Neglected Indy neighborhood rising up behind winningest volleyball coach in Butler history
Gregg DoyelINDIANAPOLIS – Outside one of the oldest firehouses in Indianapolis, giant stereo speakers are blaring Phil Collins’ ominous lyrics all over this neglected neighborhood on the near northwest side, where homeless encampments pop up regularly and drug dealers hide inside abandoned houses until the police cars parked nightly near the BP gas station on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street drive away.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight…
A few blocks away from the BP, a few blocks from the nocturnal business conducted beneath the shoes draped over power lines, a neighborhood is rising up outside this firehouse. And it's rising up behind the all-time winningest volleyball coach in Butler history.
This is one of those stories, and this is one of those neighborhoods, you have to see to believe. But be careful, because an army of single moms and senior citizens and other concerned residents on the near northwest side, fed up of fearing the dark, are about to go marching down the street. Do not get in their way. Don’t get distracted, either.
“Watch out there,” says one of the men leading the walk, pointing down at a ruptured sidewalk. He’s pointing out the obvious — looks like an earthquake hit this sidewalk — because he knows there are other things to see, other distractions to avoid, on this walk:
The house next door gutted by a fire but still standing, barely, what you’d call “abandoned” only if you don’t notice the occasional glow of a cigarette, or something else, inside a window. The home next to that one, with “No Trespassing” and “Private Property” signs tacked alongside boarded-up windows. The lot one property over, empty except for the rusted-out dipper stick and bucket of a backhoe in the weeds. The field next to that, with an erector set of plywood hammered together. Looks like a treehouse, only there’s no tree.
This is the neighborhood where Sharon Clark decided in 2012 to chase one dream, for herself, before giving it up to chase another dream for the community. This is the neighborhood where people are marching — west on Udell Street, right on Clifton, right on 29th, right on Rader — past decaying houses and empty lots and into glimpses of hope. A woman sitting on her porch with a grandchild. A church with a community refrigerator outside its front door, stocked with free yogurt for the hungry. A home with a fresh coat of green paint. An elementary school.
“Communities like this, so often people cling to home and stay inside — they don’t go outside much for a fear of safety,” Clark is saying. “We’re trying to reclaim the space outdoors.”
Clark, her husband, Tim — a former NCAA official who coached Brebeuf to a 2023 IHSAA lacrosse state championship — and their army of volunteers are staking their claim with grudging acceptance from area drug dealers and other conductors of illicit commerce. When Sharon and Tim Clark bought the old firehouse in 2012 and began cleaning it out, the urban entrepreneurs who did their business across the street at Frank Young Park tried to scare them away. One time Sharon Clark was upstairs, doing remodeling work, when she looked out a window and spotted a young woman stealing tools from her car.
“We had break-ins all the time,” Sharon says, “until we came to a truce. Now we’re on some sort of ‘off limits’ list.”
Mostly. A man with a gun showed up a few weeks ago, shouting at one of the muralists painting a message of hope on the old firehouse. The man was angry, Clark says, “that his sidewalk had been taken.”
They’re taking back a lot more than a sidewalk here on the near northwest side. Sharon Clark and her supporters are taking back an entire neighborhood, with dreams that extend to Riverside Park more than a mile away. It’s audacious, the vision Sharon Clark has for this neighborhood — and this city — but her intentions are made clear on a metal sign outside this firehouse, built by the city in 1897 as Engine House No. 23.
The metal sign shows the new name of the old IFD fire station:
Aspire House.
'What’s the city doing for people here?'
Anita Callaway is marching ferociously down Udell Street, then right on Clifton and right on 29th Street. She’s lived in this neighborhood for years, and she’s not afraid to be out on these streets. Never has been, but then, she’s ferocious, an IT professional who moved here almost a decade ago and decided to stay.
The Aspire House march has reached 29th Street when Callaway, 59, spots an elderly woman sitting on a porch with a young child. The march continues without Callaway.
“How you doin'?” she calls out sweetly to the woman on the porch. “You doin' good? You know we’ve got a building over there — the old firehouse?”
The woman nods: “I know the old firehouse.”
Callaway continues.
“One night a month we have a Sunday supper,” she says. “It’s tonight. You ought to come! We also have community events, cooking classes, youth sports. And bring your baby. We have things for kids too!”
The elderly woman nods again, and Callaway continues her walk.
“The Aspire House is ours,” she says. “It’s for us.”
Callaway walks past a dark house.
