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Cleanup of contamination in store for new Claus site: Sausage shop owner redeveloping brownfield property

It’s 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and a steady stream of customers continues to patronize Claus’ German Sausage and Meat Market on East South Street. By March, however, the butcher shop likely will have abandoned its longtime home for a new building on South Shelby Street in Fountain Square. Whether its loyal clientele will follow concerns owner Claus Muth, who purchased the store from relative Gerhard Klemm in 2003 and changed the name from Klemm’s in April. “Since [the new…

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Young architect honored for design of orphanage: Cluster complex plan wins international competition

Chunsheh Teo is a driven man. The 28-year-old sometimes works long days as an architectural graduate at Ratio Architects Inc. and spends his off time building furniture for the home he and his wife recently purchased in Irvington. On a recent weekend, he built a new fence for the yard. Oh, and he also enters international design competitions in his down time-about seven in the last three years. “It’s just kind of a fun thing to do,” Teo said. At…

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NOTIONS: A travel dispatch from somewhere over the rainbow

The sun is setting, the pavement damp, and dark clouds dance across the San Juan Mountains as we turn onto U.S. Highway 550 and drive north toward Durango. As if there weren’t enough beauty in this peak-filled paradise, Nature’s earlyevening sideshow features a fully arced double rainbow, quite the welcome sign to a late-summer vacation. I suppose you could write off a double rainbow as a mere meteorological phenomenon. I suppose I could, too. But it’s more fun to wonder…

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IPL seeks to expand green plans

Electric customers would gain new payment options and more access to “green power,” and Indianapolis Power & Light would have more opportunities to profit, under a plan the utility filed Aug. 23 with state regulators.

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Racing toward a new type of learning center: Decatur, Panther team up on educational facility

Mention a career in motorsports to most youngsters and they imagine whizzing around the track like NASCAR’s Tony Stewart or Sam Hornish Jr., points leader of the Indianapolis Racing League. But a partnership between Indianapolisbased Panther Racing LLC and Decatur Township Schools wants to introduce students to more practical professions within the sport by providing the resources in a hands-on learning environment. The result is the Panther Education Center, set to open next fall near the racing team’s headquarters at…

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VOICES FROM THE INDUSTRY: Businesses should tap Indiana’s ‘invisible work force’

Based on an analysis of biographical accounts, both Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison appear to have been challenged by dyslexia, a reading and comprehension developmental disorder that can be severe. Few today would question the astonishing contributions these individuals made to humanity. Despite the severity of the challenges that some of these children face, many adapt and conquer, entering the Indianapolis community as successful working adults. There are many stories of achievement about children exceeding expectations, from a teenager with…

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INVESTING: Mexicans turn pro-market, Americans socialist

Hola! I feel like speaking Spanish today. I want to go down to Mexico and protest with my socialist brothers the outrages of the freeelection process. There’s a lot of wealth we Americans didn’t create but want to take, and that’s hard to do when a bunch of capitalists are running Mexico. It has been a long struggle for Mexico. Decades of anti-capitalist governments and first-rate corruption have created problems that will take generations to work out. But the election…

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VOICES FROM THE INDUSTRY: Low-impact development likely to make a big impact

Every time Indiana experiences one of its summer cloudbursts, the rainfall sets into motion one of a real estate development’s most expensive and least appreciated systems. As rain hits the ground, it quickly collects into wellengineered courses to swales and gutters, through pipes and culverts and into detention ponds. Flowing around, over and through the land that once absorbed it, the water is efficiently collected and conveyed off the site. In other words, gather it up and drain it off….

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Dispute over retail at Hamilton Proper boils over: Some homeowners bucking HDG Mansur management

Tensions between the developer of Hamilton Proper and some of its homeowners spilled into public view at the Fishers Town Council meeting Aug. 7, with the council president becoming so agitated he broke his gavel. Another councilor, Charles White, opened the meeting by complaining about the council’s July 17 decision to reject an application by HDG Mansur, the developer of Hamilton Proper, to build an 11-acre retail project on the periphery of the subdivision. White had been absent for that…

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Six sites named ‘Shovel Ready’: State program designed to speed permit process for fast-track developers

State officials have added another arrow to their quiver of economic-development incentives meant to attract companies to Indiana. A new pilot program, known as Shovel Ready, certifies land that can be rapidly developed. The aim is to make the properties more attractive to companies by cutting the time it takes to navigate the permitting process. “The ability to expedite a company’s development will make us more competitive than perhaps we have been in the past,” said Chris Pfaff, director of…

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Architectural firm embraces solar panels

The architectural firm Schmidt Associates Inc. wants to persuade clients to build greener buildings. So a couple of weeks ago–during a heat wave and under scorching sun, nonetheless–workers erected a solarpanel awning in front of the company’s 320 E. Vermont St. offices.

