Can Big Car turn Garfield Park into next hip neighborhood?

The Garfield Park house is one of the city's more forlorn. The windows are boarded up. The front door is busted open. Trash from squatters is strewn about.

In many ways it's another empty property plaguing this post-industrial area down on its luck since the interstate plowed through the Southside neighborhood in the 1970s.

It's also a perfect place for the big idea to begin. Oh, it's big but not unfathomable. And it works like this: Use local artists, and their art, to transform and revitalize an urban neighborhood.

Big Car is behind the big idea. The nonprofit art collaborative plans to buy the house at 1230 Cruft St. and rehab it into not just an affordable home but also a studio it intends to co-own with artists.

But that's just a slice of the effort to breathe new life into Garfield Park. If all goes as planned, by this time next year the house will be just one of many artist homes in the heart of a burgeoning art colony that could be Indianapolis' next cultural hub.

Across the street, in a long-vacant 12,000-square-foot building that years ago made airplane parts, would be Big Car's new headquarters. Further down, two more Big Car projects: a vinyl record store and a low-power, nonprofit FM radio station.

With initial plans to invest $1.5 million, this is Big Car's most ambitious gamble yet. Garfield Park, the group believes, could become a new artists village, a spiritual and physical corridor connecting Fountain Square to the University of Indianapolis.

The school also has plans to invest in the area. The university announced this January that it will use a $100,000 grant from Fifth Third Bank to study how to improve the Southside's quality of life.

The Big Car plan has support at the highest levels. Lilly Endowment, the Local Initiatives Support Corp., the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership and Riley Area Development Corp. have together invested nearly $600,000 and will co-own the artist homes on Cruft Street. The largest single contribution comes from a $460,000 federal grant for urban development, awarded by the city.

The investors say this isn't the first time artists have been instrumental in driving a neighborhood's cultural and economic growth. Artists have been a part of countless urban revitalization narratives, including Fountain Square and Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis and Houston's Third Ward, Detroit's McDougall-Hunt neighborhood, Chicago's South Side, and New York's East Village and SoHo.

Local artists pumped vitality into these neighborhoods. But the challenge for Big Car and the others isn't just to follow suit, though finding enough money, the will, the long-term commitment from the community will be challenging enough. The challenge also is to keep the neighborhood from becoming so popular the cost of living drives the artists, and longtime residents, away.

Thinking big

The seeds of Big Car's big idea were sown in May 2014, when the 11-year-old collective of creative types lost its low-rent Lafayette Square headquarters, a former auto service center, to a tenant that would pay full rent.

Big Car began searching for a permanent home, a building that would remain a place for artists, no matter how hip — and thus attractive to developers and flush tenants — the area became.

Executive Director Jim Walker, who moved to Garfield Park from Fountain Square three years ago, set his eyes close to home, and the big idea was born.

The house with the kicked-in door is among up to 10 vacant homes that would be leased to artists under Big Car's "Garfield Park Creative Community." Big Car and Riley Area Development Corp. will co-own the homes with a resident artist. This housing co-op model has allowed properties to be reserved for artists.

"We helped with the Mass Ave. launch in the mid to late 1990s," said Eric Strickland, Riley's executive director. But as the story goes in many cities, artists were eventually priced out. The avenue now, Strickland said, is upscale but with only a fraction of the art galleries it once had.

"Now Mass Ave. is approaching rent structures that are like the Wholesale District," he said. "It's a little heartbreaking. We understand how the arts can help the community. We want to make sure that term is longer."

The old airplane parts factory — Tube Processing Corp. sold it for $40,000, a bargain — will become Big Car's first permanent home. Called "The Tube Factory," its first floor will feature exhibits, interactive installations and a community gathering space. Below, in the basement, there will be a shop for wood and metalworking and screenprinting.

Nearby, a long-vacant former appliance store will house the record shop and the radio station, "Listen Hear." It'll give Big Car a retail presence for the first time.

Big Car aims to open "Listen Hear" by September, "The Tube Factory" by October and the Cruft Street artist homes next spring. These elements of the Garfield Park project are confirmed, though more plans to boost the neighborhood are in the works.

