INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana – This bustling Midwestern city was once so boring that visitors and locals alike derisively referred to it as “India-no-place.”

Ouch. Almost as bad as “Mistake on the Lake.”

But as the Cuyahoga River caught fire for the last time in 1969, an opening act to Cleveland’s descent into a decades-long funk, Indianapolis coalesced around a revival strategy that still fascinates urban planners and political scientists to this day.

Much has been written about the strategy, which was given the futuristic sounding name of “Unigov,” short for unified government, but was really pretty simple in concept. It merged the declining City of Indianapolis with the surrounding – and growing – suburbs of Marion County.

Indianapolis instantly went from the nation’s 26th largest city to the 11th largest when Unigov took effect on Jan. 1, 1970. The boost in land mass and population helped provide additional resources to battle urban decay, stabilize the regional economy and convert a sleepy downtown into a convention mecca.

Today, Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer are examining Unigov as part of Cleveland 2030, A Way Forward, a project that looks at models of government consolidation that might inform the debate over regionalization in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.

Cleveland 2030 is part of Cleveland Connects, a series of civic dialogues sponsored by PNC Bank since 2012.

Small start, big results

Unigov did not merge all government functions right away. Police consolidation would come decades later and schools are still not unified. Instead, the architects took a streamlined approach, replacing the county and city governments with a council and strong mayor.

That provided an ideal setup to eliminate costly, intra-county competition for economic development and to allow civic leaders to drive progress downtown, said Drew Klacik, senior policy analyst with the Indiana University Public Policy Institute.

Drew Klacik, senior policy analyst with the Indiana Public Policy Institute, along Canal Walk in Indianapolis.

UniGov gave one voice to the city and its suburbs. And that meshed perfectly with a plan to redevelop the downtown area and grow the local economy around professional and amateur sports.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Indianapolis would have gone down the tubes if they hadn’t a done Unigov,” said Aaron Renn, a senior fellow and urban policy expert with the New York-based Manhattan Institute.

Bill Blomquist, a political science professor at Indiana University/Purdue University in Indianapolis, is more cautious in his assessment. Many factors have contributed to the city’s rise, including strong, civic-minded leaders.

But Blomquist acknowledged that some of the enormous projects that triggered downtown Indianapolis’ renaissance were “easier to do because of Unigov.”

It began with basketball

Indianapolis was founded in 1821 and grew up along the National Road, also known as U.S. 40. But prior to Unigov, the city wasn’t known for much more than the Indy 500 auto race held once a year in the suburb of Speedway, and as the home of prominent drug manufacturer Eli Lilly and Co.

That began to change under the unified government, which was created by an act of the Republican-controlled state legislature at the urging of local Republicans led by then Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar.

Lugar and others proposed using some of their unified resources and vision to elevate Indianapolis’ profile in the world of sports.

At the time, Indianapolis had an American Basketball Association team called the Pacers that played at the Indianapolis State Fairgrounds, just north of the city center. Lugar insisted that a new arena be built downtown.

To that end, Market Square Arena opened in 1974, the same year that the Cleveland Cavaliers moved from the Cleveland Arena at Euclid Avenue and East 37th Street to a new home in the wilds of Richfield in Summit County.

Two years after the Pacers moved to downtown Indianapolis, the team joined the NBA via merger with the ABA, and the city began hosting 41 home games a year and generating all the related economic spinoffs.

“That turned out to be really fortuitous because downtowns are now cool and important again,” Klacik said.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway

If you build it . . .

The construction of Market Square Arena was just the beginning.

Over the next 10 years, Indianapolis expanded its downtown convention center and, in 1982, began building the Hoosier Dome, hoping to lure an NFL franchise. Two years later, the Colts fled Baltimore for Indianapolis.

“We built a professional football stadium without a team,” Blomquist said. “And then got a team.”

Lucas Oil Stadium, which replaced the Hoosier Dome in 2008, hosted a Super Bowl in 2012 and has continued to be the site of the annual NFL Combine, where college athletes showcase their skills ahead of the draft.

Bankers Life Fieldhouse, home of the NBA's Indiana Pacers.

A bet on amateurs

As big a role as professional sports played in the revival, the city focused as much, if not more, on promoting amateur sports. The region has a rich history of high school and collegiate basketball, and the landmark Hinkle Fieldhouse on the campus of Butler University was the site of the 1954 high school state championship game that inspired the 1986 film, “Hoosiers,” considered one of the great sports movie of all time.

In 1979, city leaders created the nonprofit Indiana Sports Corp., billed as the nation’s first sports commission, to host events and make the city a hub of amateur athletics.

A natatorium, velodrome and track-and-field stadium were built with financial help from Eli Lilly. Over time, the city has hosted more than 450 events that have contributed billions of dollars to the local economy.

