segregation.
But the Avenue that Ridley remembers from his childhood is far different from the one that remains.
“It was a great place in those days,” he said. “But now it’s dead.”
What’s left of the Avenue are homages to its jazz legacy in street banners and signs. But local historians say these nods to jazz strategically ignore the racism that led to the Avenue’s destruction.
“Urban renewal projects gutted the near westside and its jazz clubs,” said local historian Paul Mullins. “But city planners continued to eulogize jazz history even as they razed its material remains.”
A look inside the Avenue’s jazz clubs
Glasses clinked and laughter echoed in the famed jazz clubs. Men wearing wide-legged, shoulder-padded zoot suits sauntered in, their arms hanging on the shoulders of women draped in slinky dresses. People leaned against the bar, chatting with drinks in hand. And David Hardiman stood in front of them with his trumpet.
Hardiman had played at schools and neighborhood parties but never at a nightclub on the Avenue. He was only 14 years old — much too young to get into the club without an instrument in hand. If his mother knew he was there, she’d be furious.
He learned the ropes at the McArthur Conservatory, where he formed his first memories of the Avenue. From the time he was 9 years old, he lugged his trumpet case on the bus across town once a week, got off on West Street in front of the YMCA and walked three blocks for $1 lessons in the three-story brick building. The conservatory was the backbone of education for Black musicians in Indianapolis in the 1940s, but Hardiman, now 81, said the clubs were the true training grounds for jazz.
Jazz musicians would gather in clubs for jam sessions. They learned by watching, listening and, when they were finally ready, joining in. Players would switch tempos and keys without warning, leaving the unprepared behind. Veterans would warn newbies with stories of a drummer throwing a cymbal at a new musician, who went home and practiced for days until he was ready to come back.
“If you weren’t ready,” Hardiman said. “You’d soon find out.”
Standing in a jazz club for the first time, Hardiman wasn’t sure he was ready. He didn’t yet know he would go on to play at beloved Avenue venues such as George’s Bar. He didn’t know he would join Freddie Hubbard and Dr. Larry Ridley in his generation of jazz greats, following in the footsteps of the previous generation of national legends born from the Avenue, including Jimmy Coe and Wes Montgomery. At that moment, he was nervous.
He took a deep breath and began to play.
Erasing the Avenue
Most of the music venues of Hardiman’s childhood were erased by the 1970s following post-WWII urban renewal projects centering on “slum displacement.” Mullins said the term “slum displacement” ignored the Avenue’s economic diversity, where more affluent professionals lived alongside poorer manual laborers due to segregation. “Slum displacement” was code for the displacement of Black residents.
“Like many other cities, Indianapolis targeted African American communities in a way that can only be explained by shallow racism,” he said.
Urban renewal projects starting in the 1960s and the construction of Interstate 65 marked the beginning of the end of the Avenue. IUPUI also expanded onto Indiana Avenue and now sits in what was once a Black neighborhood. The area was dealt its final blows in the 1970s and ’80s when the city began bulldozing its historic buildings to raise skyscrapers.
Jeff Bennett, Indianapolis Deputy Mayor of Community Development, said he recognizes the city’s role in the Avenue’s decline.
“It’s indisputable that the city over a period of decades played a significant role in the loss of historic fabric and the loss of the cultural and economic underpinnings of that whole area,” he said.
Mullins also said the key agents for the destruction of the Avenue were developers working with the city, who decided to raze the Avenue but didn’t have a clear idea of what development would look like.
“They just knew that in the short run, they wanted to empty the Avenue,” he said.
One by one, restaurants, stores and barber shops closed. Then there were the jazz clubs — the Cotton Club, Paradise Gardens, George’s Bar and the famous Sunset Terrace. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
The YMCA on Senate Avenue garnered 5,000 members after it was built in 1913. It was known for hosting lectures by well-known Black leaders from around the country, including Booker T. Washington. The site is now a parking lot.
A brick building on West Street was once Madam C.J. Walker’s home, office and salon. In its place, a parking lot.
The Famous Door on Indiana Avenue once filled with burlesque shows, cabarets and drag queens. In its place, a parking lot.
Mullins said almost every historic building on and around the Avenue was demolished by urban planners hoping to develop the area.
“But in many of those lots, development never did occur,” he said. “So we tore buildings down and left parking lots.”
