Indiana Square: one year later
As renovation plans move ahead, many tenants still unsettled after last April's storm
By Erika D. Smith
erika.smith@indystar.com
April 1, 2007
It's been a year since a brutal windstorm swept through Downtown Indianapolis and shredded one of the city's oldest high-rise office buildings.
Indiana Square still isn't the same.
Mismatched metal sheeting is wrapped around the outside of the building where windows once stood.
Many attorneys and accountants, locked out of the building for weeks last year, still aren't back in their offices. They're stuck in temporary space on adjacent floors or crammed in smaller offices, making do as best they can.
No, things aren't back to normal at Indiana Square -- and they won't be for a long time.
It will take until May 2009 to put a new exterior on the building, said Todd Maurer, principal of Indianapolis-based Halakar Properties, which co- owns the building.
The process, called overcladding, will give the high- rise a new, streamlined look but will require replacing what's left of the building's undamaged exterior walls.
Construction will begin in June. It will be a big, noisy project, but Maurer says it won't interrupt daytime work inside the building or traffic around it.
When finished, the building will have a nearly all-glass exterior, looking like many other high-rises Downtown. Currently, the building has vertical rows of windows interspersed with rows of aluminum panels.
"We want to create a very classy-looking building that will stand the test of time," he said.
Maurer declined to say how much the renovation will cost and said he still is negotiating with the building's insurance company.
"We're not trying to do anything over-the-top crazy," he said. "We're just trying to do what's necessary to make the building safe."
Misfortune and age are catching up with Indiana Square at a particularly inopportune time for its owners -- just as the amount of vacant office space Downtown is on the rise and rents are falling.
The vacancy rate at the end of 2006 was 15.9 percent, up from 14.6 percent the previous year, according to Colliers International's latest Commercial Real Estate Report. The average asking price for rent also has been falling and recently reached a new low.
But many tenants say they're loyal to Indiana Square, and they praise owners for making a tough situation bearable.
(They're also bound by multiyear leases.)
The building was 30 percent occupied when Halakar bought it in October 2001. Now it's 70 percent occupied.
The tenants still talk about the tough times, though.
They talk about the days and weeks after the April 2 storm when they couldn't get back in the building to retrieve files and equipment.
They talk about lost productivity. They talk about how the streets surrounding the building were blocked off, and how glass and metal and insulation blew for blocks.
They talk about the paperwork stolen by the wind. They talk about the guy whose desk chair was found on top of a parking deck around the corner. And they talk about how amazing it is that no one was hurt.
The waiting game
Bob Weddle misses his office.
The attorney at Tabbert Hahn Earnest & Weddle hasn't set foot in his spacious northwest-corner office since last spring. It was shortly after the windstorm claimed the office's three windows and the radiators beneath them, but somehow left papers stacked in neat piles on his desk.
Since then, Weddle has been crammed in a smaller office at the opposite end of Indiana Square's 19th floor. Other employees are in makeshift offices on the 15th floor.
Everything has been a hassle since April 2, 2006.
It was a hassle having to deal with construction workers as they boarded up and replaced some windows, gutted two uninhabitable offices and erected a facade of locked doors and drywall.
It was a hassle having to move into temporary quarters.
It's a hassle having to communicate with employees on two floors. Before the storm, the firm occupied only the 19th floor.
And it's a hassle knowing that none of it is going to change anytime soon.
But hassles aren't enough to make Tabbert Hahn Earnest & Weddle leave Indiana Square. The building's location, across from the Federal Courts Building and blocks from the City-County Building, is just too good.
"We're going to stay in the building," Weddle said.
Time to go
But at least one tenant didn't feel that way.
Hackman Hulett & Cracraft called Indiana Square home for 36 years.
Then the storm hit, and the attorneys couldn't get back into their offices. Riding out a 10- year lease didn't seem like a good idea anymore.
So the law firm moved into bigger offices in Chase Tower. It's the only tenant that others in the building said they could point to as having left Indiana Square since the storm.
"We had to make a quick decision, and this option was better," said partner Robert Hulett.
It wasn't an easy decision.
The owners of Indiana Square had promised the firm, as they had other tenants, temporary offices on an empty floor. But those offices had to be built, and that would take time.
Hackman Hulett & Cracraft didn't have time because it didn't have any extra offices for the five attorneys who lost their windows in the storm.
However, a larger space in Chase Tower was ready and waiting with furnished offices and meeting rooms, phone lines and Internet access. The firm decided paying the penalty to get out of its lease at Indiana Square was worth it.
"It seemed to be the least amount of disruption to the business," said partner Michael Cracraft.
Still, Hulett said he and the other partners are open to moving back to Indiana Square -- once the building is redesigned and brought up to current code.
"I think that will make a big difference," Hulett said.
Last man standing
Most people who saw Indiana Square on April 3, 2006, will tell you, Indianapolis is lucky the storm didn't hit an hour earlier, when John Mellencamp was crooning to a crowd of thousands on Monument Circle.
Many people are lucky to be alive.
Jonathan Polak might be one of the luckiest.
The attorney made a mad dash down 35 flights of steps just as the wind was turning an otherwise empty Indiana Square into Swiss cheese. He was working late at Sommer Barnard. The law firm lost 13 offices.
"It was like something out of a movie," he said.
Polak survived to win one of the biggest cases of his career, representing Fred Goldman in his fight to get money awarded in a decade-old civil lawsuit against O.J. Simpson.
The night of the storm, it was almost 10 when the windows in his office started shaking and Indiana Square's storm-warning system blared to life. "Don't be alarmed," it said. "Stay away from the windows."
Indeed.
Ten minutes later, the whole building swayed from one side to the other.
"I decided it was time to leave," Polak said.
He tried the elevators, but they weren't working, so he ran to the stairs.
His ears popped -- probably the moment the windows blew out. He ran down the steps. Gusts of wind attacked him. And then his wife called his cell phone. She was huddled with their children in the basement of their Carmel home, riding out a tornado warning. She wanted to know what he was doing and when he was coming home.
Polak made it to the lobby and then the parking lot.
By then the winds had died down. "When I pulled out of there, it looked like a war zone," he said.
"It was clear at that moment, that we weren't getting back into the building for a while."
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I really like the green color. They do need to get a move on with the remodel. Any decent storm that rolls through downtown will cause further damage. Living on borrowed time, as they say.
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