Real Estate Development and Developers

The first real estate sale in Indianapolis took place on October 8, 1821, at Matthias Nowland’s tavern near what is now the corner of Washington and Missouri streets. Although this early venture failed (only one lot sold), many Indianapolis citizens and companies have since steered the physical evolution of the city through real estate development.

Antebellum development involved a host of Indianapolis’ most prominent men and women. In 1849 taking advantage of the excitement over the 1847 arrival of the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad, several residents platted subdivisions within or near Indianapolis’ Mile Square. In the 1850s, Calvin Fletcher, Nicholas Mccarty, Hervey Bates, Ovid Butler, and Janet McQuat also became developers. Fletcher Place’s 458 lots sold “like hotcakes” after Fletcher and Amasa Stone platted the area in 1853. One hundred homes were built in the subdivision in 1854 alone.

By the 1870s the city had entered a boom period, and in 1873 more than 8,700 properties were bought and sold. Judge Elijah B. Martindale’s addition along Delaware Street attracted lawyer Benjamin Harrison and other prominent citizens to the near north side. Many of Indianapolis’ later suburbs were also platted during this period, including Irvington, Woodruff Place, and Brightwood. However, a real estate collapse that followed the Panic of 1873 temporarily halted development by the late 1870s.

A new boom began in the 1890s aided by an annexation movement, expansion and electrification of streetcar lines, and the discovery of natural gas. When the state fairgrounds were moved to their new Maple Road (later 38th Street) location, Willard W. Hubbard, Edward F. Claypool, and Judge Martindale purchased the former site. They platted 280 residential building lots and named the area Morton Place after its Civil War moniker, Camp Morton. Within Indianapolis, population density increased as developers erected duplexes for rental property. On the northwest side the Fairview streetcar line was an impetus for development.

The beginning of the 20th century brought increasing activity. Alfred F. Potts constructed a small community of English Tudor homes, known as “Pottstown,” on 15th Street. On the southside, in 1902, William L. Elder donated eight acres to the United Brethren in Christ Church for the erection of Indiana Central University (now the University of Indianapolis). In return for the donation, the church furnished many of the buyers for the 446 lots Elder platted in University Heights. In 1906 the Wocher brothers purchased 740 acres south of the city for the New York Central Railroad. They also took options on an additional 1,600 acres, organizing the Beech Grove Improvement Company to plat and sell them. In 1910 George R. Brown & Co. platted lots in the Northview addition on College Avenue. The next year Warfleigh addition’s 618 lots, with “graveled streets, cement walks, five-cent street car fare” and a location “30 minutes from Washington St.” went on sale.

Indianapolis real estate developers formed the Indianapolis Real Estate Board with James S. Cruse as president in 1911. That year the Greater Indianapolis Industrial Association developed Mars Hill, an industrial and residential suburb which was to be Indianapolis’ answer to Gary, the northern Indiana steel town. Gary flourished, but Mars Hill foundered. Carl G. Fisher, James A. Allison, Arthur Newby, Frank Wheeler, and Lem Trotter were more successful with their industrial-residential suburban town, Speedway City (now Speedway). In 1912 the men, who had earlier erected the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, platted the town where lots could be had for “$10.00 down and $10.00 per month.” (In 1915 Fisher directed his entrepreneurial skills toward a new development—Miami Beach, Florida—creating a land boom that lasted for 10 years but eventually cost him his fortune.) Predating a national move toward “garden suburbs” by five years or so, in 1915 the Spencer Aughinbaugh Realty Company began offering tracts in Golden Hill for $2,000 to $3,000 each.

Locally, the number of new real estate developments reached record heights in the 1920s, mirroring national trends. High rises, apartment buildings, and suburban communities were all popular. In this decade many of Indianapolis’ most prominent citizens moved to the tony “estate developments” of Golden Hill, Woodstock, Crows Nest and Williams Creek. Subdivisions such as Forest Manor, located at Maple Road and developed by Gates-Kinnear Company realtors, and Highlands Addition, at 52nd Street and Michigan Road, owned by Reliable Realty Company, were directed at the middle-income home buyer. In the 1920s Edgar J. Spink & Co. constructed the city’s first one-and two-bedroom apartments with kitchenettes, adding 60 apartment buildings to the Indianapolis skyline. Spink’s company followed a national trend of developers who purchased land, constructed, and then managed the completed apartment or office buildings.

