Butler-Tarkington, Indianapolis

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Butler-Tarkington is a neighborhood on the north side of Indianapolis with the following borders: 38th Street and Crown Hill Cemetery to the south, the Central Canal and Westfield Boulevard to the north, Michigan Road to the west, and Meridian Street to the east.

The neighborhood began as a farming settlement in the 1840s near what is now the intersection of 38th Street and Illinois Street. The settlement was called Mapleton due to the large number of maple trees in the area. 38th Street which now forms the southern boundary of the neighborhood was originally called Maple Road. The settlement was connected to the railway system of the City of Indianapolis in the 1860s. In 1890, the city's electric street car system ran a line up through the neighborhood. Mapleton was annexed by Indianapolis in 1902, and most of the rest of the neighborhood was annexed by 1906. Residential development took off in the 1910s and 1920s. By the end of WWII, the neighborhood was built-out.

The neighborhood was almost exclusively white up until the mid-1950s when African-Americans began moving into the southwest portion of the neighborhood. The Butler-Tarkington Neighborhood Association was formed in 1956 to help foster community and ease the tensions resulting from racial integration of the neighborhood. Today the majority of residents are white; however, approximately one-third of the residents are African-American. The community continues to be seen as an example of successful neighborhood integration.

This neighborhood consists mainly of working to upper-middle-class households, but one finds wealthier individuals inhabiting the much grander homes along the western edge of Meridian Street, and also portions of Illinois Street north of 40th Street. Butler-Tarkington is known for its attractive residential architecture.

[edit] Education

The neighborhood's name comes from Butler University, which has its campus in the neighborhood, and the famous writer Booth Tarkington who lived in the neighborhood for 23 years in his country estate until his death in 1946. Butler University moved from Irvington on the city's Far East Side to the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood in 1928 when it acquired what had been the community's 300-acre Fairview Park. The first school to come to the neighborhood was IPS School 43, which opened in the village of Mapleton in 1883. The school moved into its present building at 150 West 40th Street in 1909. IPS school 86 was built in 1928 at 49th Street and Boulevard Place, and is currently The International School. In 1939 St. Thomas Aquinas opened its school (which serves kindergarten through eighth grade) at 4600 North Illinois Street. The Christian Theological Seminary was formed as an independent educational institution from Butler University in 1958, and in 1966 it opened its own campus next to Butler University.