Moving on on our tour of Midwestern neighborhoods and their relation to downtowns, we next come to the Lockerbie community of Indianapolis, Indiana. First of all, I had never realized that Indianapolis had a planned street grid, with radiating arteries coming out from a central roundabout (we’ll look at that sometime in the future). Lockerbie Square, as its name implies, was laid out by a Scotsman in the 1840s.

Like many neighborhoods near a major American downtown, it was built up early, suffered abandonment, demolition and decline, and has seen in-fill and rebirth. It is within walking distance of central Indianapolis, and critically, there are not any really ugly, pedestrian unfriendly areas to walk through to get there.

What is perhaps interesting is that while Indianapolis is a city of wood, there are still some brick houses, and the in-fill tends to reflect the former. But look at this amazing Queen Anne house below.

I perhaps enjoyed the wood frame and brick Italianate houses sitting right next to each other, as well.

Ultimately, though this is an amazing neighborhood, I was saddened by the fact that it is really an island surrounded by interstates, parking lots and other uses that makes it isolated. It seems almost like a “living history museum,” much like the LaSalle Park neighborhood in St. Louis. Wouldn’t be just that much more wonderful if it flowed into other contiguous neighborhoods?