The Great Depression nearly halted development in Indianapolis, although in the early 1930s speculators continued to build homes in wealthy areas such as North Meridian Street. In 1935 a new type of development took shape nationally as the federal government sought to boost the economy by financing rental and low-income housing construction. The Public Works Administration helped to fund the “slum clearance” project near downtown Indianapolis that resulted in the demolition of 363 homes and the construction of the 748-unit Lockefield Gardens public housing development.

By the end of World War II, developers, aided by infrastructure improvements that allowed access to outlying districts, no longer sold building plots only. They also built and sold moderately priced houses in large additions. Indianapolis experienced a huge “suburban land boom” in this period and land values increased at a rate above most other metropolitan areas. By 1957 many large tracts of former farmland had been converted to suburban use. Industry played a part in new development in Lawrence where the opening of nearby Chrysler, Ford, and Western Electric plants initiated a 30-year period of growth. In 1955 a National Homes development, Eagledale, opened on the city’s westside. These aluminum-sided homes proved as popular in Indianapolis as they were nationally (by 1950 the company was building 12,000 per year in the United States.) In Eagledale, developers William Jennings and John Lookabill sold 100 homes per week.

As suburban housing increased in the 1950s, developers constructed shopping and service areas nearby, creating self-contained suburban communities. Two such developments, the Triangle Shopping Center on Shadeland Avenue and Meadows Shopping Center on East 38th Street, brought services into the neighborhoods. Concurrent with this suburban boom, downtown properties continued to sell, although often at prices below their assessed values. Indianapolis African Americans, who had been excluded from membership in the local real estate board, founded a local branch of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, facilitating the move of middle-class Black residents into the suburbs.

The opening of I-465 in the 1960s extended the scope of suburban development. Single-family and apartment developments sprang up along the entire circumference of the beltway. Developer Gene B. Glick was among the many who took advantage of the increased access provided by I-465, and in the 1950s and 1960s he constructed Glick’s Post Road, Mount Vernon, and Glick’s 38th Street and 42nd Street developments along the eastern edge of the highway. Industrial developments such as Park Fletcher were also sited along the beltway.

In 1967 College Life Insurance Company began construction of its $85-million, commercial-residential development on the city’s far northwest side. The development, comprised of College Park and North Willow Farms, included three 12-story apartment buildings, a 110-acre office complex, a shopping center, single-family homes, townhouses, and garden apartments and was the “largest proposed development in the history of Marion County” to that time. It served as a model for successive projects. In 1970 Robert V. Welch transformed the former Stoughton A. Fletcher, II, estate, Laurel Hall, into 84 acres of condominiums called Windridge, and an additional 25 acres became Windridge Center, a shopping area. Indun Realty, Inc., Hunt Development Company and Northland Shopping Center Company constructed the 200-acre Keystone Crossing Office Center, one of the largest suburban office centers in the state, in the 1970s. It included the Fashion Mall, restaurants, a hotel, and offices. The partners estimated landscaping costs alone at $2 million. At the other end of the spectrum, the federally funded Model Cities program and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) helped Flanner House construct a 294-family, low-rent apartment complex in the inner city.

Following a recession in the early 1980s, a new boom had begun by 1986. In 1989, 2,500 single-family lots were platted in Pike Township alone. Residential developments included the Shorewood Corporation’s expensive, single-family homesites around Geist Reservoir, as well as more moderately priced subdivisions. Some developers began marketing subdivisions for “target audiences.” A. H. M. Graves targeted “empty-nesters” for its Lake Kesslerwood development on the northeast side. Others moved outside Marion County to Carmel or Fishers for new suburban projects.

Over the years some developers have lamented the conservative attitude of local banks as a brake on Indianapolis’s development, believing that “speculative building was never as popular here as in some cities.” Local home prices may bear out that assertion. Although it increased 33 percent since 1981, Indianapolis’s median home price in 1992 was $83,700, compared to the national median of $103,700. Still, Indianapolis real estate development has come a long way since that first failed land sale. One measure of success: in 1993 the city ranked twelfth in U.S. News and World Report’s list of “most desirable” housing markets.

*Note: This entry is from the original print edition of the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (1994). We are currently seeking an individual with knowledge of this topic to update this entry.