St. Louis Post-Dispatch
May 2, 2004
Indiana Town Turns Base Into Downtown
With investment, an abandoned military base can become a functioning, vibrant part of a town's civic life.
By Harry Levins, Post-Dispatch Senior Writer
LAWRENCE, IND. -- A year from this month, the Pentagon will tack up its next base-closing list -- and already, the municipal neighbors of Scott Air Force Base in Illinois are holding their breath.
But here in Lawrence, 11 miles northeast of the heart of Indianapolis, officials can attest that the base-closing ax need not be fatal.
In the '90s, Lawrence lost the Army's Fort Benjamin Harrison. Now, on the grounds of the former post, Lawrence has gained a downtown -- and a state park, and, many say, a community identity.
The Army post -- the locals still call it "Fort Ben" -- made the BRAC hit list in 1991. That's when the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closing Commission singled out Fort Ben for closure. Five years later, the last soldier left.
"The common feeling back in 1991 was, 'This will be a disaster -- we'll need 20 years to recover," says Lynn Boese, who heads the Fort Harrison Reuse Authority.
The post's last commander was Army Maj. Gen. Ronald E. Brooks, now retired. He says, "Closing the post was one of the worst things that happened to me in my career."
But now, as a civilian, Brooks runs the American Legion's Marketing Services Group -- working out of an office in a new building on old Fort Ben. He says the rebirth of Fort Ben "succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. I don't know how it could have gone much better."
Today, the redeveloped post goes by the name of "Town Center." On the 550 acres that once housed the post's cantonment area - its built-up part - Town Center brings together a mixture of housing, offices, doctors, dentists, lawyers, retail businesses, light industry, warehousing and even Lawrence's city government center.
In effect, Town Center is a downtown for a community that never had a downtown.
"I would have thought that closing the post would be devastating," says Chuck Ricks, recently retired as deputy mayor of Lawrence. "But now, I say that the closing gave us an unexpected opportunity."
A commercial void
Lawrence and Fort Ben spent most of the 20th century together. In 1903, the Army decided to build the post. By 1908, laborers had erected most of the buildings - graceful multistory red brick structures with white wood trim, in the dignified design of the Edwardian era.
Infantry regiments came and went. But by World War II, Fort Ben had evolved into a schoolhouse post, training the Army's finance clerks and other support soldiers.
After the war, it held onto its status as home of the Finance Corps. It also became the hub of the Adjutant General Corps, the people who handle the Army's paper work. When the BRAC ax fell in 1991, Fort Ben further housed the Army's Recruiting School and the multiservice Defense Information School, where military press handlers learned their trade.
When the post was built, an infantry regiment would easily have outnumbered the townspeople. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Lawrence had barely 1,000 people. But as postwar prosperity kicked in, the population shot up. Today, it's about 40,000 and rising.
Trouble is, the town had to grow up around the post, which ate up almost four square miles smack in the middle of Lawrence. In most communities, that middle ground would have been downtown. But Lawrence did without a downtown.
Instead, Lawrence's commerce - such as it was - clustered south of the post along U.S. Route 36, Pendleton Pike. It's a charmless strip of used-car lots, topless bars, liquor stores and, by now, a batch of boarded-up gas stations and pawn shops.
"Until we got a Kohl's and a Wal-Mart in the last few years, you couldn't even buy a shirt in Lawrence," says the Reuse Authority's Boese (pronounced BAY-see).
Tom Schneider was Lawrence's mayor when the BRAC news came down. "He had a vision," says Brooks, the retired general. "He built the city government center right in the middle of the post. It gave Lawrence an identity, and Lawrence has blossomed because of it."
As point man for redevelopment, Schneider turned to his deputy, Ricks. The marching orders: Give Lawrence a downtown.
"We had what you might call a commuter retail market," Ricks says. "There was nothing in Lawrence - virtually no restaurants or retail, not even a library. The Army's departure gave us the opportunity to build a downtown."
But the new downtown came neither easily nor quickly. Even now, it remains a work in progress.
