How Indianapolis Built America and How it will Rebuild it with the National Bicycle Greenway

By Martin Krieg

This book endeavors to change the nation’s perception of Indianapolis as being a place filled with speeding automobiles. I will be using the words ahead to show why I moved here from San Francisco as a way to make the National Bicycle Greenway real. You see, in the last twenty years, because of its internationally renowned Greenway system that is fed by its globally celebrated, downtown Cultural Trail, the only one of its kind in the world, Indianapolis now offers the most bike friendly business district in America!

Soon, you will see how, in coming full circle back to being a top place for cyclists, it was the bicycle, its clubs, racers and industry captains that helped make Indianapolis the world’s original leader in the early years of gasoline powered transport. You will also learn how one dynamic man, Carl Fisher, used his successes in the universe of pedal power to make the car the ruler king it then went on to become.

This book will show you how the transportation innovations Indianapolis brings about continue to affect the face of the Nation. From the nearby Lewis and Clark starting point, to Fisher filling the region with first HiWheel then conventional bicycles, to its revolutionizing train travel with implementing the first union train station in the world, to one of its companies making chain affordable enough that bicycles could be sized down to where they could be stood over, to another one of its businesses (run by Fisher) making it affordable to drive a car past sundown, to it bringing about the first car highway to connect the coasts (led by Fisher), Indianapolis has always stood at the forefront of how we as an American people move about.

In laying a foundation for showing you how it was the actions that took place in Indianapolis that brought about the America we now know, I will use the beginning of this book to take you through the timeline of a short history of long distance travel in America. It also won’t be long in the first chapter, before I also tell you about what was needed before cars could even exist to then enjoy the roads that would bring the Western frontier into the 20th century. Building on this, in the next chapter, you will see the part one still flourishing Indianapolis company, Diamond Chain, played in making a part that most all machines, whether powered by humans or by motors, need even today.

As the Crossroads of America where half of the nation is now within an 8-hour car drive, this book will show how it was Fisher who gave purpose to long distance driving. You will see how he got Americans everywhere to help him build the first road across an entire continent. The Lincoln Highway, originated in, and developed from Indianapolis, was the first arterial to travel from the Eastern Seaboard to the Pacific Ocean.

We will also see how Mr. Greenway, Ray Irvin, led the charge that transformed the Rust Belt City Indianapolis had gone on to become into its now being known as the Greenway Capital of America. As an extension of Irvin’s work, the 10 mile Indianapolis Cultural Trail is what we will be keying off of as we endeavor to connect the coasts for cyclists.

By the time you have finished this book, you will understand why I need to be here so I can relaunch the National Bicycle Greenway from where Greenways are a known and valued commodity. In daily using and learning about the Cultural Trail, I look forward to locals helping me devise a formula that establishes Downtown Greenways in all 19 of our other NBG Anchor cities that connect San Francisco to Washington, DC. With such a template in place, the NBG can help cities show themselves off as they attract bicycle visitors from all over the nation and world. It will be this new tourist economy that will inspire bikeways to and from these population centers as they also use them to connect to one another with the result, in time, of what we have long foreseen, the National Bicycle Greenway!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Krieg
• Release date: Feb 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463095560