Multiple generations of Black families visited businesses along the street for decades, Mullins said. Generation after generation, people had a connection to the Avenue’s schools, churches, businesses and theaters.
“Their heritage is based on place,” he said. “And now their heritage is represented by a parking lot.”
Despite grassroots activism from the Black community opposing demolition, Mullins said, the neighborhood largely disappeared. As buildings fell around them, most residents had no choice but to leave.
But Ridley stayed close enough to see the old street decline. Buildings were torn down overnight, often without neighbors knowing. The street lost its individuality, and Ridley was left wishing that at least some things stayed the same.
Now as he walks down Indiana Avenue, he sees dilapidated buildings, vacant lots and no signs of what once was.
“The Indiana Avenue I knew is dead,” he said.
Heritage as accents for development projects
The remnants of the Avenue are street banners decorated with saxophones and the words “Rhythm. Reborn.”
The street was named Indianapolis’s sixth cultural district in 2004. As the city and developers championed new construction that continued to demolish the Avenue, Mullins said, they invoked its jazz heritage in signs and banners. He said they celebrated the street’s jazz history while destroying its material remains and hoping to build on its ruins.
“Even as they razed the Avenue, they invoked its jazz heritage,” he said. “And that, in turn, reduced jazz heritage to an accent for development projects.”
A 1983 IndyStar article reported plans to redevelop Indiana Avenue, stating developers would make an effort “to recapture the jazz tradition for which the Avenue once was noted.” Yet in the same story, developers acknowledged that the project would mean “some blocks will have to be cleared for new development.”
Another story from IndyStar that year explained the Avenue would be “primed for a renovation project that will be so radical in its scope it will make people forget what was there before.”
Mullins said the city and developers’ continued celebrations of the Avenue’s jazz heritage even today are counterintuitive to the decades of urban renewal projects that emptied the street and demolished its music venues.
“We’d spent three decades leading up to that moment tearing down all of those buildings and ensuring that jazz had nowhere to be played,” he said. “We emptied that neighborhood out and then suddenly the city is committed to the memory of Wes Montgomery and Jimmy Coe and all these structures they’d just torn down.”
Mullins calls these celebrations a hollow embrace of jazz heritage that ignores the displacement of Black residents, the erasure of the material remains of the street, and the structural racism that resulted in the Avenue’s decline.
These representations of jazz history also run the risk of oversimplifying the Avenue’s cultural heritage and reducing it to symbols that often reflect stereotyped caricatures of Blackness, he said. The cultural legacy of the Avenue, Mullins said, is more than banners of saxophones and images of five famous musicians.
As a result, Mullins said he’s suspicious of how the city has embraced jazz heritage.
“If we had a commitment to jazz heritage and the Avenue, we would have preserved them instead of tearing buildings down,” he said.
Jeff Bennett, Indianapolis Deputy Mayor of Community Development, said Indianapolis has emphasized the street’s musical heritage as an engine for economic development and cultural tourism. He said many of these celebrations, including making the Avenue a Cultural District, were the results of neighborhood-led efforts.
“It’s undeniable the depth of talent and culture that Indianapolis had along the Avenue, and it’s only fitting to recognize that in a significant way,” he said. “That’s not to deny the recent past of what’s happened to the Avenue, but hopefully it is a way to move toward a more equitable future.”
But Bennett said he understands why the city’s celebrations of jazz heritage may feel like a hollow embrace of the Avenue’s history when seen in context. He said these celebrations must be paired with the city taking responsibility for its role in the fall of the Avenue.
Bennett said the city should also continue its efforts to help preserve the Walker building and should improve access to capital for Black entrepreneurs. Policies through history reduced Black entrepreneur’s access to capital, markets, banks and loans — necessary building blocks for business development. He said it’s now up to the city to reverse the effects of those policies.
“Can we correct that?” he said. “Can we create tools that create access to capital for Black and brown residents of Indianapolis? That would begin to right, in some ways, the historic wrongs you’ve seen play out on Indiana Avenue.”
One way Bennett says the City of Indianapolis has done that is offering small business restart grants to businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic. He said 28% of these grants went to Black-owned businesses.
“We have a responsibility as a city not only to recognize the rich cultural history of the area but to have conversations that really need to happen about how we got to where we are now and what the future looks like,” he said.
