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Green District served its final salads on Monument Circle on May 5, bringing the fast-casual restaurant’s downtown Indianapolis era to an end after 20 months.
Ron Wyckoff, manager of Green District’s Nora location, 1250 E. 86th St, Suite 350, confirmed that the Monument Circle shop closed permanently, but said he was unaware of the reason.
The downtown restaurant, 26 Monument Circle, opened in September 2021, replacing an Au Bon Pain fast-casual restaurant on the south side of the Circle.
Louisville-based Green District, which offers chopped salads, wraps and grain bowls, has two remaining locations in central Indiana: 8701 E. 116th St., Suite 140A, in Fishers, and the Nora spot.
Another Green District restaurant opened in 2019 at 8350 E. 96th St., Fishers, and closed in 2020. A Green District opened in 2020 in Plainfield, in the Shops at Perry Crossing, and closed at the end of 2022.
Chris Furlow, a resident of New Albany, co-founded Green District in 2017 with business partners Jordan Doepke and Matt Petty.
The restaurant chain has six locations in the Louisville metropolitan area, including one in Jeffersonville, plus two in Cincinnati.
Attempts to reach Green District ownership on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning were unsuccessful.
Green District’s exit from downtown Indianapolis follows the closure of a Starbucks at 55 Monument Circle in October.
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Sweetgreen
Yep. Much better product.
The monument circle is riddled with crime, homelessness, filth, drugs, etc. It is no surprise shops are exiting.
sounds like you have not been down there….
Sounds like you are just repeating bullet points…
Sounds like you easily make incorrect assumptions.
Weak take.
JJ Frankie,
Good grief!!Have you been to Monument Circle??
I’ve lived in Indianapolis for almost 40 years. The Circle looks worse now than
it ever has. Stained smelly sidewalks, vacant store fronts. Vagrants laying
around.
Is this the Monument Circle we want visitors to witness???
There’s no piece of real estate that represents the entire state of Indiana
more than Monument Circle. It’s sad that this landmark is full of
empty store fronts and so much of the space is vacant.
With the closing of this restaurant, I think only S.B. Chocolate Factory remains.
Even Starbucks closed last year.
The Circle looks pathetic compared to how it looked just four years ago.
How about they closed because they didn’t have enough customers?
How about they didn’t have enough customers because nobody is spending much time downtown except homeless?
I’ll at least admit that the huge teleworking element is going to have a negative effect.
But the deteriorated condition of Monument Circle is noticeable. And the people denying reality are predictable.
How much worse do things have to get before the ideologues admit their ideology is failing? Very worse, it seems. That’s why it’s an ideology.
So … what’s the alternative? Indianapolis residents have yet to be offered one.
It’s really easy to just scream “no” a lot and not offer alternatives. Pat Bauer did it a lot in the Statehouse and look where it got his party.
We just finished yet another legislative session where the state of Indiana had more money than we knew what to do with.
Democrats asked for money for a low barrier shelter and the bill died in committee. More spending for mental health was a topic and that was shuffled to the side.
Republicans just like to complain. Maybe a good alternative would have been giving the city of Indianapolis the money, with the additional stipulation that come July 1, 2025 it won’t be legal to live on the streets or under the bridges if the municipal unit has an alternative place like a shelter.
And for Pete’s sake, more money on mental health spending.
It’s not hard. Just the Republican ideologues refuse to do it.
Throw more money at the problem. It works so well! It is the hallmark of a leftist that their government programs, when called to the carpet for showing no positive results, will simply retort that the budget was too tight and that the services were not generous enough.
I can admit that Reagan’s initiative to close the state hospitals was, in hindsight, a bad decision. But we also have to recognize that a sizable portion of this “mental health issue” in 2020 is really just drug addiction. A mental health issue induced by people’s irresponsible and reckless behavior, abetted in no small part by corrupt doctors and pharma reps. But in the end, the individuals themselves choose to turn to drugs (prescriptions or illicit). Perhaps drug use is borne out of depression or anxiety, sure, but depression and anxiety aren’t in themselves a surefire path to homelessness the way opioid addiction is.
Oh well, like most government initiatives that nakedly fail and then get escalated, this will drag the responsible and well-adjusted down in the muck along with everything else.
Maybe we need to institutionalize the truly mentally ill AND the junkies. One or both characterize about 98% of the chronically homeless. The down-on-their-luck people not using drugs don’t remain homeless for long. Enabling drug addiction is a horrible idea. Hopefully the West Coast will fall on its face hard and IBJ’s delusional (who complain that Indiana needs to be more like California) will wake up from their trance before the mindvirus propagates enough over here.
You still didn’t offer an alternative solution. I’ll take that as not having one.
Considering the numerous closures across the metro area, sounds like a bad product
Agree w/ SB. As a downtown resident, weary of the ignorance and fear mongering: yes, there are people w/o housing. I’ve had no unpleasant experiences with any of them. Filth? C’mon. Downtown well maintained for the most part—problem areas are generally in vacated retail spots. Drugs? Again, live downtown. Evidence of a big drug problem lacking.
Does history repeat itself? Are we headed back to the 70s and early 80s of having a rough and unsafe downtown?
Mass Ave is thriving and new stores are opening up frequently. Many of the shops or business that closed in the DT area have been replaced. I would say we are seeing a period unsuccessful businesses die off and be replaced with new ones that are adapting to people living downtown rather than just the “lunch rush.”
The Circle is the one place that Indianapolis should prioritize more than
any other single block in the city.
It looks terrible.
There’s going to be a transition period as former commercial spaces transition to residential.
I am hopeful the low barrier shelter the city is trying to do will help. A legislative ask for funding at the state level died in committee.
https://www.ibj.com/articles/a-low-barrier-shelter-could-be-the-answer-to-some-of-indys-homelessness-problems
A glorified salad bar is not a deal-breaker. But it’s a death by a thousand cuts. Lots more vacancies DT than there were four years ago, even if less than downtowns that have gone south worse than Indy (Chicago, Minneapolis, Louisville).
How long can downtown remain desirable enough to convince arrested-development Gen Z-ers and young Millennials that this is the best way to extend their college frat/dorm culture up until they turn 42 years old? I mean, the main reason people move downtown is the concentration of things to do and places to eat or (especially) drink.
Most of the residential construction going up now was based on agreements negotiated before half the world lost their minds and shut everything down for a disease that was mild for the overwhelming majority of the population. I think we’re still running on the momentum from the 2010s, but we’ll hit a wall very soon. Sure hope I’m wrong.
History repeats itself over and over again, because humans are flawed.
Sad. I have restricted my downtown activity to places with valet parking during daylight hours. A couple of years ago, I had to park down by south street and walk north to the circle. The underpass was crowded with homeless and reeked of urine. This was at noon. I told my wife she shouldn’t go down there without me. We used to go down there regularly for the Symphony and dinner. We miss that but feel unsafe. I know that Starbucks did not leave because they have bad product.
You are right, Starbucks did not leave because of bad product. But there have been legitimate questions raised about the reasons Starbucks cited. It has been speculated that the move had more to do with preventing unionization. The NLRB has issued a boatload of citations against Starbucks for labor law violations, and Starbucks has been accused on multiple occasions of closing stores to prevent unionization in other cities. It is certainly suspicious that if there were crime concerns, the Monument Circle location apparently never bothered to call the police.
I used go downtown regularly.
There were always homeless people hanging out in front or close by panhandling.
I’ve seen the police down there several times making an arrest in front or within
maybe a few yards of the Starbucks.
As you mentioned, maybe it was a unionization thing. But the vagrants were a
huge issue also.