03/27/2006

Pinning the city's economic decline on any one thing isn't easy, but Beech Grove merchants say a lot of their woes can be traced to a concrete wall.

And now, at last, 30 years after it went up, the wall is coming down, its demise part of a $7 million plan to spruce up Beech Grove's main entry point, the intersection of Main Street and Emerson Avenue.

The wall's demolition, set for mid-April, is part of a wide-ranging refurbishing that will include repaving Emerson and adding new lighting, green spaces and signage. The federal government is kicking in $4 million of the project cost, the city of Indianapolis $1 million and Beech Grove $2 million.

Beech Grove's wall doesn't look ominous, certainly nothing like Berlin's did. Berlin's was 15 feet high and topped with a concrete tube to make climbing nearly impossible. Beech Grove's comes up to your thigh -- a smoker could jump it. But an automobile can't get over it, and since the 1970s, the wall has funneled traffic on Emerson Avenue, Beech Grove's chief north-south feeder, away from the city's Main Street. The once-vibrant seven-block stretch languishes. Turnover among businesses there is high, even though ground-floor retail rent is as cheap as warehouse space. The banks, the drugstores, the clothing stores are long gone, replaced by nail and hair salons (eight of them), a few bars, a few churches, some business offices and a gym.

Such a mix is not conducive to pedestrian browsing, which is what city leaders want. Main Street is so bereft of traffic that Scott Veerkamp, who owns the local Re/Max franchise, moved his office from a building he owned on Main Street to a building he rents on Emerson, just south of town. On Main Street, Veerkamp was getting one or two walk-in clients a month. On Emerson, he gets five times as many.

When Kara Biro, a Beech Grove teenager, hits the stores with her friends, they go to Greenwood Park Mall. Sometimes they even drive north to retailer-rich Broad Ripple -- "not for any one thing," she said, "but for everything."

Sam Merl, the city's director of public works, said the hope is that Beech Grove (population 14,000) will become that kind of place. "We want people to go downtown for more than just one specific reason," he said.

The wall's demise is a linchpin of a revitalization being pushed by Beech Grove's first-term mayor, Joe Wright. Beech Grove's merchants are behind the plan, united in their distaste for the wall. "I'm so glad we're getting rid of it," Veerkamp said. "The mayor is not just sitting there letting Beech Grove die. That little wall is what killed the business community."

That a 3-foot-high wall could so influence a community's fortunes may be surprising. But what's really startling is that it was allowed to stay in place for so long.

"I scratch my head about that and about a lot of other things around here," said Wright, 47, a Beech Grove native and the town's first Republican mayor since 1955. "So without being accusatory, I'd just say this is a good idea."

The dolling up of Beech Grove is Wright's first big initiative. The plan is to knock down the wall, add a pedestrian-friendly green space and erect four steel "towers," each about 30 feet tall. Two of the spires would bracket Main Street and hold aloft a metal sign proclaiming "Beech Grove."

Beech Grove has never had a "gateway." The intersection of Main and Emerson today is nondescript if not forlorn, a lot of concrete with no trees or plants in sight and nothing directing motorists' attention to the city they've come upon.

"That's the doorway to Beech Grove," said Roger Balser, who sells used cars there, "and if your doorway is beat up, people think the rest of the place is the same. So you got to make it nice."

Beech Grove's wall did more than just look shabby -- it barred entry. The wall was put up in 1973, as Emerson Avenue was transformed from a two-lane country road into a major thoroughfare. Its purpose was to separate the new four-lane expressway from Beech Grove's narrow First Street, which parallels Emerson.

Initially, the wall completely blocked off Main Street, prohibiting cars from entering downtown Beech Grove from Emerson. An intersection there was thought to be too dangerous -- "the most perilous thing you ever saw," then-Mayor Elton Geshwiler said at the time.

Geshwiler, who served eight terms as mayor, died in 1999. No one today, it seems, can explain what he meant. From the start, the wall sent the wrong message, said Shirley Miller, who runs the Main Street shoe store her father bought in 1953: "It couldn't have been less welcoming. It said, 'We're not going to let you in.' "

A decade later, the wall was opened up enough to allow entry onto Main Street, albeit awkward entry. But by then, the damage was done. The hardware stores, the banks, the drugstores and the grocery stores had moved out. Droves of Emerson Avenue motorists had been conditioned to ignore Beech Grove.

"It used to be you could get anything you wanted on Main Street," said Miller, 69, recalling when there was even a movie theater in Beech Grove.

With the tearing down of the wall, can Beech Grove return to those days?

"I don't know," Miller said, "but I'd say this is a step in the right direction."

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Will Higgins
WILL.HIGGINS@INDYSTAR.COM
(317) 444-6043