May 19th

The American Institute of Architects has named the following top six U.S. cities for architectural innovation and design : Chicago, New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Washington DC and Columbus, Indiana. I’m glad I finally got to visit one of these cities.

So how does a town of 46,000 in south central Indiana make a list like this? As usual with these things, because of a visionary. J. Irwin Miller was an executive in Columbus’s Cummins diesel engine manufacturer, president of a local bank and general good-deed-doer. He and his wife Xenia had no formal architectural training but shared a feeling that well-designed and simple buildings improved peoples attitudes and productivity. So he pledged a fund from Cummins to pay the fees of a select number of architects whose work he admired. The two most famous are I.M. Pei, who died the other day at age 102 and Eero Saarinen, who designed the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the PanAm terminal at JFK Airport, IBM’s campus at Yorktown Heights NY – and the Millers’ showcase home in Columbus.

I got a map at the visitor center (which had a few Dale Chihuly glass pieces casually placed in a staircase window) and did a guided website walking and driving tour around the city, in drizzle and occasional hard rain. And I noticed that all the houses in town were attractive. Sometimes a rising tide does raise all boats – or buildings.

I was planning to see the Indianaplois Motor Speedway Museum. But since the Indianapolis 500 is next Sunday and there were final qualifying races today, it was too hectic. Instead I went to Bloomington and saw the basketball arena Bob Knight used to throw chairs around and the football stadium that replaced the one that was the site of the big bicycle race in the film “Breaking Away”.

My last stop was Spruce State Park in the town of Mitchell. The visitor center had a tribute to Gus Grissom, a Michell native and one of the seven original astronauts – and one of the casualties of the deadly fire as Apollo 1 was blasting off. The park had a very interesting Pioneer Village centered around one of the first water and grist mills in the state (like the Wayside Inn, it still produces bread and corn meal). The majority of the buildings are still standing from 200 years ago, though most have been restored or updated. There were demonstrations at the mill, blacksmith shop, weaver’ shop, distillery and tavern.

Indiana’s most well-known singer of recent decades is John (not Cougar) Mellencamp. I pick his song “Small Town”, as I have passed through many small towns in the last three days.