Walk into Great Oak Commons on a weekday evening and you will find gas lamps warming up before dusk, a gazebo that hosts nothing in particular most nights, and a sensory garden of perennials that someone clearly still weeds by hand. None of it belongs to the city. Every foot of it exists because a group of Old Northside homeowners decided, sometime after the neighborhood nearly lost its housing stock in the mid-20th century, that a district built entirely from private Victorian lots needed a commons anyway, and if nobody else was going to build one, they would.
That is the piece of Old Northside most guides skip past on their way to Mass Ave. The restaurants two blocks over get the attention. The parks the neighborhood built for itself do the quieter work of holding the community together, and this September is a good week to notice how.
A Neighborhood That Built Its Own Commons
Old Northside was platted as a district of large private lots for Indianapolis industrialists and civic figures, which meant it never got the kind of public square or green that older, denser neighborhoods took for granted. When the area started to recover from decades of decline after its 1978 listing on the National Register of Historic Places, residents faced a real gap: no park land, no obvious source of funding for one, and a neighborhood association without the legal standing to accept grants.
They solved both problems themselves. Great Oak Commons was assembled out of several vacant lots and landscaped as a Victorian walking park, complete with a central fountain and period gas lighting. Shawn Grove Park went in as a straightforward children's park with play equipment. And on the neighborhood's eastern edge, residents partnered with the city to reclaim abandoned land near the old Monon rail corridor, turning it into the Frank and Judy O'Bannon Soccer Park, now maintained by Indy Parks and used every summer by youth soccer leagues.
To make the funding work, residents formed the Old Northside Foundation in 1990 specifically so the neighborhood could accept gifts and apply for grants with proper 501(c)(3) status. It still oversees all three parks jointly with the neighborhood association today. That structure is unusual. Most Indianapolis neighborhoods rely on the city parks department or a developer's dedicated green space. Old Northside built its own nonprofit to fund benches, lighting, and programming, and three decades later that same foundation is still the one printing the fall calendar.
| Park | Character | Anchors the neighborhood's |
|---|---|---|
| Great Oak Commons (1427 N Park Ave) | Victorian walking park, fountain, gazebo, sensory garden | Evening gatherings and the annual fall party |
| Shawn Grove Park (1401 Alabama St) | Children's park with play equipment | Family programming, including December's lantern event |
| Frank and Judy O'Bannon Soccer Park | City-maintained field along the Monon Trail | Youth soccer through the summer |
The Week Around September 19
If you want to see why this matters in practice rather than in history, look at the stretch of days landing in a little over a month from now.
Indiana Landmarks Center, the restored former Central Avenue Methodist Church at 1201 Central Ave that now serves as the statewide headquarters for Indiana Landmarks, has been running its 90-minute Old Northside walking tour on a rotating schedule of Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings all summer. The next one on the schedule departs the Landmarks Center on September 17, covering roughly a mile and a half of the district's Victorian, Queen Anne, and Italianate houses along with the stories of the families who built them.
Two days later, on Saturday, September 19, the Old Northside Foundation hosts Plunder in the Park at Great Oak Commons from 6 to 9 p.m. It is a pirate-themed evening for families, and the board moved it this year from its old midsummer date to a cooler September night, trading July's heat for something more comfortable to sit through outdoors. That is a small decision, but it tells you something real: the people running this calendar are still adjusting it based on what actually works for the neighborhood, not defaulting to whatever date worked last year.
Zoom out and the fall rhythm the Foundation has set is consistent. The neighborhood-wide yard sale ran in July. Plunder in the Park lands in September. A Winter Light, a lantern gathering at Shawn Grove Park, closes the year on December 5. Three parks, three different kinds of gatherings, one small volunteer board still writing the schedule by hand.
Two Minutes Past The Foundation's Front Yard
None of this means Old Northside residents stay inside their own boundary lines. Mass Ave sits close enough that most people treat it as an extension of the neighborhood, and the businesses opening there this year are worth knowing about even if they are not technically inside Old Northside.
Goodies & Giggles, a toy store at 811 Mass Ave, opened inside a historic bank building and is owned by an Old Northside resident, which is a small but telling detail. The people building the neighborhood's parks are often the same people opening the storefronts a few blocks away.
Further into the Bottleworks District, the former Coca-Cola bottling plant complex that anchors the north end of Mass Ave, two more tenants are scheduled to open later this year: Amorino Gelato Al Naturale at 830 Massachusetts Ave and Bobbles & Lace Indianapolis at 820 Massachusetts Ave. Neither is inside Old Northside's boundary, but both are close enough to fold into an evening that starts at Great Oak Commons and ends with gelato a ten-minute walk away.
What The Parks Are Actually For
It would be easy to read all of this as a list of things to do and miss the actual point. Old Northside is a neighborhood of large private lots and no commercial district of its own, built by people wealthy enough in the 1890s to not need one. That same absence of shared space is what pushed later residents to build Great Oak Commons out of empty lots, add a children's park at Shawn Grove, and partner with the city on a soccer field along the Monon. The Foundation that funds all three still exists, still adjusts the calendar year to year, and still hosts the events that give the neighborhood its actual social rhythm rather than borrowing one from Mass Ave.
That is the part worth knowing if you already live here. The parks are not an amenity someone else provided. They are proof of what a neighborhood without a business district decided to build instead, and September 19 is as good a night as any to go see it in person.
If you are weighing a move into Old Northside or want a clearer sense of how a specific block or lot fits into this kind of neighborhood, Kelly Todd Group knows this district block by block and is glad to walk you through it.
