Riverside Family Center - 2420 E. Riverside Drive

WELCOME TO RIVERSIDE

This is a driving tour, but feel free to park and enjoy the different stops or bike the same path!

If you are biking the tour, the Riverside Family Center is the best place to park.

Neighborhood History

The Riverside Neighborhood boasts a rich history with roots in the City Beautiful movement. Early in the 1900’s, real estate developers and local landowners saw the opportunity to create a community that would be accessible by the newly expanded downtown transportation system. The “streetcar suburb” would feature landscaped traffic circles, generous front yard set-backs, wide boulevards, and glacier boulder retaining walls. A George Kessler designed park, Indianapolis’ first zoo, and the now-demolished Riverside amusement park, followed the success of the planned community. Today, Riverside enjoys a wide array of amenities and boasts a diverse and active neighborhood community.

The area now occupied by Riverside Park was developed for agricultural use beginning in the 1820s. The area along the White River became a popular recreation space during the last half of the nineteenth century and several privately owned parks opened along this corridor.

In 1898, the Board of Park Commissioners and Mayor Thomas Taggart negotiated the purchase of large tracts of land around Indianapolis to form new park and parkway systems in the northwest and northeast parts of the city. Originally designed by J. Clyde Power and George Kessler between 1898 and 1913 as part of the Park and Boulevard System for the city, Riverside Park was one of the largest municipal parks in the United States.

It would remain the largest park in Marion County until the creation of Eagle Creek Park in 1962. Investment in Riverside Park declined after World War II and many facilities were demolished and never replaced while others suffered decades of neglect. Interstate 65 was built through the park in the 1960s, destroying some of its popular recreational spaces.

Riverside Park was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 as a part of the Indianapolis Park & Boulevard System Historic District.