“What’s the city doing for the people out here?” she says. “People in this area feel like nobody cares, which is why some people around here” — Callaway makes a gesture at the darkened house, at the danger lurking inside — “feel they can do whatever they want out here.”
Callaway brightens up. This is the first of four Sunday suppers for the Aspire House this summer — also July 14, Aug. 18 and Sept. 15 — which makes this a night to celebrate. Old Engine House No. 23, a beautiful piece of Romanesque Revival architecture that had been abandoned for nearly 50 years before the Clarks bought it in 2012, remains a work in progress but had its grand opening during NBA All-Star Weekend in February. The Aspire House has held these supper nights since 2021, and while tonight’s crowd of about 80 is sitting at tables on sidewalks outside, this is the first time the building has been open for dinner guests to come inside.
Smaller events have already been held inside, mainly cooking and nutrition classes for residents of this food desert.
“Let me show you something,” Callaway says, pulling out her phone and scrolling through photos before stopping on a picture of something that looks delicious.
“Vegan carnitas!” she’s shouting. “Made with jackfruit! Did you know it comes in a can?”
She scrolls some more, showing a picture of ... is that pulled pork?
“That’s jackfruit!” she says. “I learned about it here.”
The walk has come full circle, outside the Aspire House, where another song is blaring through the speakers — “She’s a Bad Mama Jama” by Carl Carlton — as a man walks past the old firehouse, pushing a grocery cart holding a wooden guitar.
'Why wouldn’t you help them?'
Sharon Clark (nee Peoples) was raised, in her words, “as a Navy brat.” One of her earliest memories was visiting her dad at the old naval brig at Pearl Harbor, where Linwood Peoples was a warden.
“We moved a lot,” she says, “but everywhere we moved people showed up and helped get us acclimated.”
Tim Clark grew up differently, desperately poor in Brunswick, a coastal Georgia town you don’t hear about until something happens like the 2020 murder of unarmed Ahmaud Arbery. Tim’s mom died when he was 7, and his dad died soon after, which is how he came to be raised by his oldest sister, a single mom of two near Syracuse, N.Y. It was in upstate New York where Tim Clark discovered lacrosse, discovered he was good at it, and used it to get a degree — and four NCAA Division II national championship rings — at Hobart College.
Their childhoods shaped who they became. Sharon, a volleyball star at Cal State-Sacramento, coached six seasons at UC-Davis and at Butler from 2000-22, where she served as president of the American Volleyball Coaches Association and earned the Sam Lacy Pioneer Award in 2007. Tim worked 10 years for the NCAA in youth and outreach programs — he met Sharon on an NCAA business trip to UC-Davis — and coached lacrosse at Park Tudor (2010-15) and Brebeuf (2015-23). He retired from Brebeuf after winning the 2023 Class 1A lacrosse title to focus on growing the sport in the inner city, and on the Aspire House.
“I have a strong sense of a community from my childhood,” Sharon says, “and from parents who were always about: ‘Why wouldn’t you give it to them, why wouldn’t you help them?’ It was never a question of: ‘Should I?’ If you can help someone rise up, that’s what you should do.
“Tim and I have always had a sense of — not obligation, but we feel it was our destiny to be able to provide that. He’s looking for that little kid who doesn’t have any options, because he sees that little kid in himself. We feel it’s our job to be those connectors, because there were people in our life who didn’t know us and helped us.”
In 2012 they bought Engine House 23, dormant for nearly 50 years, as a studio for Sharon’s passion for interior decorating. Living about 10 miles to the northwest, the Clarks bought it sight-unseen on the inside — “no keys,” Sharon says. Her dad, the retired Navy prison warden, had to break into the building, where they discovered an eclectic array of junk where firetrucks were once parked: old cars, a forklift, church pews, piles of heels meant for women’s shoes. As they worked inside, wistful community members kept dropping by, having a look, telling the story of their neglected neighborhood.
Sharon settled on a new dream.
“We had to give this facility back to the community,” she says.
They have received grants and donations and dipped deep into their personal accounts — “My son lost his college fund,” Sharon says, “I’ll tell you that much” — to bring the Aspire House to life. They offer cooking classes and a community garden, hold chess tournaments at Frank Young Park, conduct oral histories with elderly people in the neighborhood and offer van service to local youths for nearby tennis, lacrosse and skateboarding facilities.
“We have to take them out of their neighborhood,” she says, “because where do they go for sports and fitness? And where do they go that’s affordable? That doesn’t exist in center township.”
This is Sharon Clark’s most audacious goal yet.
Aspire House today, Riverside Park tomorrow?
