The Meridian Through the Circle

In my recent Internet explorations, I came across something that I may have to mark up to THE Internets Find of the Year: HistoricIndianapolis.com.

For a Hoosier exile, for a person who continuously pines for the Midwest in general and the Circle City in particular, who recalls with perhaps a little bit of drooling the too-few days she spent meandering the residential areas of Indy, poking around the somewhat-busy streets of downtown, driving near 38th Street and wondering how in the world certain areas "go downhill", who looked at countless buildings and houses and wondered about their heritage and history, this website is a godsend. The best thing going, really,a website that plunges into the history of the city, into newspapers and phone directories and god only knows what else, to bring to the masses really priceless information.

Last night, on HistoricIndianapolis, I came across the Crown Jewel, as far as I'm concerned, of this website:

A very very old postcard of Meridian Street, "North Meridian Street at Night", postmarked 1916.

The coloring of this postcard, the illumination of the full moon, literally made my heart clench a little in my chest. There's something viscerally alive, something real about this image--I swear I can imagine the slight breeze that might be rustling through those trees. I bet the moon really lit the place up--I can only conjecture, but I reckon light pollution wasn't quite the problem then that it is now. I can just imagine how quiet the streets probably were. It's something of a far cry from the teeming dirt of Middle Western City of Booth Tarkington's <i>The Magnificent Ambersons</i>, but I'd like to think Mr. Tarkington would approve of this rendering.

Meridian Street is still there...and frankly, it doesn't look that much different, especially north of 38th Street. The street seems narrower now than it was in this postcard, but I wonder if it's because the imposing, leafy trees in my memory--the ones that seemed to crowd so close to the street--were the same ones as the ones in these pictures, only much much bigger. Who knows? There's so much that I will never know about this city. So much of it that I never had the chance to get to know and love. HistoricIndianapolis helps my ignorance, just a little, and yet...it enables the Circle City to dig a little bit deeper into my heart.

No matter how much I change, no matter how much Indianapolis changes--and god, of course it does, it's supposed to--I will always have my memories. And now I will always have this idealized rendering of my equally idealized city.