‘A malodorous, septic stream’

While landlocked, Indianapolis’ flat terrain, poor draining soils, and intense storm events have leant a significance to its waterways that belies their shallow, unnavigable courses. Specifically, the waterways have conveyed raw sewage, industrial waste, agricultural runoff, and household debris since the founding of the city. They have also repeatedly flooded with particularly harmful impacts on communities in low-lying areas.

In the early twentieth century, elaborate stone and concrete bridges were built over waterways such at the White River and Fall Creek running through the urban core. Designers such as Daniel Benjamin Luten and Henry W. Klaussman drew on City Beautiful aesthetics and European precedents, including a bridge modeled on the Victor Emmanuel bridge over the Tiber in Rome. 

At the same time the bridges were being built, the city constructed Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) with outlets into Fall Creek and the White River, conveying sewage to communities downstream. As an expanding white middle class moved north out of the downtown and commuted across the bridges, the residents most impacted by the fouled water were primarily low-income communities of color. While there was vocal opposition to the sewers, there was little or no reference to it in the discourses of the parks and urban planning officials who led the City Beautiful improvements. Similarly, throughout the 20th century, architectural historians have ignored the impact of the city’s environmentally hazardous conditions on affected communities. 

“Speakers at the meeting last night were of the opinion that the sewer opening would not only be unsanitary, but would destroy the beauty of the stream as well; that it would lessen the value of property in the neighborhood, and that it would be a constant sources of typhoid fever and other diseases…. They said that [the] city engineer and the Board of Park Commissioners had been appealed to in vain to alter the plans” May Sue to Halt Sewer” Indianapolis Star, April 21, 1909

For more than 100 years, the CSOs have carried raw sewage into the city's waterways, where it then runs through neighbourhoods in central and south Indianapolis, historically areas with minoritized and lower income residents.

After two decades fighting lawsuits, in 2006 Indianapolis entered into a Clean Water Act consent decree with the EPA to mitigate the discharge of raw sewage through the CSOs. The plan, dubbed "Dig Indy" will create new tunnels to convey the sewage to underground receptacles. While the tunnels will help mitigate the frequency sewage discharge, the decisions about parallels the environmental inequities of the sewers’ early twentieth century construction. 

The ongoing injustice of the sewer overflow mitigation includes the unfair economic burden on communities most affected by the pollution. Specifically, the city declined the opportunity for the federal government to share the cost and instead imposed a flat regressive tax to pay for the new sewers, doubling utility monthly charges. The city also entertained a proposal to process gravel from the Dig Indy excavations in the Riverside community. The permitting variance was approved despite community and environmental activists' protests, but the company eventually decided to move to another location. The facility would have created dust, noise, and other unhealthy conditions for local residents, the same people who have taken the brunt of industrial and water-born pollution for more than a century.

This research is part of the Humanities Action Lab’s “ Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice ” in which IUPUI students and faculty worked with the Kheprw institute, the Indianapolis Environmental Equity Council, and other community partners to curate stories of Indianapolis’ environmental justice history and to amplify the voices of affected communities. The learning process involved archival research, presentations from environmental activists and experts, community conversations and immersive walking tours, oral histories, and active listening to community members.

"In the community I've grown up in, environmental justice is often grounded in injustice and people who have conditions that have been brought on by inequitable relations to power. In a word, state violence...that often impacts poor communities, people of color." Imhotep Adisa, Executive Director and co-founder, Kheprw Institute.

The students' research was disseminated in public scholarship products such as exhibits, public programs,  digital humanities projects , and a virtual toxic tour.

The Climates of Inequality project exemplifies the potential of environmental justice as a lens to interrogate both the racial politics of urban design and the the enduring structural racism that perpetuates disparate environmental harm on marginalized communities. It also highlights the potential of community-engaged research and curation to bring marginalized voices into those discourses and to create public spaces for designing a more equitable future. 

Elizabeth Kryder-Reid is Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies in the IU School of Liberal Arts, IUPUI, ekryderr@iu.edu. Paula Brooks is the Environmental Justice Coordinator at the Hoosier Environmental Council; pbrooks@hecweb.org. This research was originally presented as a poster at the 2019 Society of Architectural Historians.