The East 106th Street and College Avenue roundabout includes a sculpture designed by Home Place residents. Red-tailed hawks are common neighborhood sights, and the railroad lantern represents a bygone interurban railroad. (IBJ photo/Chad Williams)
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Seven years after the Home Place neighborhood lost its long annexation battle with Carmel and was absorbed into the city, the community’s business district along College Avenue is set for a refresh that residents hope will leave it feeling like home.
The city of Carmel is working with Cincinnati-based urban designer Yard & Co. to draft a blueprint for the future of Home Place, a 193-year-old working-class neighborhood bounded by East 111th Street to the north, Westfield Boulevard to the east, Interstate 465 to the south and Pennsylvania Street to the west.
Home Place’s business district is centered at the intersection of East 106th Street and College Avenue, which residents describe as the heart of the community. The business district is home to a strip center that houses a Papa John’s Pizza restaurant and veterinary clinic, a convenience store and gas station, an auto repair shop and a handful of other shops. One of the community’s longest-running businesses, Rosie’s Gardens and Hughes Landscaping, is just south of the roundabout.
“A lot of residents have lived here a very long time,” said Robin Scobell, a 27-year Home Place resident. “They’re very passionate about it. It’s got the hometown feeling, although we’re a part of Carmel. Our little corner feels like its own little town within the city.”
Daniella Beltran, planning director for Yard & Co., said the firm spent a year talking with Home Place residents to gather feedback and understand what they want for their neighborhood’s future. Yard & Co., founded in 2018, worked with Carmel in 2020 to develop the city’s comprehensive plan.
The Home Place plan “is really trying to acknowledge and get everyone on the same page,” Beltran said. “As we think about decisions for what future street improvements look like, potential for new parks and public amenities, and privately led development, this plan is really a framework and a guide for how to fit those projects into Home Place and have it fit the context.”
The plan called “This is Home: Building Home Place’s 106th & College Business District” considers the construction of one- and two-story buildings, rather than the type of multistory mixed-use development Carmel has built in City Center, Midtown and the Arts & Design District.
“This is Home” provides ideas and context to what is called a sub-area plan. The city’s comprehensive plan calls for individual plans to be drafted for areas throughout the city, and Home Place—about 1 to 1-1/2 miles wide and deep—is one of the first.
“We talk a lot in the plan about Home Place being a village-scaled place, and there’s ways that you can bring commercial and retail and different types of housing in a way that fits into that sort of village,” Beltran said.
Home Place residents told IBJ they want their slice of Carmel to remain unique. They said Home Place remains an affordable location where families can get their start. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average household income in Home Place is $85,671; Carmel-wide, that figure is $134,602. More than half of the houses in Home Place were built in the 1950s and 1960s.
“I don’t want a copycat of what’s happening in downtown Carmel,” said Sherry Heston, president of the Greater Home Place Neighborhood Association and a 32-year resident. “I would like for it to stay a small-town feel.”
Setting the plan
The 92-page “This is Home” plan proposes both short- and long-term goals for Home Place.
Short-term goals, for the next three to five years, start with the establishment of a place-based organization called 106th & College Inc. that will implement many of the plan’s recommendations. The organization will have a five-person board, and it will be an affiliate of Main Street America, a Chicago-based nonprofit that focuses on preservation-based economic development in older and historic downtowns.
Other short-term goals include creating a tax-increment-financing district, launching a grant program to revitalize building facades, enhancing streetscapes, and developing retail cottages and food truck patios.
Plans for five to 10 years down the road might involve infill construction of one- and two-story buildings, enhancing the 106th Street Path that connects Carmel and Zionsville and intersects with the Monon Trail in Home Place, building a nature park, and determining a new use for the former Orchard Park Elementary School, which closed in 2021 and remains a painful loss for many in the community.
“I think the development is necessary and looked upon as bringing back some type of vibrancy and making the community thrive again versus just exist,” said Lindsay Fanning, who has lived in Home Place almost nine years. “And I think the infill development will help revitalize the business district itself, bringing in more businesses.”
The plan also calls for creating Home Place building standards that streamline development by providing pre-approved building plans that fit with the community’s vision.
