Neighborhood at the Crossroads
Produced by Kim Hood
WFYI-public TV, Channel 20
Sept. 9 at 8 p.m.; Sept. 12 at 2 p.m.

Watch this documentary. Twice. You will be glad you do.

“Where are our future leaders growing up?” stated Kim Hood during a telephone interview on Aug. 29. That’s a loaded question, for which we had better start seeking answers, and they’re right here, in Fountain Square, “the first real neighborhood outside the original square mile that was Indianapolis.”

This 140-year-old commercial center began in 1864 when the Citizens Street Railway Company laid tracks down Virginia Avenue and located a turn around at the intersection of Virginia and Prospect and Shelby streets. German entrepreneurs built up a business district. Followed by Irish, Italian and Danish immigrants, this near Southside neighborhood was filled with pride of place. In the 1920s, Fountain Square was Indianapolis’ first cinema theater district, with as many as seven houses attracting people citywide. A generation later, city dynamics changed; Fountain Square went into decline, further exacerbated by I-65/70 construction. Transportation, ironically, figured in its birth and demise.

By 1983, when Fountain Square was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it was better known as the city’s prime arena for drugs, crime and human despair. A revitalization project seemed to be going nowhere.

In 1994, documentary-maker Kim Hood undertook a 10-year project to show what the people in Fountain Square were doing to reclaim their neighborhood, despite the seemingly insurmountable challenges, as recent and wrenching as the killing of an Indianapolis Police officer in a street shooting in mid-August. Hood’s Neighborhood at the Crossroads could, but does not wallow in defeat. “This is an uplifting story,” she insists. “I’m buoyed by these remarkable people.”

Using both the standard tripod-held camera and the newest small, hand-held camera that “allows you to go where the larger cameras can’t,” Hood develops a story that tells itself through the words of the people who decided “they weren’t going to live like that anymore.” When the Citizen’s Gas explosion galvanized the disparate and un-trusting community to work together, they set out to solve the most egregious problems, from absentee landlords to trash-filled alleys, to drug-dealing, to low expectations for school performance by children whose parents were perpetuating cycles of abuse, poverty and school-dropouts.

Like Hood, you will cheer, and be cheered by, these heroes who speak up, stand up and stay the course. A sterling case is the mother of four children who leaves an abusive husband, goes back to school and, on a $10-an-hour job, not only supports her family, but manages to buy a house and become a coach for the newly-formed kids baseball league.

“Where are our future leaders growing up?” In a ravaged, once-proud neighborhood clawing its way back to excellence? Watch and decide. Or ignore and hide, the attitude that created the problem in the first place.