One plan is to make the area more inviting for visitors.

Shelby Street, its four high-speed lanes essentially barring residents on the side of the interstate from Garfield Park, could shrink down to two primary traffic lanes, its outer lanes turned into spaces for parking, biking and other activities. Big Car is working with the city on the concept.

Big Car also is eyeing another, larger property, behind "The Tube Factory" toward Nelson Avenue, as a potential studio and art space.

In the coming years, Walker hopes, the streets, if they start to fill up with businesses and art, could shed its "drive-through" status. Big Car's focus isn't really making objects, he said, but rather fostering places where art can happen.

"It's not to push people out. It's to have artists live in these vacant houses and seed some change," he said. "We live here. The growth is coming from the neighborhood."

Bearing fruit won't come easy.

Once idyllic

The Garfield Park neighborhood takes it name from the adjacent city park, Indianapolis' oldest. Initially named Southern Park, it was renamed in honor of President James Garfield after Garfield's assassination in 1881.

The area struggles in many ways. One in five people over the age of 25 lack a high school degree, according to data compiled by Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis, and only 17 percent have a college degree. Citywide, 27 percent have a college degree.

People who rent houses outnumber people who own them, and three-quarters of the houses are worth less than $100,000.

The neighborhood was never high-toned, but it once was idyllic, said Jim Simmons, who grew up in Garfield Park in the 1950s and moved back to the area several years ago and became active in community affairs.

Garfield Park was a bastion of Democrats and Catholics and blue-collar jobs. Simmons' mother never learned to drive because she never needed to. The butcher shop, bakery, drugstore, dry cleaners, bank and barber shop were a walk away.

Simmons today lives in a large bungalow built in the 1920s by Frank McKinney, who became a banking and political powerhouse in Indianapolis.

Most of Garfield Park was and is far more modest. Cruft Street, where Big Car is making its play, is lined with small houses. Most of the yards have trees, and some have flowers, but most also have fences and signs that say "No Trespassing" or "Beware of Dog."

Bill Cecil, 68, has lived in his house 20 years and knows the names of most of his neighbors — Johnny, Karen, Linda, Herschell. "Basically it's a pretty nice street," he said, "but I wish they'd get rid of the Compassion because all your homeless walk up and down and take things if they're not chained down."

The Compassion Center, on Shelby Street, is a soup kitchen that serves free meals to anyone, including the neighborhood's homeless, some who live under the I-65 bridge a block to the east. Their route to the Compassion is along Cruft.

"I'm an old hippie and I don't like to characterize people, and I feel for those people" said Karen Keller, who lives across the street from Cecil with two large bloodhounds and a beagle. "But I have had things taken from my porch. When people ask me if my dogs are friendly, I say no."

The door is ajar on the vacant house next door. Someone broke the padlocked front door and moved in.

Seeing a thriving, revitalized urban neighborhood here will take vision. Stakeholders would have to rub their eyes to see pitfalls created by too much success. Yet amid the disrepair such concern weighs heavy.

Artists as catalyst

Massachusetts Avenue, where today a "craft" cocktail costs $13, once was forlorn. Fountain Square, now a hipster enclave, once was dominated by decay. Similar stories are found in New York's SoHo, Oakland's Village Bottoms and Chicago's Wicker Park.

The first pioneers? Artists.

Research suggests that arts villages, often organically formed and centered on bohemian life, can lead to cultural developments that spur a neighborhood's revitalization.

"Artists are risk takers, and they can also see potential where others only see decay and nothing positive," said Kipp Normand, real estate development manager for Southeast Neighborhood Development, the nonprofit community development group that was an early investor in Fountain Square.

But these villages can become so attractive that properties go up, pricing out the very artists who made the place cool. Exhibit A: Massachusetts Ave. So the artists find a new home.

Phil Campbell, who in 1998 helped buy a 51,000-square-foot vacant dime store and turn it into more than 30 studio spaces now known as the Murphy Arts Building, remembers watching people come in and out of a crack house from his window. Now, "you can see gentrification happening even in Fountain Square," he said.

