HIDDEN ETHNIC HERITAGE

The city's changing face

Waves of newcomers have put their stamp on a community in which their influence sometimes remains under wraps.

By John Fritze and Scott MacGregor

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June 30, 2002

They have come in three waves, seeking the age-old promise of a better life -- first Europeans, then blacks, now Hispanics.

Together, they melded to form the Indianapolis we know, settling in their own neighborhoods, then fanning out, assimilating into the larger culture.

Germans dancing in the social clubs of Germantown. Irish railroaders cramped into the rough streets of Irish Hill. Slovenian Catholics praying in Haughville. Blacks singing blue notes on Indiana Avenue.

Yet the influence of so many immigrants, so many different cultures, is not often visible here. For more than 100 years, Indianapolis has viewed itself as an all-American, all-Hoosier city, with little of the "foreign element" that so indelibly colored other cities.

Ethnic neighborhoods gave way to suburban sprawl. Cultural heritage was often wrapped in red, white and blue patriotism -- or, worse, veiled by hatred and the grip of the Ku Klux Klan.

"We've always been ethnic, but it's hidden," said Susan McKee, president of the Nationalities Council of Indiana. "It's the Klan legacy. People would hide, and they'd fit into the larger culture."

But look harder and see the hidden heritage.

From a German descendant whose ancestors helped build the city to a black retiree who felt the sting of segregation to a new immigrant from El Salvador, modern Indianapolis is a rainbow of ancestries whose cultures remain alive, if sometimes obscured.

"People feel their heritage, whether it's real or mythical or created for present-day purposes," Indiana University history Professor Jim Madison said. "In some ways, it's the closest thing we have to history."

Arrivals from Europe

Picture a warm summer night at Athenaeum: the beer is flowing, the music festive, the Biergarten packed.

The image is a little different today than a century ago, but the focus is the same: the Athenaeum as a social gathering place.

"This is a treasure," said Jim Gould, community events director for the 108-year-old building. "It's being used for the same things now as it was when it was built."

It's also one of the last vestiges of Indianapolis' once-thriving German community.

Tens of thousands of European immigrants-- Germans, Irish, Slovenians, Poles, Scots -- helped settle in Indianapolis in its first decades.

The Irish, who first came to work on the railroads and National Road, were among the city's earliest residents, settling on the Eastside and in Fountain Square. They left a particularly strong mark; 11 percent of Marion County residents still count Irish among their ancestry.

But it was the Germans -- many fleeing political and religious turmoil -- who came in the largest numbers, settling in Germantown (now Lockerbie) and on the Southside. German-American is still Marion County's predominant European ancestry, at 17 percent of the total population.

In 1880, half of Indianapolis' foreign-born residents were German, according to the book "The Germans in Indianapolis," by Eberhard Reichmann. The city had six newspapers, four printed in German.

The Athenaeum -- called Das Deutsche Haus until World War I -- was the centerpiece of Germantown.

German contributions were far-reaching. Germans designed the Indiana Statehouse, City Market, the Murat Temple and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Many of the city's boulevards and parks were laid out by a German named George Edward Kessler, and Germans dominated the city's music and arts.

Gould is a modern link to those days. His great-great-grandfather, William Haueisen, emigrated to Indiana from Germany in 1850 and was a founder of Das Deutsche Haus.

Gould can't speak German. But his heritage is still important.

"You still have certain traditions that have been passed down," Gould said. "I'm still interested in Christmas traditions -- the ornaments, the Christmas tree with candles. My aunt still cooks German Christmas cookies.

"But times change, and each generation becomes more American."

Indianapolis was never a friendly place for foreigners, especially in the early 20th century.

Still, Germans remained a strong influence until World War I, Reichmann said. Then American patriotism and anti-German fervor swept them into virtual oblivion.

By the 1920s, anti-immigrant fever had reached a virulent pitch, and the Klan was the most powerful machine in the state; Indiana was proud to be the purest state in the union, with 95 percent of its population native-born and 97 percent white, historians say.

But what Hoosiers didn't get, said local German historian Ruth Reichmann, was that white Indiana culture was "foreign" culture: the food, the music, the architecture, the conservative politics, were influenced mostly by Germans and Irish.

"We don't pay much attention now," she said, "because now it's a part of Hoosier."

Harbor for blacks

Tom Ridley walks along Indiana Avenue in his mind, listening to an early Duke Ellington tune and smelling the movie theater's popcorn as it wafts through his memory.