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EYE ON THE PIE: The trouble with inexpensive housing

From 2000 to 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau tells us, there were 148,500 housing units added in Indiana. That’s a 5.8-percent rate of growth (16th in the country), exceeding the national rate of 5.3 percent. During the same period, Indiana added 134,600 people, a 2.2-percent increase (33rd in the country) and just more than half the 4.1-percent national rate. For every person we added, we built 1.1 housing units, the 10th-highest rate in the nation. What’s going on? To get…

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Hotel art adds more than ambiance: Local gallery offers work from Picasso to Perrin for sale at Conrad Indianapolis

An international crowd in for the Formula One race milled through a sold-out Conrad Indianapolis downtown on a recent weekend. As they jutted off to their spa appointments and dinner reservations, some may have spared a glance at artwork that sprinkles the walls of the first and mezzanine floor-an interesting mix of modern art from the likes of Pablo Picasso to Indianapolis artist Lois Main Templeton. The collection of 18 pieces was selected under an agreement between the hotel and…

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Australian-born luxury ‘healing’ spa opens in Conrad: Spa Chakra touts healthy benefits of its treatments

A world-renowned, high-end luxury spa that originated in Australia and partners with a Parisian skin-care and fragrance company has chosen Indianapolis for its second U.S. facility. Spa Chakra, which uses Guerlain SA products exclusively, opened in the new Conrad Indianapolis Hotel in May. There are 16 Spa Chakra locations worldwide, but only one other in the United States-in Portland, Ore. Locations are expected to open in Bal Harbour, Fla., later this year and in Washington, D.C., in 2007. The spa,…

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VIEWPOINT: Consumers should take charge of health

In an environment where we’re all being asked to pay a larger share of our own health care costs, it’s interesting to see how little time we spend thinking about major decisions that have an impact on our health. Like selecting a primary care physician or any medical specialist, for example. According to a recent Managed Care Weekly Digest survey, 67 percent of U.S. adults ages 18-64 said they spent eight hours or more researching an automobile purchase, yet only…

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Westview soldiers on amid health care explosion: Hospital fares well against larger, newer competition

A touch-screen directory, a grove of potted trees and a muffin-bearing kiosk greet visitors entering the six-story atrium at the new Clarian North Medical Center in Carmel. A much milder scene awaits people walking into Westview Hospital a few miles away, on the west side of Indianapolis. There, a lonely player piano spills soft tunes into a one-story lobby filled with clusters of chairs and pamphlets on volunteering. “Quiet! Healing in Progress” reads a nearby sign. Indiana’s lone osteopathic hospital…

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Williams Creek Consulting Inc.: Consultants engineer ‘green’ solutions After years of taking any work it could find, company specializes in stormwater issues

In development circles, the color green is often associated with money. But it has a different connotation for Indianapolis-based Williams Creek Consulting-an environmental one. Launched in 2002, the firm aims to help developers minimize disruptions to the natural features of a construction site, co-founder Neil Myers said. It specializes in strategies to manage stormwater runoff. “We improve a project by integrating the building into the natural environment,” Myers said. That means doing more than digging a series of retention ponds…

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PROFILE: RYAN MCCORMICK: Laughter proves best medicine for cancer survivor

PROFILE RYAN MCCORMICK Laughter proves best medicine for cancer survivor When local companies need hazardous materials removed, Ryan McCormick hopes they call Active Environmental Ser vices, an environmental services company based in College Park. McCormick, a part-time comic, has been the sales and marketing manager for the Indianapolis-based company about three months. But two years ago, McCormick faced his own personal hazard when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a form of cancer that attacks the body’s lymphatic system. He…

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Patient safety center steers clear of the blame game: New approach modeled after aviation industry

Indiana hospitals are drawing inspiration from the aviation industry for their latest push to reduce medical errors. The Indiana Patient Safety Center, which opened July 1, will foster a blamefree approach to reporting errors, much like the environment promoted by the Federal Aviation Administration. The result will be a culture that encourages system analysis to fix flaws that lead to an error, rather than one that merely heaps blame on the person who committed it, said Bob Morr, vice president…

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INVESTING: Time to ditch widely touted-but wrong-investing rules

We love a good conspiracy in America. The FBI just spent millions of dollars looking for Jimmy Hoffa again, and again came up empty. We’ll be talking about who killed JFK until our grandkids are gone. Today, I am going to start a new one, and when you read this you are going to want your finance professor’s head on a platter. There is a conspiracy to keep you from making money. I can’t pinpoint the exact beginning of the…

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