Urbanophile

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.

“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.