Elders in mourning
As urban renewal projects continued, Hardiman moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1971. Ridley stayed, slowly adjusting as he watched the Avenue empty.
“You get used to things after a period of time,” he said. “I’ve gotten used to seeing the Avenue this way.”
But many who remained weren’t able to adjust.
For 46 years after he moved there in 1921, Dr. George Watkins worked as a chiropractor from his home on California Street, just off Indiana Avenue, where he often offered free services to neighbors. Like many of his neighbors, Watkins was forced to leave the area as Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis expanded onto his street.
The Indianapolis Recorder reported that Watkins was “despondent” for years following the move, something his wife told reporters he never recovered from. Neighbors often found the then-72-year-old Watkins wandering his neighborhood, searching for his old home. But his home fell to the wrecking ball in 1977.
The same year, Watkins disappeared. After a five-month search, his body was found just five blocks away from his former home.
When Watkins died in November 1977, the site had become a parking lot.
“There are elders who are still deeply affected, who will weep at the memory of the Avenue because they truly feel they’ve lost something,” Mullins said.
Continuing the fight for the Avenue
Paula Brooks refuses to adjust to the Avenue that exists today.
A third-generation Indianapolis resident, Brooks grew up on West Street near Indiana Avenue in the 1970s, during the height of urban renewal. At the time, many businesses still stood.
She was too young for the clubs but heard stories of their jazz performances, drag queens and dance floors. For Brooks, the Avenue was a commercial center. She grabbed burgers from Woody’s Burgers and got ice cream from the Dairy Queen just south of Indiana Avenue. She walked to the Walker to see movies on Saturdays, picked up copies of the daily newspaper from the Indianapolis Recorder office and went shopping at grocery stores, butcher shops and boutiques.
But when she left for school on the East Coast, the Avenue began to change more rapidly. Every time she came home to visit, another building was gone. By the time she moved back to Indianapolis in 2010, most of the street had been cleared.
“It’s like all the life has been stripped out of it,” she said.
Brooks said the urban renewal efforts led by the city, developers and IUPUI are the result of structural racism and erased the Black roots of the Avenue.
“Our entire identity was stripped,” she said. “Our history was erased, and it continues to be erased.”
Brooks said a preservation movement led by Black residents in the early 1980s saved what is left of the Avenue, including the historic Walker building.
Now, she wants to continue their legacy as a member of the group Reclaim Indiana Avenue. The group is pushing for development that reflects the heritage of the Avenue and serves its predominantly Black community. This includes constructing buildings designed to represent the architectural history of the street, building new restaurants, grocery stores, entertainment venues and other amenities for residents, and encouraging the city to recognize how it has erased Black culture along the Avenue.
She also wants the community to be involved in planning of any further development.
“We can’t bring back the Avenue that once was,” she said. “We can’t go back. But we can create a brighter future for it. We can bring back the life that was once on the Avenue.”
What’s left behind
The famed Walker building barely escaped the wrecking ball. Only after a coalition of preservationists in the 1970s and ‘80s lobbied to save it, the building survived and is now recognized as a vital piece of Black heritage in Indianapolis. It is also one of the last buildings of the Avenue still standing.
Until the building closed for renovations two years ago, Ridley, now 97, gave tours at the Walker, just two blocks from where he grew up.
During tours, people often asked him about the dazzling jazz clubs of the Avenue’s golden years. He told them about dancing at the Sunset, meeting friends at the Walker, and listening to his favorite jazz tunes including Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” and “In a Sentimental Mood.” Ridley’s tours and a book he wrote titled “From the Avenue — A Memoir” are his ways of remembering the legendary street as it was in his youth.
Today, he mostly sees people drive past the Avenue. There are no music venues or restaurants to stop for — only parking lots. He hopes one day he’ll see restaurants, theaters and music venues return to the street and revive the Black art and culture that was once there. But he’s not expecting that to happen, at least not in his lifetime.
“The Avenue I knew is gone,” he said. “It would be nice to see it alive again.”
To read historians Paul Mullins and Jordan Ryan’s recent paper about the connection between development projects and the jazz heritage of Indiana Avenue, click here or visit Mullins’s blog.
Follow Christine Fernando on Twitter: @christinetfern.