“Did you know Riverside Park is larger than Central Park?” she’s asking, and it's a good question. Did you know Riverside Park, those 863 acres between 18th and 38th streets — little more than a mile from Aspire House — is larger than the world-famous park in New York City (843 acres)?
The fire within Sharon Clark burns hottest for the Aspire House, but Riverside Park simmers on her back burner. The city released its 20-year master plan for Riverside Regional Park in 2017 and has accomplished some goals in seven years, including the opening of the Taggart Memorial Amphitheatre in 2021 and the 1½-mile Riverside Promenade for walking, running and biking in 2023.
But Clark wants more, and she wants it now. She sees indoor and outdoor facilities for tennis, pickleball and softball, and room for more U.S. Olympic trials to accompany events like the 2024 USA Swimming Trials.
“I know Sharon Clark,” former IU athletic director Fred Glass says admiringly, “and she’s a force of nature.”
Doyel in 2016: IU AD Fred Glass has his reasons for shaving his head for St. Baldrick's
Game recognize game, as they say. Glass has served as president of the Marion County Capital Improvement Board, and president of the 2011 Super Bowl Committee. Another civic leader, Jim Morris, counts Clark among the city’s brightest lights.
“We’re blessed to have many here in Indianapolis,” says Morris, an internationally acclaimed humanitarian and a central figure behind Downtown’s development into a major sports destination, “but every city could use more people like Sharon Clark. She cares about the youth — particularly those that are vulnerable, and lonely — and she loves Indianapolis, and she recognizes we could always do more.”
Clark considers those 863 acres between 18th and 38th streets and sees a track. She sees volleyball courts and lacrosse fields. She’s attended the ATP Cincinnati Open, and wants one of those at Riverside Park.
“Why should I have to go to Cincinnati for a tennis tournament?” she asks. “Why don’t we have that here?”
Now someone’s asking Clark a question: “Ever been told you’re a dreamer?”
She dissolves into laughter.
“I think Jim Morris thought I was crazy when I first started talking to him about all this,” Clark says of a man she calls a mentor. “We have elite youth sports facilities in Westfield, Fishers and Carmel, but not in center township. The reality is, the urban core is coming back. People are moving back. That’s why they keep building a zillion condos downtown. The real-estate side of me thinks this is a dream spot.”
The city’s master plan for Riverside Park taps into that movement — but the plan is economically, shall we say, ambitious.
“Our goal and plan is to be a driving force to find funding for that park,” Clark says. “I’m not driven to make it like any other Indy park. We are driven to make it a sports destination. It has that potential. It’s an economic driver for this neighborhood. Think of the jobs for people who live around here.”
For Clark, it all comes back to this neighborhood on the near northwest side, a spot so volatile that the Indianapolis Ten Point Coalition — Rev. Charles Harrison’s group that patrols nine of the most dangerous neighborhoods in town — has identified it as a priority. Two people were shot dead in November near the BP at 29th and MLK Street, the latest killings in a neighborhood with too many memorials lining too many utility poles.
Former Butler athletes help out
On this night in June, as a crowd lines up outside for the symbolic walk through this once-vibrant urban neighborhood, one of Clark’s former players at Butler is preparing food inside. Sara Marshall was in Clark’s first recruiting class at Butler, where she met her future husband, Butler basketball star Mike Marshall. Sara, who counts Sharon and Tim Clark as mentors, serves on the Aspire House board. Her husband and their three kids helped clean out the firehouse, and find other ways to volunteer even now.
“It’s hard to tell Sharon no,” Sara Marshall says, “and not because she’s asking — but because she cares so much. Her dreams are so big, but she feels she can reach them.”
Among those dreams already reached: Four rental residences, fully furnished and ready to go, inside the Aspire House. Two are earmarked for young teachers at nearby local elementary schools and offered at below-market pricing, and two others for artists-in-residence.
Brooke McGee, a Butler sophomore from Leo High near Fort Wayne, recently moved into one of those residences. She has started a mural of giant sunflowers on the back wall of the three-story firehouse, but to keep going McGee will need a 30-foot extension ladder. And to do that, she’ll need to conquer her fears.
“I’m afraid of heights,” she says with a nervous laugh, but scoffs at the suggestion that someone else could finish the mural she started. “I’ve just got to keep going.”
Higher and higher she’ll climb, painting sunflowers that soar above Udell Street and the neighborhood below.
How to help Aspire House
To volunteer or contribute to Aspire House, visit the Aspire Higher Foundation at www.aspirehouse.org/contact-us/
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.