Is There a Plan for Eleven Park?

Last month, the City of Indianapolis, specifically the Department of Public Works, publicly made available their "Archaeological Investigation Workplan for a Portion of Greenlawn Cemetery (CR-49-6) Henry Street Bridge Project" (The Plan) prepared by Stantec for the White River Infrastructure Development project at the Henry Street Bridge. The Plan highlights what they are going to do for the excavation of the ground where the bridge and the connecting Henry Street runs through the southern portion of what used to be the Greenlawn Cemetery. The same cemetery that has shut down the construction of Eleven Park. The Mayor’s attempt to bring MLS to Indianapolis, his still-unknown ownership group, and the takeover of the PSDA location (from the site owned by Ersal, Keystone, and Indy Eleven to the area surrounding the downtown Heliport) exacerbated that shutdown, but it feels from an external perspective like nothing is being done for Eleven Park. Once the PSDA made it's way through the government channels, has anybody heard anything about what the club intends to do?

Keystone and Indy Eleven haven’t issued any new information on their plan in months. Unlike my last article about Eleven Park and the Henry Street Bridge where I didn't reach out to the team, I did reach out to them for this article. What they said was, "Once we have a further update on the new stadium and Eleven Park, we will share accordingly." What I heard was, "when we want you to know something, you'll hear about it in an article from the IBJ." Which a long history of dealing with the team on items of this magnitude has proven to me will always be the case. 

But I digress...

Periodically since the time of the Mayor's announcement, I drive by the Eleven Park site. Every time I do so, the site has progressed further and further away from any kind of construction activity. At first, there was a construction trailer and some equipment sitting there unused. Then the equipment disappeared. After that the construction trailer was removed from the site. The large piles of fill dirt have remained, likely because Keystone would have to bring back the equipment to haul it somewhere else. However, he last time I drove by, some of the construction fencing and the Eleven Park fence banners had been allowed to fall down. Once the equipment and trailer were removed, it looks, again externally, like the site is just being left to rot and return itself back to nature. Any kind of site security has been neglected, seemingly with the knowledge that there's nothing there to take, except for some dirt, new weeds, and if anyone else were so inclined, a high probability of human remains. 

Photo: Indianapolis City-Council Council X post

Conversely, the construction for the Henry Street Bridge that runs just south of the Eleven Park site is in full swing, including another ceremonial groundbreaking. Though it looks like from all indications that the groundbreaking took place on the WEST side of the River this time even though the construction on the west side has been ongoing since March and it's only been recently that the activities have been happening on the east side of the river. My guess is somebody realized that it would have been some really bad optics for the Mayor to have another groundbreaking in the same general vicinity as the groundbreaking he attended for the Eleven Park development in 2023. From the article [emphasis mine], "The Henry Street Bridge is a transformative infrastructure project designed to provide added vehicular and pedestrian connectivity between the west side of Indianapolis and Downtown..." 

Why does that sound so familiar? Oh wait, since the original Eleven Park announcement, it has been described as a "transformational riverfront neighborhood development in downtown Indianapolis." 

As I began to dig [pun intended] into the Plan for the Henry Street Bridge project, the Plan requires that [again, emphasis mine]:

"Once overlying fill dirt has been removed and the original ground surface exposed, an archaeological team will monitor backhoe stripping of the cemetery portion within the Project Area. This process will involve using a smooth blade backhoe to incrementally strip back the soil in order to identify unmarked burial features. When soil stains are exposed during the backhoe stripping, archaeologists familiar with historic cemetery excavation will discern whether these stains represent grave shafts. Shaft stains will be assigned unique feature numbers and mapped using the grid established during the cemetery mapping and georeferenced to the established coordinate system and datum. All potential graves shafts identified will be fully investigated by experienced excavators."

Nearly everything that now comes out from the City related to the Henry Street project makes some reference to it being led by an archaeological team. The Plan document itself doesn't explicitly differentiate this method being different than the "Contractor-led" excavation that is regularly referenced by the DPW notifications when describing the work that was being done at Eleven Park, but as of right now, that seems to be a key difference between the City's Plan and whatever plan Keystone had before the Mayor's MLS announcement. "Archaeologist-led" versus "Contractor-led" has seemingly come to mean, "still moving forward, but slowly" versus "come to a screeching halt." Again, at least when looking at it externally. 

