When designing a new mural for the westside Rhodius Park, two Indianapolis artists sketched out several familiar features. There were the hickory flowers that grow near the pool. Monarch butterflies. Fish from the White River. The park’s baseball diamonds, and houses on an overlooking hill.
But one longtime neighbor noticed something was missing.
Where was the rocket slide?
“It would burn you in the summertime, and it was freezing cold in the wintertime,” said Ralphie Cronnon, 59, about the metal slide. “Everybody I know that ever went on it has fallen off the top of it. It felt like it was like two and a half stories tall.”
The 26-foot-tall slide — torn down long ago — played an important role in the childhoods of thousands of kids who grew up around the park at Belmont Avenue and Wilkins Street.
Cronnon remembers when her childhood friends would cram into the back of her father’s pickup truck and head to the park for a fun day of swimming and playing. Kids would climb up into the metal fuselage of the rocket and shoot back down the slide. Older, braver kids would climb the rocket from the outside — a sometimes painful rite of passage.
The rocket and other playground equipment at Rhodius Park were torn down in the early 2000s due to safety concerns, but by the time that happened, the rocket slide had made its mark.
So when Cronnon had the opportunity to share input about the mural design, she reached out to the artists.
The artists — Rafael Caro and Erica Parker — were happy to oblige.
And they’ve continued working with Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, the nonprofit that funded the mural. The goal is to help foster a sense of community among residents through new art — and maybe bringing additional benefits, such as preventing crime by keeping up the area.
Designing the Rhodius Park mural
Keep Indianapolis Beautiful CEO Jeremy Kranowitz told Mirror Indy that, when planning a mural, the nonprofit doesn’t want to force ideas on residents.
“We make sure that we are partnering with the community where we’re putting the mural up,” he said, “and that it’s done collaboratively, so that they help choose the artist and the design elements that they’d like to see.”
Kranowitz said residents and members of neighborhood organizations like the West Indianapolis Neighborhood Congress helped Indy Parks and Keep Indianapolis Beautiful not only select the two artists but also what the mural should portray.
Once the design was finalized, about three dozen volunteers from the Eli Lilly and Co. technology center, which is about a mile from the park, helped paint the 10 sections that make up the mural, finishing about 80% of the project. Caro continues to add finishing touches to the mural. He expects the work to be complete later this month.
Caro and Parker were trained at IU Indianapolis’ Herron School of Art + Design. Caro studied illustration, art history and visual communication, and Parker studied integrative studio practices.
The artists used the skills they learned in school and creating art on Indianapolis streets to make the design bold yet simple enough for volunteers to help with the painting.
“You gotta let things marinate, and then kind of look at the drawing board and say, ‘OK, how can we make this work,’” Parker said. “And that’s where art, I would say, is kind of like science in that way, because it’s all experimentation and process.”
Caro developed the design to be paint-by-numbers, so volunteers could easily look up what color to paint the features. Every part of the design labeled with the number six would need to be painted a color called summer sky. Sevens were light blue, and eights were periwinkle. Eleven colors were assigned numbers in total.
The artists also had to think about another challenge.
“Painting on brick is really challenging,” Caro said, “you have to go in there with the brush and get into every little crack.”
The trick, Caro said, is to fill in those cracks without making it look sloppy and uneven.
That’s something that the artists kept in mind during the design process by incorporating the brick lines into the design and making sure the fine details won’t end up lost in recesses.
The technique, Parker said, is not something learned at art school.
“When we started muraling it was on crummy brick walls,” Parker said. “You only really learn how to manipulate it when you’re in it.”
More than just a pretty park
The park’s new look could help keep crime away from the neighborhood.
Keep Indianapolis Beautiful partnered with the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health to study how the organization’s greenspaces affected crime. Researchers found a 12% reduction in gun violence up to a half-mile away from areas improved by the organization compared to places without improvements.
“In some places, people might be scared to go out of their houses or might just not have a place to engage with their neighbors,” Kranowitz said. “Now there is a shelter where they can have a coffee, and there is a nature play area for their kids to play, and it creates all of these new reasons to engage with a formerly abandoned space that it doesn’t become interesting anymore for vice.”
Keep Indianapolis Beautiful has created 65 parks and pocket parks throughout Indianapolis. It has funded art projects at many of those parks and other locations, including other murals created by Caro, at the Unity Park in the Hillside neighborhood and under the Interstate 65/70 north split.
Cronnon, the longtime westsider who asked for the rocket slide, said the park attracted the wrong kind of attention for too long. Vandals lit fires in trash cans close to the pool and broke into the pool’s concession stand. She attributes that to a lack of improvements at the park.
“It’s sad when you see kids messing around and doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing when they could be playing some kind of sport or an activity here,” she said.
Now she hopes the new art will bring more people to the park and inspire the city to invest more in West Indianapolis.
“I love it when the park is full of people,” she said.
Mirror Indy reporter Enrique Saenz covers west Indianapolis. Contact him at 317-983-4203 or enrique.saenz@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @heyEnriqueSaenz.
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