Opening a dead end
Step No. 1 involved forming a governmental entity to deal with the Pentagon. Thus was born, in 1995, the Fort Harrison Reuse Authority. For $6.1 million (payable over time), the authority took title to the cantonment area.
"Along with the 550 acres, we got 250 buildings," says the authority's Boese. "But many of them were totally unusable. We got a central steam-heat plant that cost us $250,000 a month to run. And we got all of the maintenance chores."
Traffic patterns made the post a dead end of sorts. And although Fort Ben had stood open to civilian traffic, few locals ventured inside. "The MPs would nail you for going one mile an hour over the limit," says Boese. "I got my first traffic ticket ever right here, as a teenager."
The authority brought in bulldozers to extend the post's main east-west artery beyond its old eastern limit. The bulldozers also were tabbed with tearing down some of the post's buildings - for example, new barracks and fairly new single-family housing.
"The new barracks are built in a way that made it impossible to use them as anything but barracks," Boese says. The last of them will be gone by summer's end. The single-family housing had to go because Town Center wants to attract empty-nesters, not families with kids.
"Our school district was growing by 600 kids a year and could hardly keep up," Boese says. "We didn't want to impact the schools further. So it made sense to use the base commercially and minimize the residential use."
Today, Fort Ben has about 1,000 residential units, with maybe two people to a household. And Fort Ben's business community brings in 1,750 people each workday - more than the 1,500 or so civilians who worked for the Army inside old Fort Ben.
The workers ply their trades in buildings both new and old. "If it's new, we specify a lot of red brick and white trim," says Boese. And if it's old, the exterior stays what it was.
One of the post's six "mule barns" - stables - houses an ad agency and public-relations firm. The old post stockade houses an insurance agency. Boese's own office is in what the Post Engineer Center, built in 1904 and expanded in the 1930s.
What had been the post's big schoolhouse for around 3,000 soldier-students now houses the health services school of Ivy Tech State University and its 4,000 or so civilian students.
Boese puts the capital investment at about $300 million. It might have been much more - and most people are glad it isn't.
"Our Forest Park"
To the relief of people like Ricks, the biggest part of old Fort Ben remains undeveloped. That's the 1,700-acre bivouac and training area, now a state park that wraps around the old Fort Ben golf course, described as one of Indiana's finest.
"A lot of people wanted to saw down the trees and put up condos," Ricks says. "Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.
"Now, that park gets 300,000 visitors a year - and all of them have to go through Town Center. And when we get a Marion County library, that'll draw 400,000 more a year."
Chris Butler left Clayton, Mo., in 1989 to move to Indianapolis. Now, she teaches at the 12,000-member YMCA in Town Center. She calls the state park the crowning touch of old Fort Ben.
"I remember training for a marathon in 1992," she says. "My husband and I ran in what's now the state park, because it's the only place around with hills. But there were soldiers in camouflage hiding in the woods, and we didn't feel comfortable."
Now, Butler says, "The fort has become our Forest Park - the place you go to for nature in the city. And the vision for Town Center is to make it our Central West End."
Others say that when the Army left, it took away some positives.
Assistant School Superintendent Ed Williams says that soldiers' children made up 10 percent of the Lawrence District's enrollment - but a lot more in terms of "diversity of thought and world travel experience. Some of our kids have spent their whole lives in a 50-mile radius of Indianapolis. It was good to have them in classes with kids who had lived in Germany and Japan - all around the world."
Old soldier Brooks says that as Fort Ben fades from the Army's collective memory, Lawrence will lose a steady stream of talented people who soldiered there and then sank roots after retirement.
He cites deputy mayor Ricks, a retired lieutenant colonel. And Joe Carter, once Fort Ben's provost marshal, or police chief, later police chief in Lawrence. And Bill Sweeney, once Fort Ben's chief of staff, now the director of the Indiana War Memorial.
"They brought a lot of specialized skills," says Brooks, "and retirement dollars, too. Over time, that's going to go away."
