USA TODAY International Edition
Vintage White Castle building saved
INDIANAPOLIS One of Indianapolis’ smaller, more peculiar buildings has been saved from an uncertain future by historic preservationists.
It’s just 600 square feet but has a turret. It has ramparts. It was an early White Castle. Located in the St. Joseph neighborhood on a sliver of a lot at 660 Fort Wayne Ave., it is Indianapolis’ oldest surviving White Castle building and is thought to be the nation’s third oldest, Indiana Landmarks said in a statement announcing it had bought the building from the city for $ 1.
Landmarks will sell it to someone who promises to leave the brick exterior as is and do the necessary rehabilitation work, which isn’t much, said Landmarks’ Mark Dollase. Despite being empty for a decade, the building’s roof is new, and the electrical system works.
In the two business days after Landmarks’ announcement, the non- profit group received 10 phone calls from would- be buyers, including one interested in making it a restaurant and several wanting to use it for offices.
The little building was erected in 1927, one of three White Castles that opened in Indianapolis that year. Two didn’t survive. The one on Fort Wayne Avenue almost didn’t.
It was vacated in 1979 when White Castle built a much larger restaurant at 16th and Illinois Streets. The plan was to demolish the Fort Wayne Avenue building and make it a parking lot.
White Castle executives saw a downside in relinquishing control of the distinctive building by selling it. When a White Castle ceases to be a White Castle, John J. Hurwitz told The Indianapolis Star in 1983, “the first thing they usually do is bulldoze them down” because they are “very persnickety about what would go in there.” The building, after all, would still look like a White Castle.
But preservationists, seeing cultural significance, interfered and stopped the demolition. Hurwitz looked for a buyer, couldn’t find one and bought the building himself. He operated his real estate business out of it for more than a decade before selling it to the Indiana National Guard, which used it for a recruiting office. That office closed around 2005, and the building has been vacant since.