Indianapolis: The Capital That Was Designed

In eighteen twenty-one, the Indiana legislature hired a surveyor named Alexander Ralston to lay out the new state capital on a flat stretch of land at the center of the state. Ralston had worked as an assistant to Pierre Charles L'Enfant during the design of Washington, D.C. He brought what he had learned to Indiana.

The result is a city whose central geometry still confounds GPS navigation. At the center sits Monument Circle, a radial hub from which diagonal avenues project outward through the standard grid, exactly as L'Enfant's Washington had its broad diagonal boulevards cutting across the rectangular street plan. The diagonals create triangular intersections, odd sightlines, and a legibility at the center that most Midwestern grid cities lack. When you stand at Monument Circle, you can see clearly across the city in multiple directions at once.

Ralston was paid three dollars a day for his survey work. The Indiana legislature kept his plan. The Soldiers and Sailors Monument that now rises at the center of Monument Circle was completed in nineteen oh two, eighty-one years after Ralston drew the circle it stands in. The monument is two hundred eighty-four feet tall, about fifteen feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty from base to torch. You can take an elevator to a viewing platform near the top.

The geometry Ralston laid out is still the geometry of downtown Indianapolis. Two surveyors, two capitals, one idea.