A local firm has a new plan for redeveloping a 14-acre site
in Broad Ripple. The $15-million Monon Place project calls for 150 new apartments, a clubhouse and pool and about 12,500 square
feet of retail space. The property, which sits just east of the Monon Trail between Kessler Boulevard and 61st Street, includes
the 136-unit Monon Place apartments and an 18,000-square-foot commercial building anchored by McNamara Florist. The plan calls
for an overhaul of the existing apartments and demolition of the existing commercial building. It would be replaced by nine
apartment buildings and two mixed-use structures along 61st Street. Potential retail tenants include McNamara and a new concept
from Cafe Patachou. Buckingham Cos. bought the property in 2000 and proposed a larger project with 36,000 square feet of retail
space, but a rezoning request failed in 2002 after neighbors expressed concerns about traffic and compatibility. A hearing
on the new proposal is set for May 7.
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Welcome to Property Lines, Indy's source for neighborhood real estate news. Your host is Scott Olson, IBJ's real estate beat
reporter. Edited by Cory Schouten.
A local firm has a new plan for redeveloping a 14-acre site
in Broad Ripple. The $15-million Monon Place project calls for 150 new apartments, a clubhouse and pool and about 12,500 square
feet of retail space. The property, which sits just east of the Monon Trail between Kessler Boulevard and 61st Street, includes
the 136-unit Monon Place apartments and an 18,000-square-foot commercial building anchored by McNamara Florist. The plan calls
for an overhaul of the existing apartments and demolition of the existing commercial building. It would be replaced by nine
apartment buildings and two mixed-use structures along 61st Street. Potential retail tenants include McNamara and a new concept
from Cafe Patachou. Buckingham Cos. bought the property in 2000 and proposed a larger project with 36,000 square feet of retail
space, but a rezoning request failed in 2002 after neighbors expressed concerns about traffic and compatibility. A hearing
on the new proposal is set for May 7.
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It's also across the street from Fogo de Chao and Morton's....
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Yep, the haters are trying to make good news bad. I guess it is hard to get people to believe the series is dying when they are gaining new sponsors.
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David Copperfield! I remember watching his specials on TV when I was little.
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Don't forget this is next to an MMA gym, a pawn shop, and some abandoned spaces.
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Good project for Zionsville - A group who has owned the property for many years has waited and worked patiently to bring highest and best use development to a major corridor, and mix that in with the great downtown you have. Win Win. All the Best to Pittman Partners and Zionsville.
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This is an appropriate densification of a place where people WANT to live inside the IPS district. The re-development will INCREASE the tax base and INCREASE the population...as rentals, these units will pay 2% of assessed value in property tax, not 1% like single-family homes.
The redevelopment will remove an ugly eyesore building (the McNamara quonset hut). Lots of people will be easily able to WALK to the shops from the OTHER dense developments along the trail.
Folks, this is big city. We need projects like this to succeed, in order to demonstrate that Indy's metro-area growth does NOT need to be vinyl villages at 199th and Boondocks Rd.
Sermon over.
I wish it were more modern and more dense - right now it still looks quite suburban.
Major problems are growing pains of a small city becoming a big one. If the commercial space offers more choices in restaurants and local shopping (as proposed above), it's good in the long run. If it's more Subways and Little Caesar's, not so good.
That street is nasty at the moment, this would help in so many ways. I also would envision that this would make the Broad Ripple Farmer's Market more successful and would help take some blight away from BRHS.
I am activly looking for a home in Broad Ripple and I hope these projects continue!
As a lifetime MK and BR resident this is exactly what's needed in the area. Crystal, please move to the burbs and get out of my urban village. Yes, that's right, you live in an urban village. We need dense, smart development to attract more people to our area. We aint getting any more land in the rip so we better make darn sure to get more value out of what we have!
Side note: with more feet/eyes on the street in this area the safety factor will get better!
Cory: have you ever thought about posting hearing details here so that all the folks can come out and show support?
this thing has been delayed once, i hope it gets on the fast track now (hippies be damned)
to live there? THE BEACH!!! Let's tear the beach up and stick residential
dwellings there and see what we have left. The song Paved Paradise
and Put Up a Parking Lot keeps running through my head.
This isn't appropriate densification in this location. People who
walk along the Monon want trees. We want a peaceful, shaded place
to walk. They've put in so much residential along the Monon now.
Personally, if I lived along the Monon I wouldn't want to look out my
window and see people walking by. This is beach front because of the
Monon. The Monon is there because of the green surroundings. This is desirable
real estate because of the beach. We're tearing out the beach to make
room for this high density development. See the conflict there???
Let me clarify: the beach here is The Monon Trail, an URBAN amenity...it is a paved multi-user trail, an alternate transportation mode, a shared social space.
