When Logan Sancewich started at Purdue University, he didn’t know much about the city of Indianapolis.
“I knew the races happened there, the 500,” said Sancewich, who just finished his sophomore year. “But that was it.”
That changed in fall 2025 when he enrolled in Community of Inquiry, a required course for honors students.
Sancewich spent the fall semester researching Bethel A.M.E Church to contribute to a class project about the buildings on and around Indiana Avenue.
The final study, published in December 2025, included maps, photos and detailed descriptions about a series of landmarks, including the Madam Walker Legacy Center, Mary E. Cable Elementary School and Lockefield Gardens.
The study is especially relevant as Purdue looks to further develop its Indianapolis campus. The university recently approved the purchase of the former Second Baptist Church, located on Indiana Avenue and Michigan Street.
Purdue previously bought property for what’s now the college’s student center on Indiana Avenue, Canal Square Apartments on West Street and the former site of the American College of Sports Medicine on Michigan Street.
Get the backstory
The area has a complicated relationship with development. Thousands were displaced when IU acquired land in the 1960s to build what would eventually become IUPUI. The university’s development contributed to the fall of Indiana Avenue, once considered Indy’s “Black Wall Street.”
That history was top of mind for professor Ashima Krishna, who taught the Purdue class and supervised the project for the university’s Urban Matters lab, which she runs. She wanted to give students a way to learn about urban development and research while also keeping the Indianapolis community’s feedback in mind.
“I’ve been a huge advocate always for expanding student skills and abilities, expanding their awareness about the world around them and the places and spaces they inhabit,” said Krishna. “This was a great way to do that in the classroom.”
Exploring history
The project began shortly after Purdue officially split from IU Indianapolis in 2024.
Krishna, who’s also an architect and historic preservation expert, said she started having conversations with Purdue’s university architect Amber Chellis-Omedo about documenting and mapping the area where the school was looking to build its new campus.
Two Indianapolis students started doing research in summer 2025. In the fall, Krishna expanded the project to her Community of Inquiry class.
Because the honors students were all in West Lafayette, the class made multiple trips to Indy throughout the semester to do research at the Indiana Historical Society.
Students worked in pairs to research a site. Krishna selected locations from Indiana Avenue’s National Register of Historic Places, which includes all the buildings in the 500 block of Indiana Avenue, as well as a list of properties Purdue had acquired or was interested in.
Along with site visits, the class heard from local experts such as Claudia Polley, who founded a group previously called Urban Legacy Lands Initiative, and Sampson Levingston, who regularly gives tours of Indiana Avenue.
The final product included detailed histories of both iconic landmarks and everyday spaces that were once part of the fabric of Indiana Avenue.
“It was a grocery store, or it was a hair salon,” Krishna said. “It was important.”
‘History is about people’
Vedha Masuraha, an incoming junior at Purdue, was nervous going into Krishna’s class last fall.
Masuraha didn’t have experience with historical research — she’s usually more of a science person. But throughout the semester, she became both more comfortable with the research and aware of the deep connections that Indianapolis communities have to the Indiana Avenue sites.
“It’s really cool to see how directly it impacts a person,” Masuraha said. “It’s not just like, a one and done.”
Masuraha and her class partner researched Mary E. Cable Elementary School, named for an influential Indianapolis educator and principal who taught Black children during school segregation in Indy.
The school closed and became IUPUI property in 1980. The building was razed in 2006. Today, it’s a parking garage.
When the study was published in December, Masuraha said it was surreal to see something she poured so much work into come to fruition. As Purdue builds out its campus, she hopes that people can connect with the history of Indiana Avenue and become invested in what comes next.
“I hope that people learn about not only the past history, but what is to come,” she said, “And they’re excited, and they get involved, and they have more of a connection to the location.”
As for Sancewich, his experience researching taught him not just about Indianapolis, but how history is really just a collection of stories.
He spent the spring semester working as an intern for one of Krishna’s other projects, and plans to continue exploring how to integrate history into his psychology and political science studies.
“History is about people more than it’s about anything else,” Sancewich said. “It’s very much ingrained (in me) now, that personal part of history, and of Indianapolis as well.”
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Claire Rafford covers higher education for Mirror Indy in partnership with Open Campus. Contact Claire by email claire.rafford@mirrorindy.org, on most social media @clairerafford or on Signal 317-759-0429.
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