Martin Krieg

I am Martin Krieg, a business school graduate of Cal State Hayward and former accountant. I have crossed the country twice on a bicycle after first rehabilitating myself from paralysis, clinical death and a seven-week coma as a result of a car wreck.In 1979, I rode across America on a standard upright bicycle. On my second trip across America in 1986 I rode a recumbent bike and organized media events, public speaking and fund raising for the National Head Injury Foundation. That ride reached 40 million people amongst my newspaper, public speaking and TV and radio appearances. Upon its completion, to spread the word for the interconnected network of safely bikeable roads and paths I envision called the National Bicycle Greenway (NBG - it became a nonprofit in 1993), from 1987 to 1994, I published 60,000 Cycle America Regional Directories in four different parts of California.In 1994, WRS Publishing published the book about the experiences described above. Building the National Bicycle Greenway into the story line, I had written and rewritten it for 14 years. Called "Awake Again, All the Way back from Head Injury", it gives credibility to my vision and opens lots of doors for me.Once “Awake Again” became an attractive hardback book, complete with pictures, I alternated between traveling the country to promote it and learning the excitement of the all new World Wide Web. During this time, I built the first web sites for well over a hundred small and large bike companies. In 1997, from Santa Cruz, CA, I began a campaign to send hundreds of cyclists to Washington, DC, all of which ended with a widely known bike celebration called Cycle America 2000. We brought that excitement back to the West Coast with two large cross-country relay rides both of which ended in the Surf City with huge festivals attended by thousands of people. During this time, I also personally inspired, coached and consulted on over a dozen other successful transcontinental bikes rides.From Palo Alto, CA, we kept producing our annual National Mayors' Rides and in 2003, we began the Mountain Movers Podcast series. In addition, I also finished “How to Bike America”, kept working on a business plan for the NBG, and poured hours of research and writing into what amounts to the sequel to "Awake Again' called “How America can Bike and Grow Rich, The National Bicycle Greenway in Action” (HBGR).I took the 2007 Mayors' Ride season off to devise a fully interactive Google mapping system that ran like a game while building community to let users calculate, request, plan, utilize, store, display and vote on bike routes. I did this all toward the end of showing how, in our increasingly crowded world, the internet can now make the bicycle the superior way to move one's self about. My internet service provider, which was based in India, however, scrambled all of our files and lost hundreds of maps people had input to our system.Refusing to surrender to adversity, in the summer of 2009, in an attempt to call attention to the NBG, in what became a test run because of all the horrific weather (the deserts were water logged), I rode the Eagle HiWheel (http://bikeroute.com/NationalBicycleGreenwayNews/2013/02/23/chapter-excerpt-why-i-ride-an-eagle) the only one like it in active use in the world, from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. In 2010, my Mayors' Ride/Author Tour on the amazing Eagle was put on hold by a car that ruined my bike when it turned left in front of us.At which point I moved to Ireland, married my wife Virginia, had Baby Cayo, finished HBGR and studied Europe's top Greenway system, the Great Western Greenway (GWG). The GWG was made possible by a joint partnership between the National Tourist Bureau and 14 other public and private stakeholders as led by the Irish National Road Authority.Forced out of the mapping game when Google started mapping bike routes, in merging their bike travelways with the work of our NBG Scouts, in 2014 we put our full-featured coast-to-coast map on the main page at BikeRoute.com. In the summer of 2015, I returned to America, sans Cayo and Virginia, for our CA Mayors' Rides and landed in what used to be America's top bike city, Davis, CA. After a year of learning the local lay of the land in this small city of 65,000 people (when you don't include its 30,000 students), we determined to make Davis the new home of the National Bicycle Greenway. Toward that end, in early 2016, we began working to create our first Davis NBG Fest. A worthy success, it was held on October 22.In the build up to our event, Sinead Santich, made me one of the stars in her excellent UC Davis sponsored video about the two-wheel way of life there - https://vimeo.com/158869106.From Davis, CA, I also worked to celebrate the 20 cities that serve as waypoints to anchor our route from San Francisco to Washington, DC at http://bikeroute.com/SF-DCNBGAnchorCities.php. Some of this work included Virtual Tours that show cyclists where to ride, eat, shop, recreate and sightsee. Here, for example, from the massive Harrahs Casino and Resort, is what we did for Reno, NV - http://bikeroute.com/NationalBicycleGreenwayNews/category/Reno .The most recent news feature about myself and the NBG appeared in a beautiful 2 minute video that Sacramento based ABC-10 got on to the air waves on Nov 3, 2016 per this link http://www.abc10.com/mb/news/local/davis/big-story-behind-the-big-wheel/346584864In October of 2017, I landed in Indianapolis, a city with the bike friendliest downtown in America. You can see why this was an easy decision to make here - http://bikeroute.com/NationalBicycleGreenwayNews/2018/01/30/why-has-the-nbg-moved-to-indianapolisOn Feb 11, 2019 my new book "How Indianapolis Built America and How it will Rebuild it with the National Bicycle Greenway" publishes. You can see ii here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/917460It is not how many times you get knocked down that countbut how times you get back up.George Armstrong CusterTHX 4 all of U!!

Book preview

cover-image, Manuscript EPUB HIBA E-book WORD 7-2-20

How Indianapolis Built America and

How it will Rebuild it with the National Bicycle Greenway

By Martin Krieg 

Copyright 2019 Martin Krieg

Smashwords Edition

Revised Edition Nov 2022, Oct 2023

Table of Contents

Foreword - Greenways, a part of the Indianapolis economy and mindset

Chapter 1   About Indianapolis - the Greenway Capitol of the World

Chapter 2   Why Indianapolis is the True Gateway to the West, not St. Louis

Chapter 3   The Gateway to the West, Indianapolis Riverfront at National Road

Chapter 4   Manifest Destiny and Taming the Western Frontier

Chapter 5   Indianapolis, Birthplace of the Automobile

Chapter 6   Diamond Chain, Industrial Revolution leader

Chapter 7   Carl Fisher, From Bicycle Leader to King of the Automobile Age

Chapter 8 Lincoln Highway, First Coast-to-Coast Highway, Born in Indy

Appendix

Why the Lincoln Highway Bypassed Indianapolis

The Gateway to the West , Indianapolis Riverfront Timeline

Coast-to-Coast Transportation History Timeline

Indianapolis - Trend Setter for the Nation

Epilogue

Foreword

At the end of the 19th century, Indianapolis was one of  America's richest cities.

