Not far from Pogue’s cabin was the site that Indiana’s newly organized General Assembly had picked, in 1820, for the capital of the four-year-old state. The assembly hired Alexander Ralston, who had worked with Washington. D.C.’s famed planner Pierre L’Enfant, to draw up a scheme for the new city. Ralston’s elegant design echoed D.C’s: Indianapolis would be a square grid, a mile on each side, with a circular plaza in the center and four wide, stately boulevards radiating out towards each of the square’s corners.
Except—in the southeast corner of the city, the gridded blocks tilted, askew. There was a black line snaking through the plan, throwing the grid off kilter. That was Pogue’s Run, ruining the city’s planned symmetry. [...]
Eventually, city planners decided they’d had enough. By 1905, they were planning a “straightjacket” for the stream, to keep its water contained, and in 1915, they trapped the run underground. [...]
Hyatt walked the whole length of the tunnel, twice, with “an urban explorer type of dude who had been through it before,” he says. It’s not entirely clear which government agency has responsibility for it, or whether they were trespassing. Inside the pitch-black tunnel built more than a century ago, the water can be deep, or, depending on the rainfall, can slow to almost nothing, leaving dry concrete pathways on either side.
