Ransom Place

A block north of Indiana Avenue, tucked between the near-west side and the downtown that erased so much around it, a small cluster of Victorian houses survived. The neighborhood is called Ransom Place, and it is the most intact fragment of nineteenth-century African American Indianapolis still standing.

The first Black residents settled the area in the eighteen thirties, free African Americans and former slaves moving north looking for a place to build something. The neighborhood developed through the eighteen eighties and nineties alongside Indiana Avenue's commercial growth, and the houses that remain are modest Italianate and Queen Anne vernacular cottages, the kind that working families of modest means built when they had enough saved.

It was named for Freeman Briley Ransom, who moved to Indianapolis in nineteen ten and became the corporate attorney and general manager of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. Ransom lived at eight twenty-eight North California Street, one block from his colleagues. He was a businessman, lawyer, and civic leader who spent nearly three decades holding the Walker enterprise together after Madam Walker's death. The neighborhood took his name officially in the early nineteen nineties, when a community activist named Jean Spears moved into the block and began the work of preservation.

The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-two. By then it was already surrounded by absence. The urban renewal projects of the fifties, sixties, and seventies had removed nearly everything else that once bounded it. Ransom Place endured partly by accident and partly because the residents who remained understood what it was.

It is a small block in a large city. It holds what the city's other neighborhoods of comparable age did not keep.