Aaron Renn

They seemed like such good ideas at the time.

“Trails have shifted from a want to a need in the last 15 years,” says Urbanophile blogger Aaron Renn. “Now, a great trail is an amenity and a new form of infrastructure your city and community have to have.”

A path will lead from the Cultural Trail to the park, where people will be able to watch traffic merge from two interstates, sometimes harrowingly so.

“Union Station is not vacant. Most of it is leased. However, it’s been difficult to find a use that both pays for the building’s upkeep and, perhaps, showcases its unique qualities.”

“The whole downtown/midtown/uptown thing started in New York because that city is narrow and vertical,” says Matt Hale. “We’re a radial city growing out in every direction from the center, so it’s a stretch to say Indy has a midtown.”

For all that downtown’s Central Canal is—mainly, a lovely spot for fresh air—it may forever be known for what it is not.

As a committed downtowner, I like to believe that Indy is the state’s cradle of cool. Sure, Bloomington mounts a serious challenge, and lately I keep hearing surprising things about Fort Wayne, but I never considered Carmel—stylish, yes, but not exactly hip—a hotbed of progressive sensibilities. Yesterday, I had to reconsider. Amid the news that the Indianapolis City-County Council has proposed domestic-partner benefits for municipal employees (28 years after Berkeley, California, became the first American city to do so), the Star pointed out that Carmel already has domestic-partner benefits in place.