On a dollars-and-cents level, waitress Marsha Burton still rues the loss of Fort Ben. In the dining room at Bennigan's Grill inside the Four Points Sheraton just off Pendleton Pike, only two tables are occupied for her breakfast shift.
"We used to get a lot of business from the fort - a lot," Burton says. "We're trying to make it up. But I can't say we're there yet."
Still, one of those two tables holds fans in town for a college golf tournament - at the Fort Ben golf course.
Boese all but bubbles with optimism. "We're 60 to 70 percent full," he says. "The real-estate pros thought it would be a 15- to 20-year project. I think we're well ahead of that curve."
Maury Plambeck, the chief planner for the city of Indianapolis, shares Boese's upbeat attitude.
Plambeck calls the reborn Fort Ben an asset to the region.
"Fort Ben has created an identity for Lawrence - and for northeastern Indianapolis as well," Plambeck says.
Although old soldier Brooks misses the presence of the Army, he thinks Lawrence came out ahead. "Some people had visions of boarded-up buildings," he says. "But the development has taken off. What could been bad turned out pretty doggoned good."
Christine Hursh heads the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, working out of an up-to-date office in a century-old building in the middle of old Fort Ben.
"There was a lot of fear about what would happen," Hursh says.
"Now, the fear has turned to pride."
Base
closings brought changes
Military facilities targeted in '90s are now residential, business and
recreational areas.
It's been more than a decade since five Indiana communities felt the bite of the Defense Department's plan to close or realign military installations.
But a strong economy in the early 1990s and redevelopment efforts have helped communities such as Peru and Lawrence rebound from the loss of more than 4,000 jobs, according to a recent report.
In its first major review of the closings since 1998, the U.S. General Accounting Office has found that nationwide, 79,740 jobs -- about 61 percent of the 130,000 lost -- have been created at former military bases.
At the same time, the base closures have saved the federal government more than $16.7 billion, the report states.
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The 1996 closing of Fort Benjamin Harrison in Lawrence meant the loss of more than 1,000 jobs and an annual payroll of $125 million. It also left a hole in the community, where the fort had thrived since being established in 1903 to help house the Army, which had been expanded to 100,000 men after the Spanish-American War.
Bases such as Fort Harrison "put a lot of money into the economy," said former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind. "They had become almost a fixture in the community, like the local high school."
But the end of the Cold War rendered the fort obsolete. Many of its operations were consolidated at another base, making Fort Harrison a prime candidate for closure.
Those seeking a new use for the property had two key assets to work with: 1,700 acres of rolling hills and more than 75 brick buildings, some dating from 1908.
The woodlands became Fort Harrison State Park and the brick buildings became a historic district, which helped attract additional housing and businesses. More than 100 businesses have opened since 1996 at the fort, creating at least 1,500 jobs, and more than 1,000 housing units are on the property, according to the reuse authority.
"I wouldn't be anywhere else," said Scott Vail, who opened Java Junction in a building at 56th Street and Post Road that once served as a bus station and post office.
Gerry Hays moved his HomeYeah!.com offices to a former dormitory on Otis Avenue because of lower rent and the nearby park.
"It just turned into a really nice area out here," said Hays, president of the real estate firm.
The surroundings also prompted Ed Jolliffe, president of Schneider Corp., to move the 180 employees of his architectural and engineering firm from 30th Street and Post Road to a building that housed enlisted men in 1939.
"One of the things that attracted us was the campuslike setting," Jolliffe said. "We think it's a key for recruiting and retaining employees."
Lawrence Deputy Mayor Chuck Ricks hails the changes.
"Now we have all this economic activity and a tax base, which didn't exist before," Ricks said.
Efforts to reuse the site are entering the final stages. Though some thought it would take 20 years to complete Fort Harrison's reuse plan, Boese said officials are working on plans for the last 70 of the site's 2,500 acres.
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Note: Excerpt used with permission. From the Indianapolis Star newspaper May 19, 2002.