Further... anyone who thinks that ripping up the sea of asphalt around the McNamara building is a bad idea isn't thinking straight. The tangle of trees on that plot are largely non-native and invasive (mulberry, tree-of-heaven, and honeysuckle). I'd guess that Buckingham, IndyParks, and Keep Indianapolis Beautiful will be glad to collaborate on replanting native species in their place.
Finally, apartment dwellers are people who might buy a house or condo in the neighborhood after they get established. In fact, they're the most likely to do so because they WILL be familiar with the area...and nowhere else in Indianapolis can they find the same sort of living.
ps. This is from someone who lived and worked in that area for the better part of 20 years. My second apartment and my first and second homes were less than a mile away.
People are always whining about traffic and parking in Broad Ripple. Yes, parking is tough if you are used to parking right in front of your favorite Applebees at your local suburban strip mall, but this is an URBAN area. It won't kill you to walk a little.
It's never been a neighborhood of single-family homes. The McNamara building dates to at least the 1940s, and the apartments in the corridor between Compton and the Monon from Kessler to 62nd are all between 40 and 60 years old. The strip mall between 62nd and Broad Ripple (built in 1989) replaced the old Bud Wolf car dealership.
I guess when you're wrong on the facts, it sometimes works to resort to namecalling.
One more thing JoeMama, Keep up the name calling....your point (if any) gets lost when you start the 3rd grade name calling.
Densify densify densify, this BR resident says! (Actually I'm Warfleigh, but walk into BR all the time.) And please someone move a new grocery store into the former Sunflower space! (The Kroger remodel looks excellent.)
Downtown is the metro area. It's about high density. This is quaint (though
there could be a better use for the space) area. Some people want
large lots. The term NIMBY is overused in this string of comments.
If you're a home owner in BR would you want something like this in your
backyard? No. Forget the property tax issue. Forget NIMBYs. Not every place
in all of Marion (or Hamilton or anywhere else) has to be about high density, and
a mix of retail and residential. That's Fishers. That's Carmel. That's not
Broad Ripple. You have Broad Ripple Village which is quaint shops, and BR
residential that is older, charming homes with yards. And yes, if they have a 3
acre yard, they should be paying the tax on that.
Why start complaining now?
Your right there are a lot of nice single family homes, but people are cautious about homes right now. Believe it or not. More people are moving into the Metropolitan area and Indiana. They want to live near downtown. BR makes this an ideal location. Whoever mentioned High Density should only be for the downtown urban core hasn't traveled. Look at DC and Chicago, and Atlanta, and Boston, and Phonenix and San Diego. Those are all cities with a major urban core, then for a few miles it is houses, then it pops up again with more of a village feel (i.e. Broad Ripple) and the density gets hire (like Lincoln Park in Chicago, Eagles Landing, in Atlanta, Alexandria, Crystal City, and Huntington in DC).
Mid-High Density in Broad Ripple is good. we'll run out of land at somepoint, might as well stave that off with higher denisty now and get the tax benefit.
It is all on an average cycle of 23 years. It first was that people couldn't wait to get out to the suburbs, get their cars, travel in to the city. Well that trend is slowly cycling around again. There will be a bigger demand for more of this type of living all over the Inner 465 loop to downtown Indy. All NIMBY's better get used to parking their car and walking, taking the bus or get out now while the getting is good.
May 3rd, 2008 at 2:37 pm
What does NIMBY stand for?
Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)
Just for the record, if 61 St. is so overcrowded, why was it being proposed a few years back that this street be turned into a pedestrian pathway?
I am thrilled that a developer would want to replace the eye-sore of McNamara and re-do the apartments! What a great investment. Let's support these upgrades to our neighborhood! I welcome the investment and addition to the tax base.
Sophia writes:
Circlecity18, these NIMBYs would hate Carmel, which is embracing development like this. They need to move to Avon, or some place like that.
If you have such a poor opinion of BR residents, why did you move there in the first place? Certainly there are some stick-in-the-mud residents - but those are, by and large, the people who made BR the nice place it is to live now - and they did so by specifically *not* moving out to the suburbs when so many other people were moving out there. You may not like these people, but rest assured that they have no desire to move into a vinyl village.
Carmel is doing some nice things, in part to develop a village feel like BR. But, AFAIK, Carmel is not adding 150 apartments to any existing neighborhoods.
Indianapolis-based Buckingham Cos. are developers of...the $500 million plan for Gramercy, a redevelopment of the Mohawk Hills golf course and apartment complex at 126th Street and Keystone Avenue into more than 2,200 apartments, condominiums and town homes.
Just thought I'd fill you in on a little bit of history. BR started off as an amusement destination, as Broad Ripple Park was originally an amusement park with carnival rides, roller coasters, and a beach on the White River...
Sorry...just found your choice of words slightly amusing...