Development: Tavern at the Temple Closes

Just as the canal was welcoming a new restaurant to the area (Zing), I received word this afternoon that another canal restaurant is closing. Amanda Cravens has announced that Tavern at the Temple will cease operations after dinner tomorrow night (Sept. 10th).

This is very sad news, though perhaps not unexpected. I've had a handful of delightful meals there but they were never terribly full. I think they had the right location and the wrong restaurant plan. The outrageous success of Creation Cafe proves that people were more than ready to support a restaurant on the canal. Fine dining was probably not the way to kick off canal dining, however. In my opinion, a successful canal dining establishment needs to be one that caters to those out for a stroll on the canal or out enjoying a paddleboat ride as part of a day in downtown. You need to grab people off the canal, or at least entice the young professionals living in the area in some way, not hope for people to dress up and drive to your restaurant and look for on-street parking. The almost complete lack of signage doesn't help much either.

My guess is that the space won't stay closed for long and that we're likely to see another casual dining restaurant in there in the future. Perhaps a sports bar with a nice beer selection? Well, a beer geek can dream. . . .

UPDATE (9/10): Feed Me/Drink Me has some inside info about this closing. It appears that this is more of a management change than a closing of the restaurant. Obviously, I'm not sold on sticking with the same concept, but from a nearby resident perspective, I'm certainly not going to complain about keeping a fine dining restaurant in the area! I wish the new owners/management all the luck in the world.

Photos: St. Weyertech Building

I'm not sure what to call this building. Most recently, it functioned as Section 8 housing under the name Weyerbacher Terrace Apartments, though it was originally built as St. Vincent Hospital in 1913. St. Vincent Hospital operated out of this building until 1974 when it moved to its current location on 86th St, after which the building was converted to federally subsidized housing. When Weyerbacher Terrace was forcibly closed in 2002, it fell into disuse and disrepair. It was subsequently sold by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to the City of Indianapolis in 2004 for $10 and then to Ivy Tech Community College in 2006 for $1. Ivy Tech planned to rehabilitate the building and convert it to classroms, though there is some controversy over their current plans, as, due to technical difficulties with rehabbing the building to their desired use, they have instead proposed to demolish the building and construct a new structure specifically for modern classrooms.

Here's how the building looks as of August 2008.


Someone posted quite a collection of photos of the interior of the building last year on flickr, so be sure to check those out as well.

DIG-B Update

Apologies for the lack of content recently. Things have been a little busy for me and I haven't had a chance to get out and take pictures for a while. I've also been working on a couple small but significant tweaks to the layout of DIG-B that I would like to finish up before I make any new photo posts.

The primary difference will be changing the width of the main column where posts are displayed. Since DIG-B has morphed into a very photo-centric blog, I feel that it's important to be able to display larger images. As a result, I'll be able to show pictures that are about 50% wider (and 50% taller -- for the geeks out there that results in images with 2.25 times as much area).

You may have also noticed that my pictures currently get displayed with jagged lines and other strange effects (also called aliasing). I'm tweaking the way images are displayed so that the blog will display alias-free images with 640 pixel width and you can click on the image for a version with 1024 pixel width. If that's too technical for you, just know that things will look a hell of a lot better and if you're on a slow connection, things should also load noticeably faster. I should be done with all the tweaks I'm working on sometime this week.

Welcoming Zing to Indianapolis

Last night I had the opportunity to get an early taste of the food and beverages at the newest restaurant in Indianapolis, Zing. My prediction?

Zing will be a home run.

The menu is tapas/small-plate style with a focus on sharing. Indianapolis really only has one other option in this restaurant style in BARcelona Tapas, and they have a decidedly different take on it. Samples of about a dozen different menu options circulated and we tried almost all of them. Several different "pizzettes," calamari, mini burgers, and meatballs were all very tasty but particular standouts were the ahi tuna and bacon wrapped dates. Highly recommended.

The price point, concept and location are perfect. It's unique enough to be the kind of place that draws from a wide range, a destination restaurant. The location is ideal for drawing some IUPUI lunch business, as well as Indiana Government Center employees that have a short canal walk to Zing, not to mention the building itself has very high visibility on West St.

Most importantly, it has a hip feel and a relatively low price point ($7-11 for most plates) that will appeal to the young professionals that predominate in the nearby apartment complexes. That's key, in my opinion. You can have a great restaurant with good buzz that draws people for a time, but the people living closest to a restaurant -- the ones that will continue to frequent it after the buzz has worn off -- are your bread and butter. You better appeal to them, and I think Zing will do just that.

And of course, there's the draw of the wrap-around balcony. Some have worried that the street noise from West St. would be a distraction. Far from it, I thought it actually added to the lively atmosphere and reminded you that you were in a city. Yesterday, downtown happened to be hosting a trifecta of sporting events with the Fever, Indians, and Colts all starting games at 7pm, so the road was particularly packed around 6-6:30. On a typical night, traffic on West St. drops to a trickle after 6pm, so I wouldn't worry about it. Of course, if a little street noise bothers you, you can always duck inside where the brick walls block out any noise outside.

They have parking for 25 or 30 cars in their lot, with another 15 or so metered spaces on Indiana that are free after 6pm, with little or no demand from other businesses. Add the relatively dense (and getting denser) population within just a couple blocks and getting people into Zing shouldn't be a problem.

Dinner service officially starts at 5pm on Monday the 1st and lunch service is added the following week, Monday the 8th at 11am.

Unfortunately, my camera died after just two shots last night, but I'll provide them here at the end, paired with earlier shots, so you can see the effect that the final week of little details had on the upstairs area.

Photos: Cosmopolitan Update from the Canal Side

If you stumbled upon this post looking for information about the Cosmopolitan fire on March 12, 2009, information and photos can be found here and here.

While the work on the Cosmopolitan is still largely focused on the Senate and Michigan corner -- they recently started working on more wood framing north on the Senate side of the project -- visible work is finally showing up on the canal side. These photos were taken August 27th.

Looking SE, with the downtown skyline in the distance.

Looking north from the Historical
Landmarks Foundation parking lot.

Looking down to canal level from the same location.

Looking north at canal level in front of
the Historic Landmarks Foundation.

Looking northeast from the same location.

The backside of the Senate/Michigan corner from the
Historic Landmarks Foundation parking lot.