In 2010, the National Endowment for the Arts coined the term "creative placemaking," turning an idea — that art can engage and transform places — into a national policy framework. It was a new way of talking about a centuries-old artistic practice. "Michelangelo was a creative placemaker," said Jason Schupbach, director of design programs for the NEA.

Creative placemaking takes the arts and puts it front and center in urban planning. The term has spurred millions of federal dollars spent in rebuilding communities with the arts, though some observers say it's a vastly different approach to what artists like Campbell did. For example, when a community without a history of urban blight, like Carmel, invests in the arts — arts district signage, bronze statues, world-class performing arts center — the results are drastically different.

"It's all high-end," Normand said.

Cara Courage, a U.K.-based researcher who is writing a book about placemaking, agreed that Big Car takes a different approach than the NEA's creative placemaking framework. Rather than bring high-minded arts projects into communities, the collaborative helps communities create ideas themselves, she said.

"Big Car has a vision and a framework through its work that places the community at the core, and this is based on listening to what people say and responding to them with open dialogue," she said. "It's a difficult position to occupy, to have both an open mind and an expertise and ideas."

Big Car describes what it does as social practice art, an emerging art form that combines elements of performance art, site-specific installation and public art. Social practice takes another old idea — that art is a catalyst for social change — and takes it a step further: Art is social change. Artists can create a mural that exposes urban poverty, the thinking goes, or they can actually go in the community and make an impact.

In this way, Big Car's efforts in Garfield Park are inspired by the work of Theaster Gates, who restored dilapidated buildings in Chicago's Southside into cultural institutions, and the work of Rick Lowe, whose Project Row Houses in Houston's Third Ward created affordable housing complexes aimed at preserving the neighborhood while uplifting it.

"Our long-term plan goes back into preservation of the structure and history and architecture of the neighborhood," said Michael McFadden, communications and marketing manager at Project Row Houses.

In Detroit, Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project repurposed abandoned homes as sculptures and canvasses that inspired dialogue about the urban African-American experience. After nearly 30 years, the project now brings in $2.7 million in tourism revenue. It has also helped Detroit, despite its recent financial troubles, become one of the most important arts cities in the country.

"You're taking the culture of a community, and you're using it as an essential building block," Executive Director Janenne Whitfield said.

Pulling it off

A grass-roots rather than top-down approach to community building. Local rather than imported strategies. Models to keep artists in the neighborhood, even if rents go up. Proximity to bike paths, a library, a park, a university, the city's arts enclave and an upcoming public transit line. A wealth of cheap, vacant commercial and resident spaces for future development.

These are Big Car's keys to success in giving Garfield Park new life.

A land grab fueled by speculative buyers could set efforts back. Hopefully, big idea supporters say, buyers will see this neighborhood of cheap properties as a cultural investment, not just a financial one, even though the two often go hand-in-hand. Garfield Park's story, they say, needs to be about creating strong social connections and art, not just economic growth.

Ask those invested in this neighborhood, and you'll sense the same energy Theaters Gates, Rick Lowe and Phil Campbell had for their communities. In these voices you can hear vision, and, most important, hope.

Hope resonates.

Cecil, who used to work at the airplane parts factory, may not be an art aficionado. On his Cruft Street porch is a concrete statue of a goose. But he is eager for his new neighbors to get going.

"That art studio seems like it's doing a lot around here," he said, "and they're friendly people, and I think they're on to something."

Star researcher Cathy Knapp contributed to this story. Call Star reporter Wei-Huan Chen at (317) 444-6249. Follow him on Twitter: @weihuanchen. Call Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter: @WillRHiggins.

The big idea

The arts collaborative Big Car is spearheading an effort to use art as a catalyst for revitalizing the Garfield Park neighborhood. The $1.5 million plan calls for the following:

•Buy a vacant building formerly used to make airplane parts and turning it into a home for exhibits, community gatherings and Big Car's permanent headquarters.

•Work with Riley Area Development Corp. to buy five to ten abandoned homes around Cruft Street to convert into affordable residences for artists.

•Open a vinyl record store and FM radio station on Shelby Street, aiming to boost the struggling commercial corridor.

•In a pending project, work with the city to turn Shelby Street from a four-lane high speed artery into a two-lane, walkable street that invites visitors.