Alive And Dead in Indiana
“Like me, it has no reason for being here. The people of the state simply wanted their capital in the middle of Indiana, paced off the distance, and brought an apprentice of L’Enfant out from Washington, D.C., to make all the same mistakes in this city’s plans. Streets, named after states, radiate from circles where monumental statuary bases are waiting for statues, waiting for someone to become famous enough to become a statue. Everywhere you look in this city you see these flat-topped pyramids..., empty niches in building facades, friezes without faces, metopes without bas-relief. The circles here, too, were planned for defense purposes as if someone would wish to take a thing that was never meant to be. The theory was that batteries positioned in the circles could command three hundred and sixty degrees of the neighborhood. The airplane makes this all silly, of course. But, on the other hand, it is only from the air that you can see the plan, gain any perspective on the order here. Instead, the circles cause traffic jams, rotaries coursing with cars at all hours (late-model plum-colored Chevrolets, it seems, are everywhere), all looking for numbered streets.MoreLess
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