The year is 1933 and Ridley is 10 -- old enough to help his brother deliver ice and coal to neighborhood residents, old enough to understand that there were places in town you just didn't go.

At least not if you were black.

"Now, I never had any problems," said Ridley, who still lives just off the avenue, in a pocket of houses south of 10th Street. "But there were certain sections of town that were pretty rough."

Blacks have lived in Marion County as long as whites, but the great black migrations that followed the Civil War changed the city's demography and cultural heritage.

Indiana Avenue was a harbor, where blacks owned theaters and restaurants and newspapers, where they staffed the police station and where a woman named Madam C.J. Walker, born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation, built the hair care business that would help make her a millionaire.

In 1900, less than 3 percent of the population along the 800 and 900 blocks of Indiana Avenue was black, according to census data from that time. By 1940, they accounted for nearly 100 percent of residents.

Today, they make up about 25 percent of Marion County's population.

Like the settlers before them, they followed the promise of a better life along the railroad tracks and waterways that ran through the Midwest.

Richard Woodard's grandfather stopped in roughly 1912 and got an $18-a-week job as a city trash collector.

Growing up on the avenue, Woodard recalled, was less glamorous than some history books portray. He remembers the outdoor toilets, ramshackle houses and the rats.

"You had rats so bold that they'd come up and eat your popcorn," he said as he curled into a ball on his chair to show how he would sit in the movie theaters.

"It was fine because we didn't know anything else. We didn't have anything to compare it to."

Woodard, 73, is retired but works as a security guard at the Walker Building, one of the last standing structures from the avenue's heyday. By the 1950s, local segregation was easing, and blacks began to move off the avenue and into homes farther north.

The Walker Building remains at the foot of the avenue. A new musical celebrating Motown music is wrapping up on the stage of the Madame Walker Theatre.

Woodard doesn't like to tell young blacks today about life back then, not the bad parts.

"It would make them infuriated if they had known what we went through. And I don't think they would have stood for it."

Oscar Hernandez left San Salvador as a professor, an engineer and a father. He arrived in Indianapolis unemployed, alone.

He doesn't speak English. He doesn't have much money. But he doesn't often worry about himself; he worries about his wife and daughters in Central America.

"I miss my family," Hernandez, 40, said through a translator. "The big difference here is that I'm not close to them."

The pace of Hispanic immigration is so fast that some think the census count, only 2 years old, is already out of date. According to the data, 33,290 Hispanics, mostly Mexicans, live in Marion County, up 294 percent since 1990.

Hispanics aren't the only immigrants still arriving here, but they are one of the fastest growing population in the city, state and country.

Most have come to Indiana in search of work, and many have found it.

Most choose to live together in pockets within the city, leaving marks as distinct as the sight of pinatas hanging in a grocery store.

Along West Washington Street, in a neighborhood some now call Little Mexico, signs carry advertisements in Spanish.

Bakeries and sweet shops and restaurants line the streets with the inviting smell of tamales and hot bolillos.

One man sells prepaid international phone cards to Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras so recent immigrants can call home.

Hernandez came to Indiana following a series of earthquakes in El Salvador that shattered the national university, his former employer, and then crushed the local economy. Because of his education, he found work at a local chemical company.

He is also teaching again -- a GED class for other Hispanics.

On nice days, male students miss class because they must continue their construction or landscaping work into the evening.

"I want to help people to prepare themselves so they can have a better life," Hernandez said.

Hispanic migration is just as fractured as European immigration was decades ago.

Most, but not all, of the immigrants come from Mexico. Some can afford to live in large suburban homes, but most cannot.

Some come here legally.

Others get "chuecos," or crooked papers. Some don't get papers at all.

"It is tough," said the Rev. David Penalva of the United Methodist Church on West Washington Street. But, he added: "They get used to it. They know their situation."

Penalva arrived 16 years ago, before the gas company, the bus company and the city employed Spanish speakers.

When he took over at the church last year, only a handful of people turned up on Sundays. Now, with services in Spanish, attendance nears 100.

"It's easier to move around," Penalva said, comparing the current Indianapolis with how it was when he arrived. "Before you had to go to Chicago to buy ethnic food."

But the idea that enduring the cultural differences isn't worth it, or that most Hispanics plan to move back to their native country as soon as possible, is a myth, said Marco Dominguez, a Venezuelan-American who is the executive producer at WTBU (Channel 69).

More and more, Indianapolis is becoming a part of their new identity. In turn, they are enriching a new homeland.

"We miss the food. We miss the family. We miss the beaches that are there," Dominguez said. "But this is home.

"This is home."