Welcome to Douglass Park! Indianapolis is a city rich in sports tradition. We have the Indianapolis Indians, minor-league baseball’s second oldest team; the Indiana Fever, who won their first WNBA title in 2012; the Pacers, three-time American Basketball Association champs between 1967 and 1976; and our beloved NFL team, the Indianapolis Colts.
Even after the city’s parks and golf courses were integrated in the 1960s, the clubhouse of the Douglass Park Golf Course remained a popular meeting place for local African American politicians, business owners, and civic groups. One of Douglass Park Golf Course’s most famous visitors was Joe Lewis.
Their ongoing preservation can yield an improved quality of life for all, and, above all, a sense of place or identity for future generations. The author, Charles A. Birnbaum, Coordinator, Historic Landscape Initiative, Preservation Assistance Division, National Park Service would like to acknowledge the assistance of H. Ward Jandl and Kay Weeks.
Douglass Park, named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass, is located at 1616 East 25 th Street. The land for this 43-acre community park was a donation from the family of Edward Claypool, local businessman owner of the Claypool Hotel.
For the National Park Service, historic preservation is the act of protecting and sustaining cultural and natural resources in perpetuity.#N#The identification and preservation of cultural resources is critical to protecting the nation's richly textured history. Cultural resources include tangible items of historic or cultural significance, such as cultural landscapes, buildings, structures, and objects; as well as the intangible items, like traditional knowledge, practices, and life-ways.#N#Cultural landscapes have been recognized by the NPS as cultural resources since 1983. Our responsibility for their preservation is equal to other resources, regardless of the landscape type or level of significance.
A Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) identifies the preservation goals for a cultural landscape. The CLR documents landscape characteristics and associated features, values, and associations that make a landscape historically significant, according to National Register Criteria for Evaluation. This guide is the definitive guidance document for the creation and use of CLRs.
When landscapes are documented in photographs, registration points can be set to indicate the precise location and orientation of features. Registration points should correspond to significant forms, features and spatial relationships within the landscape and its surrounds. The points may also correspond to historic views to illustrate the change in the landscape todate. These locations may also be used as a management tool todocument the landscape's evolution, and to ensure that its character-defining features are preserved over time through informed maintenance operations and later treatment and management decisions.
Most historic properties have a cultural landscape component that is integral to the significance of the resource. Imagine a residential district without sidewalks, lawns and trees or a plantation with buildings but no adjacent lands.
A historic property consistsof all its cultural resources—landscapes, buildings, archeological sites and collections. In some cultural landscapes, there may be a total absence of buildings. This Preservation Brief provides preservation professionals, cultural resource managers, and historic property owners a step-by-step process for preserving ...
Preservation maintenance is the practice of monitoring and controlling change in the landscape to ensure that its historic integrity is not altered and features are not lost. This is particularly important during the research and long-term treatment planning process. To be effective, the maintenance program must have a guiding philosophy, approach or strategy; an understanding of preservation maintenance techniques; and a system for documenting changes in the landscape.
Inventory and documentation may be recorded in plans, sections, photographs, aerial photographs, axonometric perspectives, narratives, video-or any combination of techniques. Existing conditions should generally be documented to scale, drawn by hand or generated by computer. The scale of the drawings is often determined by the size and complexity of the landscape. Some landscapes may require documentation at more than one scale. For example, a large estate may be documented at a small scale to depict its spatial and visual relationships, while the discrete area around an estate mansionmay require a larger scale to illustrate individual plant materials, pavement patterns and other details. The same may apply to an entire rural historic district and a fenced vegetable garden contained within.
By analyzing the landscape, its change over time can be understood. This may be accomplished by overlaying the various period plans with the existing conditions plan. Based on these findings, individual features may be attributed to the particular period when they were introduced, and the various periods when they were present.
A cultural landscape is defined as "a geographic area,including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values.".
The 1926 court case Corrigan v. Buckley ruled that racially restrictive covenants were legally binding documents that could prevent the selling of houses to Blacks. Even areas like Stuyvesant Town, Parkchester, and Addisleigh Park only accepted whites at first.
Shortly after opening, the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown protested the restricted sale of Levittown homes. In 1948 , Shelley v. Kraemer struck down these racially restrictive housing covenants, as they violated the 14th Amendment, and the Levittown clause was eliminated.
Early Families Moving Into Capes / Courtesy of the Levittown Public Library. Abraham Levitt and his two sons, William and Alfred, built four communities called “Levittowns” in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico.
By 1951, Levittown and the surrounding area included over 17,000 Levitt-designed homes, including the much newer “ranch house” design. At the time, the community seemed utopian, as people who were willing to sacrifice their lives for their country could live peacefully without financial burden.
One of Douglass Park Golf Course’s most famous visitors was Joe Lewis. On the other side of the park, basketball history ...
As more African Americans moved to Indianapolis in the 1920s and 30s, Douglass Park became a popular site for community gatherings. The pool at Douglass Park features a diving well and a wading area. In 1928 the northern portion of the park was turned into Douglass Park Golf Course, making it the only golf course in the nation named ...
In the 1960s the Douglass Park Family Center was one of the places where Indianapolis’s top young basketball talent vied for court time on warm summer evenings. George McGinnis, Richard “Boo” Ellis, and Mel Daniels, who went on to play for the Indiana Pacers, all practiced their jump shots at Douglass Park.
Thanks to his efforts, the IHSAA allowed black high schools to compete for the state basketball title beginning in 1954 and was instrumental in petitioning the Marion County General Hospital (now part of Eskenazi Health) to hire African Americans.