College tournaments in multiple sports are now commonplace in Indianapolis. The city has hosted several NCAA Final Four championships in basketball and is slated to have the NCAA Football playoffs in 2022.

In 1987, the city drew international attention when it took on the Pan Am Games after Chile and Ecuador withdrew from consideration. Opening ceremonies with then Vice President George H.W. Bush in attendance were held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with events held at multiple venues.

The economic impact hasn’t just centered around the events themselves. In 1999, the city scored big when it lured the NCAA headquarters away from Kansas City.

NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis

The hits kept coming

The focus on downtown continued into the 1990s, when the Circle Centre Mall was integrated into a series of buildings not far from historic Monument Circle. And in 1999, Market Square Arena was replaced by Conseco Fieldhouse, now known as Bankers Life Fieldhouse.

The focus on downtown was intentional and intense with the desired effect of extending economic benefit to the whole region, said John Krauss, former deputy mayor to Mayor William Hudnut III.

Krauss recalls Hudnut telling skeptics in the hinterlands, “ ‘You can’t be a suburb of nothing.’ ”

And while the city’s renaissance has not included much public transportation, pedestrians can easily navigate downtown, whether on foot, bike or one of the ubiquitous motorized scooters that dot the sidewalks waiting to be shared.

The northwestern section of the city is bisected by a restored portion of the Central Indiana Canal that is now lined with apartments, businesses and museums. Canal Walk leads to White River State Park, another jewel that is home to the Indianapolis Zoo, a concert venue and Victory Field where the minor league Indianapolis Indians baseball team plays.

The quality of cultural institutions also has improved, largely with the help of the Lilly Endowment, a philanthropic foundation established by the Lilly family. John Mutz, one of the architects of Unigov when he represented Marion County in the state legislature, said the passage of Unigov helped Lugar convince the Lilly family to focus more of its abundant resources on its hometown.

“I think one could argue that accomplishing UniGov in the fashion in which it was accomplished kind of lit the fuse on Indianapolis doing bigger things,” said Jeff Bennett, deputy mayor for community development under current Democratic Mayor Joe Hogsett. “It was sort of this shot of adrenaline that said, OK, when we have civic infrastructure in place, the philanthropic infrastructure in place and the corporate infrastructure in place, all working together, we can accomplish big things.”

White River Gardens at the Indianapolis Zoo

In a ‘better’ place

Critics of Unigov point to areas of Indianapolis that were left behind while the focus was on downtown, but research suggests that Indianapolis has fared much better than most of the cities of its size and description.

“Many of the benefits that Unigov brought to Indianapolis were most tangible in the first two decades following consolidation,” according to an Abell Foundation report on merged governments in Nashville, Louisville and Indianapolis. “Employment growth and business creation improved meaningfully, and outpaced most peer cities through the late 1980s.”

The Abell Foundation published the Indianapolis study in 2014 to better inform the Greater Baltimore community, which has periodically discussed the possibility of merging the City of Baltimore with Baltimore County.

“While Unigov impacted communities in Indianapolis differently, because of consolidation the city is in a better position going forward – the economy is stronger, the tax base is broader, and the city’s reputation is greater,” states the report, which was written by Jeff Wachter and titled, “40 Years After Unigov: Indianapolis and Marion County’s Experience with Consolidated Government.”

Indianapolis has outpaced most of its peers, according to an Abell Foundation report from 2014.

Krauss even credits Unigov with setting the stage for United Airlines’ decision to put a maintenance hub (since closed) at Indianapolis International Airport, Lilly expanding its operations, and most recently, the arrival of Salesforce, a cloud-based software company based in San Francisco that has put its name on the tallest building in downtown Indianapolis.

And then you have the ultimate validation from one of the most influential companies in the world, Amazon. The company selected Indianapolis as one of 20 finalists for a second headquarters that Amazon now plans to locate in Northern Virginia.

“The only other Midwestern city not called Chicago, which doesn’t count because it’s really global, that made the Amazon list that’s truly Midwestern would be Columbus,” said Klacik. “St. Louis wasn’t on there. Cincinnati wasn’t on their, Cleveland wasn’t on there, Detroit wasn’t on there.”

Klacik said that when he moved to Indianapolis in the 1980s, the idea of Indianapolis being on the same list as those cities was laughable.

Downtown Indianapolis from White River State Park

Coming up

In coming installments of Cleveland 2030: A Way Forward, cleveland.com will report on the individuals who came up with UniGov and the compromises required to make it politically palatable.

We also will examine how Unigov helped marshal resources, including debt and revenue sharing, to target economic development in downtown Indianapolis, and what sections of the city failed to benefit as much during the decades of growth.

Finally, we will examine the prospects of something similar to UniGov happening in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.