The Circle at the Center of Everything

Indianapolis is drawn around a circle. When surveyor Alexander Ralston — who had helped lay out Washington, D.C. — platted the new state capital in 1821, he set a circle at the exact center of the mile square, expecting a governor's house. Indiana built one elsewhere and eventually raised, on the circle itself, the monument that gives the city its silhouette: the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Monument, dedicated in 1902, rising 284 feet over the brick-paved Circle — just fifteen feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty.

The monument is the city's bulletin board and its ceremonial front room. Its observation deck, reached by 331 steps or an elevator, still gives the finest view in the state. Its limestone figures commemorate the state's wars from the Revolution to the Spanish-American War. And its base holds the Colonel Eli Lilly Civil War Museum, telling the conflict Indiana sent a quarter-million men to fight.

Every November, the monument begins its second career. Since 1962, the Circle of Lights has dressed the monument each holiday season — strings of lights running down its shaft from a crowning star, billed by the city as the world's largest Christmas tree, switched on the Friday after Thanksgiving before a crowd that treats the lighting as the season's official start. The electricians and firefighters who rig it climb the monument the way their predecessors did: carefully, in the cold, on schedule.

The Circle around it is downtown's daily crossroads — the City Market a block east, the convention center and stadiums to the south, the Statehouse four blocks west — and its brick pavement still follows the 1821 plan. Diagonal avenues radiate from the mile square's corners the way Ralston drew them, which is why Indianapolis's map, alone among Midwestern grids, has both a compass logic and a wheel's.

November on the Circle is the hinge: Veterans Day observances at the monument's steps — with the American Legion's national headquarters a few blocks north — giving way to the lights crews by month's end. Every city has a center. Indianapolis put a monument in its, and arranged its holidays, its traffic, and its name for itself — the Circle City — around the result.