Amid the holiday season, I thought I’d take a look at the history behind some of the city’s oldest church buildings west of Meridian Street.
They include the building that housed the city’s oldest African American congregation for decades, the city’s first community center for Jewish residents, a Haughville church built for westside immigrants and the city’s oldest church.
While you’re reading about these important buildings, don’t forget to let me know which places you’re curious about by signing up for the Westside Beat texting service. Just text “WESTSIDE” to 317-659-7738.
The city’s oldest African American congregation
Organized in 1836, the Bethel Cathedral African Methodist Episcopal Church is the oldest African American congregation in Indianapolis. Members hold services at the church on Zionsville Road in Pike Township.
But for most of its history Bethel Cathedral AME was based in a historic building downtown on West Virginia Street that’s being preserved as part of a hotel project.
According to the church’s official history, the Bethel Cathedral AME Church was established in 1836 by a barber named Augustus Turner. The congregation’s first meetings were held in Turner’s home, a log cabin that once sat at the corner of Georgia Street and Capitol Avenue.
The congregation moved to Georgia Street from 1841 until 1857. Members then bought a church building from Christ Church, the city’s white Episcopal congregation, on what would become Monument Circle.
Bethel Cathedral AME moved the building to Georgia Street, where it became a hub for the Underground Railroad. That building was destroyed in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, in a fire that was believed to be set by slavery supporters.
The congregation raised funds and rebuilt the wooden church while planning to build a new brick church at 414 W. Vermont St. Construction on the new church was completed in 1869. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
Bethel Cathedral AME held services at the West Vermont Street building well into the 21st century, but the building began deteriorating over time.
In 2015, church members attempted to raise $2 million to repair the building but were unsuccessful. Without the money to repair the building, the congregation decided to sell the property to SUN Development and Management Corp., which agreed to preserve the building but incorporated it into its Homewood Suites by Hilton hotel.
Indianapolis’ oldest remaining church
The history of the Christ Church Cathedral, the oldest building on Monument Circle, began with the work of a few dozen Indianapolis Episcopalians.
The city’s Episcopalian congregation was an informal one from the time of the city’s founding in 1821 until 1837. Services were held at people’s homes. That changed when 30 Episcopalians purchased a lot to establish the Parish of Christ Church.
The congregation built a wooden gothic-style church at 125 Monument Circle, which it would use for the next two decades.
By 1856, church leaders sought to build a new church for the growing parish. They held church subscription drives and sold their wooden church building to Bethel Cathedral AME to raise funds for the new building.
The new building cost $32,438, or about $1.2 million in today’s dollars, and was completed in 1859. The parish held its first services there May 22, 1859.
The church is still there on the northeast corner of Monument Circle and serves as the home of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis.
In 2018, the church drew national attention after it placed statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph behind an enclosed chain link fence to protest the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that sent immigrant families in the country without legal status to Department of Homeland Security detention centers and separated children from their parents.
The first support centers for Indianapolis’ burgeoning Jewish population
Several Jewish community centers were built throughout the city’s history to help poor and immigrant Jews during their first years in a new country.
The first Jewish residents in Indianapolis were immigrants from Poland and Germany who arrived in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The city’s Jewish population grew over the decades and built Jewish neighborhoods in the near south and east sides of Indianapolis. But after an influx of immigrants from central and eastern Europe in the late 1880s, the synagogues, clubs and schools built for the city’s Jews could not keep up with demand.
In 1903, a group of prominent Jewish women that were part of the Jewish Federation in Indianapolis established a community center called the Nathan Morris House at 528 S. Illinois St. Morris was a Jewish attorney in Indianapolis who lost his life saving relatives from a house fire. The Morris House no longer exists, and its former location is now a U.S. Postal Service distribution center.
After about a decade, the Nathan Morris House was at capacity, and the Jewish Federation purchased an athletic club at 17 W. Morris St. for a new Jewish Community Center. The center included a gymnasium, game rooms, meeting rooms, a library, showers and an outdoor playground. The center was demolished in the 1940s and is now the site of an apartment complex.
By the mid 1920s, the group purchased a new community center on 23rd Street and Meridian Street with a bequeathal from wealthy German Jewish immigrant Raphael Kirshbaum.
According to the Indiana Historical Society, the center offered cultural programming to appeal to the more educated residents of the city, including adult education programs and, by 1927, the Kirshbaum Orchestra, which would later become the Indianapolis Symphony.
By the 1930s, the city’s Jewish center had shifted from the south side to the north side, and by the end of World War II, the Kirshbaum Center and the original Jewish Community Center on Morris Street were in a state of disrepair, according to the Indiana Historical Society. Programs were discontinued on Morris Street in 1947, and the Kirshbaum Center was put up for sale in 1951.
The Jewish Federation raised money and opened a new Jewish Community Center at 6701 Hoover Road in 1958, where it remains today.
A Haughville church for westside immigrants
A Haughville church established to meet the needs of an increasing immigrant population still stands at the corner of North Holmes Avenue and West St. Clair Street.
Several steel plants established themselves in the neighborhood that would become Haughville and would attract central and eastern European immigrants to work at the plants in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The largest such plant was established by Benjamin Haugh, the neighborhood’s namesake. The other, the National Malleable Castings Co. near the corner of Belmont Avenue and Michigan Street, sent recruiters to central Europe to persuade workers to leave their home countries and head to Indianapolis. The company would pay for the workers’ travel to the U.S. in exchange for an agreement to work at the plant for a set period of time.
Workers from Slovenia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made up a large majority of the workers, and by 1900 half of Haughville’s population was Slovenian, according to IU Indianapolis’ Polis Center.
Slovenian groups petitioned the Archdiocese of Indianapolis for permission to build their own church, and they received permission to build the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in 1906. Construction was completed in 1907, and the Rev. Joseph Lavric, a priest from Slovenia, led the congregation. At its peak in 1956, the church had a membership of 2,250.
Over time, the Slovenian residents moved to neighboring areas, including Speedway and Avon. The church closed in 2014, and the congregation was merged with St. Anthony of Padua’s Church. The Holy Trinity Catholic Church building still stands and is owned by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
Many artifacts from the church, including some restored church bells, were transferred to the St. Malachy Catholic Church in Brownsburg.
Mirror Indy reporter Enrique Saenz covers west Indianapolis. Contact him at 317-983-4203 or enrique.saenz@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @heyEnriqueSaenz or on Bluesky at @enriquesaenz.bsky.social.
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