I wrote about the forlorn, mostly vacant Washington Square Mall back in April, and my verdict wasn’t pretty. Since then, though, a months-long effort to imagine a future for the property has reached its first major milestone. Monday evening, planners unveiled an ambitious vision for the property’s future. Could one of Indiana’s most troubled malls actually have one of those?
Continue reading “Can Washington Square Mall be fixed?”
Soon after I wrote about the hidden remains of Holiday Inn’s old Great Sign in New Castle, reader decotriumph reminded me that the H&K Motel in Anderson was another old Holiday Inn. I used to pass it every day on the way to work and was aware of its provenance, but I’d never paid attention to the sign out front. D’oh! It, too, is another heavily-modified Great Sign.
Continue reading “More remnants of another Holiday Inn “Great Sign””
The ’80s progressive rock supergroup Asia is back with its first new single in twelve years as the band’s fourteenth studio album comes due this November. As the world’s foremost simultaneous amateur Indiana historian and Asia musicologist, I couldn’t let that news pass without mentioning it here!
Continue reading “The best surprise of 2026 is a new Asia single and album”
I’ve spent fifteen years trying to find a photograph of Mt. Pleasant Township’s long-lost Sycamore School in Delaware County. That’s nearly forty percent of my life! Somewhere along the way, the building became my white whale; the one local landmark I was convinced had vanished without leaving so much as a single image behind. Then yesterday, while researching something completely unrelated, I stumbled across one by accident. The school looked nothing like I’d imagined.
Continue reading “I FINALLY found a photo of Delaware County’s old Sycamore school!”
Muncie Mall is coming down. The three-screen cinema is already gone, reduced to a bare concrete pad. Outside the old Sears Auto Center, a mountain of broken concrete hints that the interior of the 129,000-square-foot department store1 has already been gutted. Now, all signs point to JCPenney as the next casualty.
Continue reading “Muncie’s JCPenney waits for the wrecking ball”
When most people think of Muncie, they probably don’t. Still, public art is on wide display here, with works by Daniel Chester French, Cyrus Dallin, and E.M. Viquesney. My favorites are the creations of Richard Kishel. One of his most striking pieces wraps around two sides of the Delaware Dental Solutions building on West Washington Street.
Continue reading “The fantastic art on a downtown Muncie dental office”
Not that long ago, I wrote about exploring Gas City’s magnificent 1924 gym with my friend Brett Yoder of Hoosier Gym Journey. Reaching it meant walking through the connected old high school, and I realized that it was every bit as fascinating as the gym. Converted into senior apartments twenty-two years ago, an astonishing number of its original architectural details have been preserved! The old school deserved a closer look.
Continue reading “Inside Gas City’s 1893 high school”
Krackel vs. Crunch. On paper, this brawl couldn’t be much fairer. Both are simple candy bars built around the same basic idea: milk chocolate packed with crisped rice. No layers of caramel, peanuts, nougat, or wafers muddy the waters! Still, despite sharing nearly identical ingredients and debuting the very same year, these two bars have followed remarkably different paths. One became a candy aisle icon. The other was relegated to the bottom of a a multi-pack. That raises an obvious question: which one got the formula right?
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The interurban electric railway hasn’t carried passengers through central Indiana for more than eighty years. If you slow down, though, traces of it still hide in plain sight. One of the most prominent survivors is Hartford City’s old traction station at the southeast corner of South Jefferson and East Water Streets.
Continue reading “The old Union Traction station in Hartford City”
I was browsing a used bookstore in Anderson’s Southdale Plaza when I realized I was only a couple of doors away from a flea market in a former Marsh Supermarket. That was all the excuse I needed to take a look! I went in curious to see whether any evidence of the building’s grocery-store past still lingered beneath the flea market shelves. Here’s a look at what remains, along with the story behind the building.
Continue reading “Traces of Marsh inside Anderson’s Southdale Plaza”