16th Street: As the Spirit Moves Us

Think of East 16th Street as a slow collision of history and the future, with eternity waiting at the end. Block by block, the street is one long, incremental intersection of empty storefronts and vacant lots making way for fashion-forward eateries and drinkeries and new apartments in late modernist geometries — all marching east toward a battalion of churches to remind us that every Saturday night becomes a Sunday morning.

Past to present is a two-way street. And the street winks at a new-old name: Tinker Street. That’s just 16th Street rechristened — or, better, 16th Street raising a name from the Old Tinker homestead that a century-and-a-half ago stood somewhere in the general vicinity of Herron High, formerly the old Herron School of Art, formerly the older John Herron Art Institute. Or, perhaps the name descends from the historic Tinker Park baseball field, now the site of IU Health Methodist Hospital. Or both.

What’s in a name? Quite a bit.

A helping hand: Tinker Street serves meal at unlikely locale

When we’re talking urban resurrection, words become incantations, subtle prayers that history will be honored even as new beers are brewed, new cocktails invented and new recipes are concocted. Sometimes it seems that menus are conceived just for the thrill of listing ingredients in alchemical combinations unimagined last month: Angel’s Envy bourbon, rice milk and cinnamon; cauliflower custard and trillium cheese; Tunisian rabbit curry; fried Brussels sprouts, almond dukkah and watermelon mignonette.

Say what? (Don’t talk with your mouth full.) Really, it’s all a kind of neourban poetry, promising sophisticated pleasures in a three-block journey, offering inspiration to balding Boomers and the current crop of lumberjack brewmeisters with their beards and plaid flannels.

To attract them all, savvy entrepreneurs strew linguistic rose petals before new ventures. Along 16th Street, the savviest open restaurants — such as the eponymous Tinker Street at the corner of 16th and North New Jersey streets, the tongue child of long-time Indianapolis restaurateurs Peter George and Tom Main. That watermelon mignonette is quoted from one of their latest menus.

A few blocks further east, George and Main have opened Festiva, a name announcing the Mexican roots of the menu if not exactly the neighborhood heritage. With this possible exception: Back in the late 1970s there actually was a tamale carry-out window in the large shack (erstwhile garage?) that still stands on the south side of 16th Street across from Tinker Street. This structure may be soon be redeveloped as yet another eatery with aspirations of culinary elegance if not linen table cloths.

Once upon another century, the panache of trend-setting art galleries was the catalyst to open new neighborhoods, drawing potential customers to time-worn quadrants of the city that lacked other attractions. Eventually, it was assumed, art openings would feed restaurants and bars. Ultimately, folks would find it most convenient to walk home to their apartments recently built or refurbished just a few blocks away. At least that was the theory.

Although the once-a-month art openings at the Harrison Center, just south of 16th on Delaware Street, certainly have primed the pump, the 16th Street revival now percolating has pretty much skipped directly to the eat and sleep part, without relying to much on the art. Or, maybe relying on the ghost of art past rather than the contemporary aesthetics. Still, the ghost has some life.

The biggest art ghost in the neighborhood is Herron, of course, which lingers in the name of the high school. But let’s not forget Foundry Provisions at the corner of 16th and Alabama streets, where lunchers and brunchers can enjoy historically named sandwiches (e.g. the Morton, the Tarkington), layered with various combinations of bacon, turkey and ham, roasted red pepper and artichoke heart, kimchi, garlic aioli and two kinds of mayo you won’t find at Shapiro’s: Sriracha and tamari.

If I had a dollar for every cigarette I smoked and can of cheap beer I drank in that building — but, oh, that was 40 years ago when the Foundry (and the adjacent structure that now houses Nottingham Realty) was the foundry, the sculpture department of the now decamped Herron School of Art.

There, aspiring artists welded steel, poured molten bronze and generally performed semi-skilled, quasi-dangerous activities with hard materials. There, on a particularly carefree night, and somewhat anticipating future evenings of culinary performance art, someone filled an eight-foot tube of five-inch steel pipe with oxyacetylene, stuck a fat orange in the other end and — va-voom — cannonballed that citrus 30 feet across the room to vaporize against the cinder block wall. Smelled like heaven.

It would be pure whimsy to suppose this was any inspiration for the “blood orange chocolate stout” now brewed by Mark Swartz and sold at his Cannonball Brewing Company at 17th and Bellefontaine streets, just a block north of the main thoroughfare.

Next door to Cannonball is the King Park Development Corporation, the nonprofit that patiently encourages the redevelopment of this entire area. There isn’t much to see out their front window — not much commercial development, and a lot of grassy lots in between the houses.

With the exception of Festiva at 16th Street and Barrow Avenue, this is a territory largely unaffected by the culinary aspirations to the west, let alone the whispers of art.  A different inspiration abides.

In the roughly mile-and-a-half square bounded by 16th and 25th streets, Roosevelt/Hillside avenues on the east and Martin Luther King Park on the west, are perhaps 25, maybe 30 doors into eternity.

Christian faith has found a bountiful harvest in this part of the city. The abundance comes in all sizes, from spired atop brick-and-stained glass churches to refurbished storefronts. Some houses of worship that are just that: houses with preachers in the living room.

Nearly every corner of the street grid anchored by 16th Street supports a church, sometimes two or three. There can’t be enough residents in the entire Kennedy-King neighborhood to fill the pews or the rows of folding chairs.

But here they are: Churches offering Universal Healing, New Hope, Sunrise, Apostolic Revival, an Oasis of Hope and a Tabernacle of Miracles. What is urban redevelopment compared to New Birth Praise and Worship. What linen-covered table compares to the Unveiled Church of Christ? What neighborhood bar compares with the Home of Refuge?

Can the Cannonball, even with its delicious stout and lamb tacos, put a dent in the Whole Armor of God Ministry?

Probably not. State law requires a new bar to notify every church within 1,000 feet, and there are other limitations on signage advertising alcohol sales. Such regulations make it complicated, but perhaps not impossible, to open a new restaurant across the street from, say, the Greater Prince of Peace or perhaps the Overcoming Church along Columbia Avenue, or any of the more modest religious establishments. Given the proper spirit, anything is possible.