Will Higgins

will.higgins@indystar.com

Massachusetts Avenue, between the 300 block and 900 block, is one of the city's liveliest, most fashionable stretches of road, a busy, high-rent entertainment zone. But not all that long ago, it was at best unfashionable and at worst, a battle zone.

There was a pea-shake house (pea-shake is an illegal, private lottery that in gangster movies is referred to as "the numbers"), a topless bar called the Rainbow Lounge, a gym for old-time, leather medicine ball-tossing body builders called Hofmeister Physical Culture Studio, a restaurant called Ed and Marge's Cafeteria where Jell-O was served, and Salisbury steak.

You could rent a "sleeping room" above Stout's Shoes for $25 a month, and about a dozen elderly people did just that, cooking on hot plates and hiking down the hall to the bathroom, including a woman who'd been a wing-walker back when aviators were like braver, higher-grade carnival workers.

"I went to work there in 1982, and back then Massachusetts Avenue was Skid Row," said Brad Stout, then a freshly minted MBA who now runs the business, started by his forebears in the 300 block in 1886.

Suddenly, beginning in 1982, in the course of a couple years, a half-dozen art galleries moved in. With that, the tired old street's transformation was underway.

Today the idea of using art as a lubricant for economic development/urban revitalization is old hat. But in the 1980s, two decades before Richard Florida published "The Rise of the Creative Class," the strategy was innovative. In Indianapolis it was part of a broader strategy to revitalize the entire Downtown, which back then, following decades of urban flight, was still considered undesirable, dangerous. Downtown had few housing options, few restaurants, no zoo, no Colts, no White River State Park, no Eiteljorg Museum, not even a grocery store. Certainly not an arts district.

"We wanted the galleries in there to start everything off," said Scott Keller, a real-estate developer who in 1980 began buying vacant Mass Ave. storefronts, cheaply. He says he can't remember what the four narrow, deep buildings cost him but does remember paying just $275,000 for the 70-unit Lockerbie Court apartments, at Vermont and Massachusetts. "We wanted (for Mass Ave.) a lot of retail, we wanted independent restaurants of quality. Art galleries got people to visit the area, generated interest, so we rented to them very inexpensively."

"My rent then was $600 a month for a storefront," said Mark Ruschman, one of the early gallerists. "And I was probably at the high end."

Mass Ave.'s first art gallery, Patrick King Contemporary Art, opened in 1982 in the 400 block. There followed the 431 Gallery, the Cunningham Gallery, Mark Ruschman Gallery, Steve and Francine Stollers' Denouement Gallery, the William Engle gallery and others.

They showed contemporary art, the type of thing that begged to be discussed and interpreted, and it appealed to the much-sought-after Yuppie, the better-funded hipsters of yore.

"It's been the pattern in reborn neighborhoods in other cities, like SoHo in New York in the '60s, that galleries are the first to go in — it's like Fountain Square now," said David Andrichik, Mass Ave.'s food-and-beverage pioneer. Andrichik was 32 when he bought the Chatterbox bar, in the 400 block, in 1982. At the time it was a place for third-shift factory workers to drink during the daytime — the bar's hours of operation were 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Andrichik, who spent his days working as an architect, converted the Chatterbox to a night spot so he and his friends could enjoy the place. By the mid-'80s, he'd begun hiring top-flight jazz players, and his bar was a hub of hipness, though still something of an island, especially late at night.

"We used to watch drug deals, crack deals, at the apartment building across the street," Andrichik said, referring to the Davlin, where today there's a Starbucks. "They'd do transactions through the windows. Every night. It didn't seem really dangerous. More just run-down, and seedy."

Contemporary art, not to mention Andrichik's live jazz, may have classed up the neighborhood, but what drew the really big crowds were the free wine-and-cheese parties the galleries hosted every six weeks or so. The galleries, which rotated the work on their walls regularly, coordinated the openings of their new shows so that they'd land on the same night, always a Friday.

These shindigs were the early version of the city's First Fridays, which today are spread all over town, from Fountain Square to Broad Ripple. Then, the party was concentrated in a two-block area, the city's smart set in and out of the galleries, up and down the Mass Ave. sidewalks, at night — having a blast, not getting mugged.

The partygoers were an interesting mix — artists like the brilliant (and formerly incarcerated), dashiki-clad poet Etheridge Knight attended, as did intellectuals like Herron art school professor Steve Mannheimer and architect Jim Lingenfelter, who'd later chair the library board, and real-estate developer Lee Alig, who'd play a central role in getting a grocery store Downtown and in saving the then-crumbling/now-thriving Athenaeum, plus a good group of barflies and other lively people.

The parties "were a big part of the electricity" responsible for "really laying the groundwork for the development that came later," said Ruschman.

By the mid-1990s, most of the galleries had lit out. Rising rents may have contributed to the exodus but are not the main factor, Ruschman said. Patrick King, who decamped in 1993, said at the time there was a great core group of art buyers in Indianapolis but that their walls were filled up.

Mass Ave. continued to get more and more vibrant, with trendy shops and high-end foodie restaurants spreading all the way into the 900 block — "the galleries' legacy," said Ruschman.

The downside is it's hard to find a good Salisbury steak anymore.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter:@WillRHiggins.