Outsized Landmarks in Jeopardy

In ancient Asian countries, white elephants were considered holy, so the gift of an albino pachyderm could ruin the recipient who was saddled with expensive care and public access for worship. In current parlance, the community equivalent is a useless, expensive-to-maintain behemoth—a factory complex built in the twentieth century to manufacture a long-gone product, an empty multi-story furniture warehouse on Main Street, a decommissioned military structure. In big cities and especially in small towns, white elephants play a similarly outsized role in the streetscape and local history.

When a landmark gets the white elephant label, the word demolition usually surfaces because, just as in ancient Thailand, the place is big, useless, and expensive to maintain—and often blighted. Indiana Landmarks tries to save these historic structures, often naming them to our 10 Most Endangered and helping to identify new purposes and imaginative developers. We also promote National Register status for such places, because it provides the potential for preservation tax credits, another financial incentive for renovation. The Indiana legislature had the same idea but a different creature in mind when it created the Industrial Recovery Tax Credit, known as DINO, as an incentive for developers who tackle industrial white elephants.

White elephants of the brick-and-mortar sort were usually workhorses in the beginning—sturdily built of lasting materials to withstand hard use—and eminently suitable for conversion to new purposes.

After languishing for years, the historic Mallory factory in Indianapolis has a new use that seems perfect. Purdue Polytechnic High School will eventually occupy two floors, a training ground for the scientists and engineers who’ll invent the next generation of products like the state-of-the-art batteries created by Mallory.

Moving City Hall

What do you do with a white elephant, or in Indiana tax code parlance, a dinosaur? A historic building that has long outlived its original purpose. Big. Blighted. Hard to envision in a new role. Important in local history. Huge visual presence. In Jeffersonville and New Albany, after elephants deteriorated for decades, forward-thinking city leaders reimagined the nineteenth-century behemoths as City Hall.

Outfitting an army takes lots of space. Jeffersonville’s Quartermaster Depot covered four city blocks—250,000 square feet across about 18 acres on East 10th Street, a busy state highway. From 1874 to the Korean War, the quadrangle-shaped site with a central administration building stored, repaired, invented, manufactured, and distributed Army necessities, from saddles to cook stoves, uniforms to medical supplies. Military man and architect General Montgomery Meigs designed the Greek Revival complex.

After the government auctioned it off in 1958, the complex housed a mix of retail, commercial, and manufacturing ventures, never functioning at full capacity. Fire destroyed the southeastern corner in 1992, and the owner chose partial demolition over repair, making the depot’s interior vulnerable to the elements. The complex joined Indiana Landmarks’ 10 Most Endangered list in 1996, and a second time in 1999 when the owner marketed the site as cleared land.

Unwilling to see such an important part of its heritage turned to dust, the City of Jeffersonville bought the site in 2001 and repurposed the three-story administration building as City Hall. Sun Properties, LLC of Louisville redeveloped the rest of the complex as Quartermaster Station, a mix of retail, restaurants, and medical facilities ringing the former administration building.