The late eighties and the nineties, and the early years of the new century, were the best years, and Indianapolis the best place. Here were the fine restaurants, the celebrated bars; here were the brawl and bustle of commerce and industry; here were the magnificent buildings constructed with little regard to cost; here were fashionable ladies and gentlemen some of them famous everywhere, riding around  the circle in handsome carriages; here were literature, music, and art,  and here sin beckoned from a narrow door way; in short, here was a farm boy’s new and shiny dream world

Indiana historian, John Barlow Martin,

in Indiana, an Interpretation

Industry boomed as Indianapolis took advantage of the burgeoning oil and gas fields nearby, in the northeastern part of the state, Filled with industrialists, philanthropists and many people with large sums of discretionary dollars to spend, it was able to afford the extravagance of world famous landscape developers John Olmsted  and George Kessler.

Toward that end, as far back as 1885  John C. Olmsted, the son of also acclaimed landscape developer, Frederick Law Olmsted, began to plan for parkways along the city's rivers and streams. None of it broke ground, however, until George Kessler was hired by the city in 1908. He overcame the resistance Olmsted had met by establishing separate taxing districts so that only those people who benefited from park upgrades would pay for them.

A warrior for city parks and open spaces, Kessler who stayed with Indianapolis for seven years, transformed population centers all over America. Over the course of his forty-one year career, George E. Kessler completed over 200 projects and prepared plans for 26 communities, 26 park and boulevard systems, 49 parks, 46 estates and residences, and 26 schools.

In adding to what Olmsted had designed, he commissioned for wide  tree lined boulevards along Indy’s waterways. This, as he also left his imprint on its world class parks such as the mammoth Garfield, and Riverside city parks as well as Benjamin Harrison State Park.

It was this that Ray R Irvin capitalized on when he wrote the Indy Greenways plan in the mid 1980s.  In helping Indianapolis move away from a manufacturing economy to a post industrial economy, much of Irvin's work was inspired by Richard Florida, an author, professor and urban studies theorist. Florida argued that the economic engine needed by American cities that were rebuilding themselves was what he called the Creative Class.

Florida described the Creative Class as people working in knowledge intensive industries, those usually requiring a high degree of formal education. Examples of such workers are health professionals, business managers and those working in high tech. He felt that by attracting the Creative Class, their industries would stimulate economic growth.

Since Florida felt that the Creative Class chose to locate themselves in cities in favorable quality of life environments with cultural amenities, Irvin felt he could make Indianapolis attractive in such a way with linear art parks. He felt he could combine exercise, nature and art into a network of bike paths that could be built for a fraction of the cost car roads required. It was this understanding that he built into Indy Greenways, the roadmap he devised for the massive transformation that has taken place in Indianapolis.

Being a former politician, Ray was in line to become the Mayor of the City when he chose to build the Greenway plan he felt called to devise instead. Armed with a deep understanding of city bureaucracy, he also knew he had to position the plan he would draw up in such a way that it would take maximum advantage of all of the opportunity in Indy city planning architecture. For example, because of Ray, Greenway alignments are also part of the permitting process in Indianapolis, any future road building has to take them into account.

To keep it funded, growing and maintained, Irvin also called for the building of the very active nonprofit, the Greenway Foundation of Indianapolis. Soon, infected by the desire to build Greenways for themselves, other parts of the state found themselves needing a way to be able to receive donations. As a result, the name of Irvin's charitable organization was changed to the Greenway Foundation of Indiana.

Because it was one of his markets of users, he also knew he had to tap into the city’s large network of higher education learning centers as we describe in more depth below . To garner their interest for the trails he would build to and through them, he engaged their support by having whole classes study the effect of Greenways in various parts of the city. It was their work, that resulted in quantifiable results he could use to accrue funding for the work he foresaw throughout Indianapolis.

It was an honor to finish the work Olmsted and Kessler started, and even though I saw the unfinished opportunity, it took Indy to realize the unfinished need of their work, I worked to take my vision and instill it in so many others, so they might join the effort and insure its future for another 100 years for Indy’s residents and nature lovers.

Thanks to everyone that joined the vision.

