One Indy Street in Need of a Name Change
Indianapolis Star elitists Tully & Smith treated us again to their Sunday morning Exchange of Letters, this time on whether or not we should rename our downtown Georgia Street in light of the new boardwalk designed for convenient shopping and carousing.
It’s another one of the hundreds of pre-Super Bowl street projects that have hassled our city dwellers who know deep down that we need this infrastructure facelift. Now if we could only persuade Colts owner Jim Irsay and the rest of his NFL colleagues to stage Super Bowls in Afghanistan for the next five years, we could finally bring that country into the 1930s.
Anticipating the Big Game festivities, city planners and civic busybodies sponsored a controversial name change contest for Georgia Street to make it unique, contemporary, hip, or justify a PR consultant’s reason to be … who really knows.
Tully has a number of reasons not to change the name, but the historical reason won me over the most. He writes:
There is the history angle. As has been noted, Georgia Street has been Georgia Street since Alexander Ralston laid out the city’s original plat 190 years ago. Now, on a whim and because the Super Bowl is coming, some are pushing a quick-hit name change? Give me a break.
I have a reverence for history and hate to see it trampled in the name of “progress.” Georgia never hurt anyone.
If the street plates do change to a nonsensical name, then at least Ralston’s pick had a nice run. Another city father has not had it so well. Oh, he has a street named after him all right, but it is an insult more than a passageway.
I give you Hudnut Boulevard.
When I think boulevard I imagine a well-traveled street filled with scenic grand homes or important businesses with movers and shakers plotting the next deal. It’s top-tier. It’s French after all.
Not so much in this case.
If you’re traveling south on Harding Street from I-70 with a box full of household chemicals and used motor oil, you’ll seek Hudnut Blvd for it is there that you turn right for the jaunt to the Tox Drop located on the grounds of the Belmont Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility.
Yes for all the work that former Mayor Bill Hudnut provided to turn our city into what it is today — one of America’s major metropolitan areas — we have awarded him posterity wrapped around a sewage dump shaped like a one finger salute from his successor Mayor Steve Goldsmith.
Keep Georgia Street, but along that new boardwalk let’s sculpt a statue for Hizzoner — the kind that Chicago has for Michael Jordan and Harry Caray.
Without Hudnut’s leadership of long ago, we would not have the Super Bowl today.