Between this purposefully wording choice from the City about who is leading the excavation and using the same "transformational" language to describe the Henry Street project that Keystone/Indy Eleven have used for Eleven Park, it's beginning to feel like the Mayor is trolling Ozdemir at every opportunity. It's like the elementary school bully taking your lunch money and then pantsing you just for good measure.

I also purposefully emphasized a seemingly random sentence from the plan about fill dirt. What makes that so interesting to me is that there is sentence a couple of paragraphs above that in The Plan that goes into more detail on what the "overlying fill" means. That paragraph indicates [emphasis mine]:

"The soil stratigraphy from the extracted cores was examined by Stantec geoarchaeologists who estimated the fill depth above the original cemetery ground surface to vary between 3.5 and 7.5 ft below the current ground surface; the depth to the base of burial deposits associated with Greenlawn Cemetery interments varies between 6.5 and 10 ft below the current ground surface." 

Let's unpack that paragraph a little. 

The Stantec staff estimate that before anybody ever reaches the original level of the cemetery, they would have to remove at least the first 3.5-feet to potentially 7.5-feet of existing soil from the current ground surface. Only at that point would the excavation then be within what was considered the "original" cemetery soil where burials would have been performed. Additionally, there are indications from research performed by historian Deedee Davis from a July 1882 Common Council Proceedings (see below) that "in excavating a grave, it was almost always the case that at least two, and frequently three sets of buried remains would be met...they simply spread the different sets of remains over the bottom of the grave, and placed the new coffin upon top of them. The city has no grounds within the enclosure, that have not been buried in one or more times." 

So expecting to find remains in our now typical "6-feet deep" range is likely optimistic. Digging will need to be deeper.

Excerpt taken from Greenlawn Research performed by Deedee Davis

The Henry Street Bridge project is just a hair under 2 acres. The Eleven Park property (officially known as the property owned by 402 Kentucky Avenue LLC) is comprised of approximately 19 acres. If you assume a similar soil stratification over the entire 19 acres as what was estimated for the 2 acres (which, admittedly, is probably a bit conservative), on the low end you are talking about 2,896,740 cubic feet of fill dirt (at 3.5-feet of fill) and maybe as much as 6,207,300 cubic feet of fill dirt (at 7.5-feet) before you actually reach the original ground level of the cemetery. Then you have another 3- to 6-feet of additional digging of the soil that is considered "original cemetery ground." Doing some math on just the upper level of soil/fill, that's approximately 107,000 to 230,000 cubic yards. A dump truck can carry about 10 to 14 cubic yards, but for simple math, let's assume 10 cubic yards per truck. Therefore, it would take 10,700 to 23,000 dump truck loads to remove all the top fill. In my day job, we would estimate a cost for this kind of excavation by "smooth blade backhoe" to be $45/cubic yard (and potentially even higher). Just to get to cemetery soil, I would estimate the cost to be $4.8M to $10.3M depending on the depth. The total area that might require this level of excavation might be high and my "per cubic yard" cost might be low. As a rough estimate, that's a lot of money, and it's only at that point that digging below the original cemetery ground can start.

That is how you end up with a construction site that does have have any construction activity. Particularly when the Mayor five-finger discounted your PSDA tax area away from you. The process of preparing the site for construction took a drastic increase in cost. I would have thought that in the months following the Mayor's announcement that Keystone and the team would have some kind of preliminary plan, but if they do, they don't look inclined to share those plans. While the Eleven Park site is showing signs of neglect, Ozdemir, Keystone, and Indy Eleven continue their mode of operation of keeping every detail about things like this as close to the vest as humanly possible until the very last second. In a world where information leaks are plentiful, it's really an amazing feat that they have continued to remain so tight-lipped for so long about so many things.

