(early-August 2023)
(Take a look at the prelude.)
Friday. Just after dawn. The sunlight squeaked in through the hotel room curtain. There was just enough for me to navigate my way to the bathroom without tripping over a suitcase and ignominiously faceplanting on a grocery bag full of potato chips and trail mix. My plan for the day was to have a mellow morning. I’d grab a cup of coffee from the hotel lobby (Starbucks - not good but decent), go get some postcards, mail them, and then head down to the convention. My wanderings yesterday took me away from the con and its hordes of gamers for most of the day so I figured, since I had no games planned, I’d buy some generic tickets that could be used to gain entrance to any event. You just show up at one that you want to attend but hadn’t registered for and, if a registered player doesn’t make it – usually because they are hungover – then you’re in.
Well, that was the plan.
My first destination was the Indiana State Library as their website indicated they carried postcards in their gift shop and I just couldn't recall where I'd bought them the previous time. It was a nice older building that kept up with the neoclassical motif I had seen on the courthouse yesterday.
What a contrast to our Capitol here in Madison which is surrounded by grass and trees on all sides, inviting any and everyone to come visit the building to admire the architecture or hang out on the lawn with some fine local cheese for a snack. Indiana seems to treat their Capitol as just another office building, to some extent, anyway. It's just odd to see acres of blacktop like this in the downtown of a large city. Why not build a ramp and more buildings and use that no doubt value real estate better?
As I continued north, I found this mural of various local jazz musicians called “46 for XLVI” on the side of the Musicans’ Repair & Sales building. I did not recognize any of the faces of the players but this is not surprising. Other than Kurt Vonnegut, I don't know of any other famous folks from Indy, jazz musicians or otherwise. Regardless, it's good see locals honored whether they made it big on the national scene or not.
I turned east thinking I’d check out the war memorials that I’ve seen from a distance before but never up close and soon found myself before a Masonic temple. Immediately that episode of The Simpsons featuring that fine parody of the Masons, The Stonecutters.
Another really neat building in the neoclassical style. I think so, anyway. It does have columns. I wondered if the Masons had an outsized influence in Indianapolis. Regardless, the city has retained some very nice, old buildings.
Across the street the from the temple is the Scottish Rite Cathedral.
Scottish Rite is something to do with Freemasonry but I’m not sure exactly what. I have a friend who is a Free and Accepted Mason and has talked about other Masons that follow the Scottish Rite but has never explained what it all means, presumably because it’s a big secret and he’d have to kill me if he ever went into detail.
The cathedral was dotted with friezes or whatever you call them of bats and owls.
The stretch I was on had displays off on the side of the path dedicated to various historical figures and I investigated the ones for Thomas Edison and Susan B. Anthony.
Perhaps one of these trips I’ll rent a bicycle and investigate the Trail further.
I headed northeast to another neoclassical (columns!) building which turned out to be Indy’s central library.
On the west side of it was a piece of art that I call the Headless Slender Man statue. I give Indy credit for featuring a piece of public art that is a bit odd and uncanny if not genuinely disturbing.
It turns out that the library was at the north end of a several blocks long stretch of memorials, fountains, parks, and whatnot. The library faced the American Legion Mall lined with even more neoclassical buildings including the American Legion National Headquarters.
The memorial in the center here is for Hoosiers who served in “the World War”, i.e. – World War I. There were more memorials along both sides of the mall but I stuck to the west side and encountered the one for those who served in the Vietnam War.
Stepping into the space created by its semi-circular shape, one is confronted by a list of all the Hoosiers who died in that conflict. Walking around it, I saw that excerpts from letters home by those who never returned alive were etched into the concrete.
The mall was a lovely, peaceful spot. A great greenspace in the northern part of downtown.
There were Canada geese ambling around on the grass in the middle of mall as well as hanging out in the shade on the tree-lined sides. Oddly enough, I didn’t see one pile of goose shit.
Continuing south, I crossed the street and was at Obelisk Square which is home to a very large black obelisk with a fountain at its base.
It didn’t appear to be a war memorial and instead had these rather large bas reliefs at the bottom which illustrated…I don’t know…general virtues, maybe. The virtues that make a nation strong, perhaps. One with a cross must have represented religion. Another was of a woman reading to a child while holding a torch. Wisdom and knowledge? And there was one with a guy relaxing near a globe with a surveying telescope behind him and a familiar looking bird ahead of him.
An owl! The Masons are everywhere in this town!
Crossing another street to the south I arrived at the Indiana War Memorial & Museum. It’s a building I’ve seen from a couple blocks away previously but now I would actually see it up close.
Again, neoclassical (I think) with colonnades. The cornerstone indicated that it was laid by old Black Jack Pershing himself on 4 July 1925. It’s a rather imposing structure – like a fortress. The bronze(?) doors were rather neat.
They looked like they'd be right at home in Lord of the Rings and I could envision some king entering his fortress through these doors after a hard day of killing orcs and being greeted by an entourage bearing fresh clothes, some water to wash the blood off, and a big flagon of mead.
Out front was a statue entitled “For the Fatherland”.
When it doesn’t look like a fortress, it has the feel of a mausoleum. There wasn’t a welcoming entrance inviting me in and I felt like I was being asked to contemplate the sayings etched into the exterior walls instead. Checking out the museum would have to wait for another visit.
Continuing south was another wonderful bit of greenspace. Not only were there trees and flowers and grass, but also this beautiful fountain.
Men and women joyously dance as fish swim at their feet. At the top a woman plays a cymbal. Something joyous and a bit of revelry made for a nice contrast to the more serious and solemn things I'd seen on my way here.
On the east side of the fountain area was a statue of a woman holding a flower that looked like a water lily.
And on the opposite side of her was one of Pan playing his pipes, which means that figure above is surely a nymph. Pan is no doubt trying to convince her with a song to rusticate out in the country with him where he would plow her field, so to speak.
This reminded me of a statue that I had seen on my wanderings the day before which featured the Roman god Mercury. It was neat to see neoclassical architecture and Greek/Roman statuary dotting the cityscape. Man, Indy sure does love a war memorial! I wonder if anything commemorates the fallen from our invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq over on the east side of the mall that I didn't investigate.
During my perambulations I seemed to encounter very little auto traffic. There was some, of course, but it felt like I didn't have to go very far from the convention center to escape a constant stream of cars. Do a lot of the businesses there let folks work from home? Or do locals just try to avoid downtown to keep their distance from the unwashed masses of gamer dorks? I couldn't blame them if they do.
While there were cars parked everywhere, I saw relatively few people. The mall was populated mostly with the homeless, as I walked through. A gentleman came out to his car from the Scottish Rite church as I was admiring it and he chatted with me briefly. Indy is a very friendly city. Hell, even the geese don't shit in public, it seems.
And so I completely failed to spend more time at the convention this morning. But it was a fun and intriguing hike around the downtown.
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Bonus photo. Cats! Here’s one from many years ago with Grabby grooming a very young Piper out on the porch of our apartment.
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