Ray R Irvin

Being at the leading edge of transportation is not new to Indianapolis. It seems to be a part of its DNA. In fact before it started interconnecting to its parks, open spaces and play areas, the call to go West, the Manifest Destiny that we talk about in ‘Manifest Destiny and Taming the Western Frontier’, had been heard loud and clear from as far back as 1834 by its citizenry. It was then that the Nation’s first Federal Highway, the National Road from Washington DC. successfully crossed the White River into the frontier where the forests were so thick a horse could not haul a wagon through them.

Soon, once roads were cleared, the National Road wood covered bridge was busy bringing riches to and from the new lands it had accessed. A heavily traveled structure as we will show you in the words ahead, it was also busy building an Indianapolis that sprung up around the riverfront we talk about in ‘The Gateway to the West, Indianapolis Riverfront at National Road’. Because it was dismantled in 1902, it was easy for St. Louis to get credit for opening up the West. And yet, as we will show you in the words ahead, along with it also sending most of the East Coast to California from its cutting edge train station, Indianapolis was the true Portal to the West

In fact, before 1834, once one left Indianapolis, civilization ceased to exist. There was nothing but thickly forested lands for the next 250 or so miles until one crossed the Mississippi River. There, on the other side, early explorers encountered  the tiny island like village of St. Louis where Americans were not welcome and the 1,000 or so  inhabitants only spoke Spanish.

When you read the chapter ‘Why Indianapolis is the True Gateway to the West, not St. Louis’, you will understand why we are making this claim. You will also see why this knowledge will cause interest in Indianapolis to skyrocket, thereby enabling it to show its bicycle infrastructure and the attitude it induces to a larger percentage of the nation. This is especially so because, as the Crossroads of America, Indianapolis is the most centrally located big city in the USA.

In terms of how Greenway building changes the way people think about its users, do consider the following. In Indianapolis, greenway building is taken seriously. As new trails are added almost regularly, and others are upgraded and maintained, it has been and continues to be the source of a livelihood for many people.  From landscape designers to construction crews, to pavers, to sign makers, to heavy equipment operators, to landscape maintenance, etc., a lot of money changes hands to build and maintain Greenways.

Seen as a product of their nonstop greenway building and maintenance efforts, all levels of cyclists are taken seriously here. They are not seen as engaging in frivolous play. It is their efforts that justify the work that has gone into building and maintaining the infrastructure they use.

Nor are Greenways the only consideration here. The city’s public works department gives great attention to its surface streets as they relate to their access to Greenways.

And when merchants and dining establishments benefit from those customers who arrive by bike, they join employers who receive growing numbers of workers who pedal their way in, to make the circle complete. And being interwoven into the local economy in such a way, this is one more way cyclists are seen as a welcome part of the Indianapolis landscape.

Add to this the fact that everyone has a friend or a friend of a friend who rides a bike here. And whether or not they ride themselves, they know to be mindful of those who do.

As circumstances, the planet’s health and energy disruptions, continue to push people towards the bicycle, it will be the Indianapolis mindset that will have infected their neighbors and neighboring states all the way across the rest of America. As Indianapolis shows that everyone wins by making it easier to ride a bike, the National Bicycle Greenway renaissance will be soon at hand!!

You will find parts of this foreword repeated in other parts of this book as a way to keep bringing you, the reader, back to the theme of this publication. The biggest reason I have written this book is to show that Indy's deep history with Greenways has set a precedent and a momentum for the charge that will connect the coasts with a network of Greenways, the National Bicycle Greenway.

About Indianapolis - Greenway Capitol of World

Always a Leader

-  Gateway to the West with its National Road wood covered bridge to the frontier where Forest or so thick a horse could not pull a cart through them, beg. 1834

-  First train station in the world to act as a Hub for all train lines, beg. 1852

-  Known as the Railroad City of the West, its train station connected the East to Chicago and the transcontinental railroad on their way to San Francisco with as many as 200 trains a day

-  Invented Meat Locker refrigeration, George Stockman at Kingan Pork (now White River State Park), 1868

-  Before refrigerated rail cars shipped beef at the end of the 19th Century, Indianapolis dictated what Americans ate by being this country’s largest pork (which could be preserved by salt) producer and shipper

-  Parry Manufacturing Co - world’s largest cart, wagon and carriage making plant, 1886

-  Stronghold for some of America’s very first HiWheel bicycles

-  Gave its many bicycle clubs (about 100) a prominent voice in road use policy (by 1890, there were over 105,000 people in Indianapolis)

-  Home to Diamond Chain, one of the leaders of the Industrial Revolution. Diamond made equal sized wheel bicycles and automobiles affordable for the masses. In making it possible for machines to do more than spin, they also made the assembly line possible as well as