“It sort of sets expectations and is a way to bring in local builders that are capable of doing these small-scale projects in a really nice way with community members and with city leadership,” Beltran said.
Carmel Director of Community Services Mike Hollibaugh said the plan offers a blueprint that can be used in other parts of the city to balance growth and protect single-family neighborhoods, which Mayor Sue Finkam’s administration has emphasized following a housing study launched last year.
“This is unique,” Hollibaugh said. “It’s the fact that Home Place had its own kind of organization and culture, which was a little bit different [from other areas of Clay Township annexed by Carmel].”
The history
A white sign painted with black letters and a red ribbon tells motorists driving south on College Avenue at East 11th Street into Home Place that they are entering a community founded in 1832—five years before Carmel was laid out as the town of Bethlehem.
Many of the community’s founding residents are buried west of 106th and College at Pleasant Grove Cemetery, established in 1837. Pleasant Grove was the community’s original name until 1914, when the Orin Jessup Land Co. purchased land in the area and renamed it Home Place, according to the Carmel Clay Historical Society.
What began with a log cabin built by a War of 1812 veteran named Isaac Sharp near the modern-day intersection of 106th and College is now a 1,017-acre neighborhood with nearly 6,500 residents and 3,300 housing units, according to The Polis Center at Indiana University Indianapolis.
Home Place was an unincorporated community in southern Hamilton County before it became part of Carmel following a contentious 14-year annexation fight.
Before the annexation, Heston said, Carmel and Home Place existed side-by-side. After children finished at Orchard Park Elementary School, they moved on to Carmel Middle School and graduated from Carmel High School.
“The relationship hasn’t always been a good one,” Heston said. “But we’ve always attempted to keep things civil.”
The long legal battle between Carmel and the residents of the small Clay Township community began in November 2004, when the Carmel City Council voted to annex Home Place.
Concerned Citizens for Home Place, or CCHP, formed to contest Carmel’s annexation plan and sued in 2005 to stop it. A majority of the households in Home Place opposed the annexation, and later that year, a judge ruled in the residents’ favor, saying Carmel did not prove it could financially afford to annex the area.
In 2007, the Indiana Court of Appeals reversed that decision. The Indiana Supreme Court declined to hear the case and sent it back to the trial court for review. Both parties agreed to postpone proceedings until the end of 2015, and the case returned to court in May 2016.
A special judge ruled that Home Place residents did not prove all the elements necessary to prevent the annexation. Residents appealed that decision, but the appellate court affirmed the ruling in October 2017.
A month later, Home Place residents gave up the fight. The annexation went into effect March 1, 2018, and all residents began receiving Carmel city services by March 2019.
The Home Place annexation was Carmel’s 57th and final during former Mayor Jim Brainard’s tenure, from 1996 to 2023.
After the battle
Since the annexation, Carmel has extended trash, sewer and water services into Home Place, improved roadways and other infrastructure, and built its signature roundabouts throughout the neighborhood.
“They have such a history, and the character is a little bit different than other places in Carmel,” Carmel Planning Administrator Adrienne Keeling said. “As the infrastructure improvements have gone into play along College Avenue and other things that the city has invested in, we felt like we wanted to get ahead of those investments and set the vision for Home Place and keep the vision going and keep people involved.”
The roundabout at 106th and College is one of 155 in Carmel, but Home Place residents wanted to make it uniquely theirs.
Unlike other areas of Carmel where city officials and a public art committee determine the artwork that adorns roundabouts, Home Place residents took the lead in designing the art for theirs. Heston imagined the idea of a sculpture with a red-tailed hawk facing south on top of a railroad lantern. Red-tailed hawks are among the wildlife in Home Place, while the lantern is a reminder of the interurban railroad that once passed through the community.
The $266,000 sculpture created by artist Ryan Feeney of Indy Art Forge was funded by $100,000 from Carmel Clay Parks & Recreation, $100,000 from Clay Township and $66,000 through fundraising by the Greater Home Place Neighborhood Association. A dedication ceremony for the sculpture was held at a May 3 block party.
“It has meant 3-1/2 years of hard work, determination, but also a culmination of past, present and future,” Heston said. “It’s paying homage to our history in addition to our present and then knowing that this will be there long after I’m gone, so it’s been an emotional journey.”
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