Damien Center - 26 North Arsenal Avenue

Year Built: 1914

Architecture Style: Italianate

Key Features:

• Decorative Brackets and Flat Roof
• Elaborate Door Surround with Stained Glass Fanlight over Door
• Tall Narrow Windows

This building was constructed in 1914 as the Evangelical Lutheran Trinity School. By 1991, it was the home of the Eastside Community Investments, Inc., a company that focused on rehabilitating many of the dilapidated homes and buildings in the area. ECI was founded in 1976.

• Mission - improve housing, turn renters into homeowners, attract economic development to the area

• Paint-up/Fix up Program; contractor assistance for elderly and handicapped; purchased decayed houses, arranged for renovation, resold them, used profits for more home improvements

• Improved some 140 houses in its first decade

• 1982 – renovated 1210 E Ohio Street (formerly headquarters of Outlaws Motorcycle Club)

• 1980s - ECI also helped paint houses for low income families, caulk windows "Caulk of the Town", and winterized 158 eastside houses.

• To learn more about this organization, read this article: https://shelterforce.org/1999/03/01/after-the-fall/.

In 2006, the Damien Center took over most of the building. The Damien Center had previously been housed in a building owned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis. The Damien Center was established in 1987 as a center for the care and prevention of AIDS/HIV and support of individuals living with AIDS/HIV. It has become the premier facility for this care in Indianapolis. The center began through an alliance of the Catholic Church, Evangelical Church, and the Bag Ladies.

It was named after the Blessed Father Damien, a Belgian Catholic priest famed for his compassionate care for those affected by Hansen's Disease (leprosy) on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Father Damien battled the religious and societal rejection of Hansen's Disease victims, living with and among them in the Molokai "lepers' colony" from 1873 until his death from Hansen's Disease in 1889. Father Damien was beatified by Pope John Paul II and became a saint in October of 2009.

To learn more about the Damien Center and its creation, read this thesis: http://hdl.handle.net/1805/22797