Monuments and Memorials

Monuments and Memorials

One of the stranger features of Indianapolis is that after Washington, DC, Indianapolis is the American city with the highest concentration of monuments and memorials. I'm not really sure how this came to be. Might have something to do with the fact that the American Legion is headquartered here, but that's just a guess. The big plus of this is that the monuments give the downtown area a distinct feel. But there's a problem, too. The building of memorials has become a bit of a fetish here. So while we have great memorials like the World War Memorial (modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicanarssus) and the Soldiers & Sailors Monument, we also have the unfortunate Congressional Medal of Honor memorial, which is so 1997, with the names of medal recipients etched on the same trendy blue glass that adorned dot-com offices and a multimedia audio component that kicks in every night at dusk. Ill-advised, to say they least. Still, the good outweighs the bad. On a sunny weekday afternoon, the best lunch seat in town is on the steps of the Soldiers & Sailors Monument (actually, we just call it "the Monument" here), watching the world go by, and the interior of the War Memorial is one of the finest architectural spaces in Indianapolis.

You can go to the top of the Monument during the spring and summer, and its base houses a small but pretty good Civil War Museum. The War Memorial is open Wednesday to Sunday from 9-6. The rest of the memorials are outdoors, so hours won't make a difference.