The 'Hood?

So I'm driving home from the monthly club meeting at Marion County Fish & Game last Tuesday night, and I decided to take the more northerly of the two major routes, since the southern one runs in on 38th Street and generally if something bad happens in Indianapolis at night, it will happen at the corner of Thirty-somethingth Street and Something Avenue.

The alternate route is to zip one more exit up I-465 and come home via 56th Street instead.

At the intersection of 56th & Georgetown, the convenience store parking lot was full of flashing lights. Looked like four cop cars had one car pulled over. Probably not just a speeding ticket...

While I was trying to reach in with as much zoom as the Lunar's 18-55mm lens had, an ambulance came running code up Georgetown from the south, turning west on 56th... Busy night.

So the next morning I crank up Google to see if there was any news, and there wasn't. At least, not from Tuesday night. But the corner of 56th & Georgetown itself? It made the news plenty...

• "Following the first shooting, Tyson made another U-turn and continued southbound on Georgetown before heading west on 56th Street..."


• "Man injured in shooting near 56th and Georgetown Road"


• "According to Indianapolis Metropolitan police, officers tried to pull the SUV over near 56th Street and Georgetown Road, but the vehicle didn’t stop."


• "Police said the victim was shot at The Woods at Eagle Creek apartments, near West 56th Street and Georgetown Road. There was a report of shots fired at that location at 6:36 p.m."


• "It happened at a clothing store called Hang Time at 56th Street and Georgetown Road early Saturday morning."

...and that's just from the first page of Google news hits on "Georgetown and 56th".

Mind you, if you follow that street just another mile or two east and it becomes Kessler Boulevard and passes through some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Indianapolis.

The trip in on 38th Street takes you through neighborhoods that signal their roughness in typical inner city ways: Boarded-up homes and businesses, graffiti, generic urban blight. But to look around with a casual glance at the corner of 56th & Georgetown, you'd just see convenience stores and strip malls, subdivisions of single-family houses, garden apartement complexes, and fairly conventional suburbia. You'd need to notice the tenants of the strip malls...the payroll cashing places, pre-paid phone stores, bottle shops, and other indicators...to realize that you were in a neighborhood where things could suddenly get every bit as sporty as they could down in the more obvious 'hood.
.