Fall Creek Parkway Bridge Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology

Including over 3,400 acres of parkland, planned boulevards, and six major bridges, the National Register of Historic Places listing for the Indianapolis Park & Boulevard System is one of the largest of its kind. Visitors today can experience amenities ranging from two golf courses to bicycle routes, swimming, and simply driving the parkways.

When Alexander Ralston mapped out the Mile Square plat of Indianapolis in 1821, he did not include parks. Military Park was originally a militia training grounds, and shortly after the Civil War, businessman George Merritt installed a badge-shaped walk and fountains for it. University Park was the home of the Marion County Seminary, and it served as such for years before becoming a city park in the 1870s.

Indianapolis grew rapidly in the late 19th century, and the city needed more parks for its citizens. Volunteer park efforts were inadequate. In 1880, the city’s population was more than 102,000, but by 1900, it exceeded 197,000. City consultations with landscape architect Joseph Earnshaw in 1894 led to consideration of a broader system of parks. In 1895, the City Council created a Park Commission. Shortly thereafter, the commission brought John C. Olmsted on board to create a full plan. Both the Earnshaw and Olmsted plans focused on parks lining White River and Fall Creek.

Legal challenges to the Olmsted plan ended its viability within a few years, though city parks director J. Clyde Power began to improve Riverside Park and oversaw construction of the first stone bridges over White River and Fall Creek. Little funding was available for other parks, and the city still had no overall plan. Most residents wanted parks in their own areas, not just on one side of town. Concerns about where parks were needed, legal disputes, and escalating land values threatened the whole parks movement.

Brookside Park Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology

George Edward Kessler stepped into this politically charged situation in 1908. Kessler was one of the preeminent landscape architects in the United States. Born in 1862 in Bad Frankenhausen, Germany, he came with his family to the United States in the mid-1860s. The Kesslers lived in Dallas, Texas, when George was a child. In 1878, George returned to Germany and studied forestry, botany, and landscape design at the Grand Ducal Gardens in Weimar, and civil engineering at the University of Jena. He came back and established his office in St. Louis quickly building an excellent reputation. His impressive plans for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and his other city park plans – for Cincinnati and Kansas City among others – were probably foremost in the minds of Indianapolis leaders when they selected him to develop a plan for the park system.

Kessler’s Indianapolis plan is among the best known of his city park system plans. His genius did not lie in simply designing a sound plan from an engineering and aesthetic point of view, but in implementing the plan in a way that quelled opposition and united the city. In 1909, after a year’s worth of study, Kessler presented his Park and Boulevard Plan to the city. It was adopted, and along with a new parks law, withstood legal challenges. A combination of the City Beautiful and the city practical, Kessler’s plan included major regional parks on every side of town, along with a comprehensive parkway system. The plan combines parks with green spaces and boulevards in a network of transportation and recreation corridors that help guide urban growth, preserve the environment, protect water from pollution, and provide flood control.

Kessler gave each of the major parks its own character. For Garfield Park, he designed formal sunken gardens with spray fountains. Ellenberger Park would maintain its old tree stands and natural paths. In the heart of the city, Kessler redesigned University Park, with formal paths and a recommendation for a central fountain. The meandering routes of his parkways would create foils to the relentless grid of subdivisions.

The very waterways which Earnshaw, Power, Olmsted, Kessler, and Lawrence Sheridan, who followed Kessler, hoped to celebrate were the only significant natural barrier to development. Power and Kessler especially disliked the 19th century metal truss bridges crossing Fall Creek and White River and began their replacement with artistic stone and concrete arch spans.

Garfield Park Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology

Kessler guided the Park Commission for six years until 1915. A good portion of the system had been surveyed and constructed by then. The city hired Kessler once again in the 1920s. He was in town, supervising construction of a new belt road, when he died in 1923. The new belt road was named Kessler Boulevard in his honor.

Lawrence Sheridan had the unenviable task of following up on Kessler’s grand scheme. Sheridan matriculated from Purdue University and later attended Harvard School of Landscape Architecture. Sheridan implemented the Kessler idea over several decades. He had served on the Park Commission and became the city planner for Indianapolis after Kessler’s death. In 1928, Sheridan unveiled an expanded version of the Kessler Plan, one which created new parks and parkways in the farthest reaches of the county. Sheridan’s efforts in Indianapolis continued past his brief service in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II.

The work of Kessler and Sheridan laid the foundation for much of Indy’s park planning well into the 20th century. The parkway system took on new life as part of the Indy Greenways system in the 1990s, a series of linked pedestrian and bicycle trails. City efforts to revitalize parks led to a landmark restoration of the sunken gardens at Garfield Park in the late 1990s. The City of Indianapolis Parks Department officially recognized the importance of the park movement legacy in 2003. The Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, the State Historic Preservation Office, worked with consultants to prepare an 80-page National Register of Historic Places nomination with complete mapping that summarized a century of park development. Restoration and preservation of the system is ongoing and involves a dialogue between transportation engineers, park planners, trail enthusiasts, citizens, preservationists, and conservationists.