I do want to clarify one thing. I have been using cemetery a lot throughout this article and my other articles. Other news sources and documentation from the City also use that designation. However, from the May 22, 2023 "Archaeological Monitoring Plan for the Henry Street Bridge Project in the Old Greenlawn Cemetery (CR-49-6), City of Indianapolis, Center Township, Marion County, Indiana" prepared by Weintraut & Associates:

"The cemetery is now classified as a burial ground since some graves have been removed, and there remains no physical above-ground evidence of its existence." 

The cemetery began to not be a cemetery around the 1870s to 1890s, and anything that is found when digging aren't "bodies" but rather "human remains" or "burial items," the latter of which is more for the jewelry, buttons, caskets or its components, etc. that might be found. 

Recently, now that work has begun in earnest on the east side of the river in the Henry Street portion of the Henry Street Bridge project, the City's archaeologist-led excavation has already discovered some of those burial items, finding granite pavers, rail lines, grave shafts, and a headstone.

New discoveries at the Henry Street Bridge project include historic railway - "Indy DPW says crews discovered granite pavers and rail lines from what was once considered to be the first and largest electric railway freight terminal in the U.S." - WTHR article linked above

Human remains, grave shafts found while preparing for Henry Street Bridge construction on Indy's near west side - "While preparing to start archaeological excavation east of the White River, Stantec – Indy DPW's archeology consultant – found 15 grave shafts. These discoveries were made three to four feet below ground. They also identified a "possible footstone" and a headstone base for a total of seven monument pieces." - WTHR article linked above

It's not surprising that the excavation is finding burial items. The historical documents have shown that there were just too many bodies buried there, and not enough records of many, to maybe most, of them being interred and reburied elsewhere. The question remains for Keystone and Indy Eleven on whether they can find the money to excavate the way that the Henry Street Bridge is being excavated (thanks in part to a donation from the Lilly Endowment). It may be some time before fans hear the answer to that question.

So while Ozdemir, Keystone, and Indy Eleven continue to keep fans in the dark about their plan for Eleven Park, the next door neighbor project is moving along and finding the remains and the burial items that everyone was concerned were going to be present. 

There has been at least one shred of information made public and that was provided by a X thread by Indianapolis City-County Councilor Michael-Paul Hart. In his thread, he indicated that the status of the Mayor's PSDA site is still going through the process. 

"A high-ranking city official explained that the project is now in the hands of multiple state agencies. They chose to delay making a decision until after the election. 

The City expects to receive an update on the PSDA (Professional Sports Development Area) by the end of December. This update should confirm whether the State approves or denies the plan."

I suspect that it will be discussed during the State Budget Committee hearings in December, and the results of those discussions will narrow down whether the Mayor's MLS desire moves forward or not. Without any knowledge of the discussions, it wouldn't surprise me if the plan is allowed to proceed, only to fail miserably within MLS headquarters. Councilor Hart indicated that if the plan does move forward, the identity of the investors will be made publicly known. So there's that.

It's not a Plan, but there may be some kind of plan.

One last interesting thing to note that I found while trying to find information. In mid-April of this year, just two weeks before the Mayor made his MLS announcement, the Department of Metropolitan Development Plat Committee gave "Approval of a Subdivision Plat, to be known as Eleven Park, dividing 18.98 acres into 12 blocks. Staff recommends that the Plat Committee approve and find that the plat, file-dated January 4, 2024, complies with the standards of the Subdivision regulations."

Ozdemir, Keystone, and Indy Eleven were that close to having another step completed before the rug was yanked out from under them.

I've recently wondered if, in hindsight, Peter Wilt would still recommend the path that Ersal Ozdemir and Indy Eleven have taken to try and get a stadium. The path they're on doesn't seem to be working any longer and they need their own Plan to somehow change paths. Watching Fort Wayne FC and Rhode Island and a long list of other teams get stadiums in the time since Indy started trying to get one before they had ever played a game, it would seem like that change of plan needs to happen soon. Indy will no longer be part of the USL Super League next season without their own stadium (for some reason...), and they have 20 acres of land sitting.

Externally, the Eleven Park Plan looks stalled, buried [pun intended] under layers of dirt without any archaeologists around to unbury it.