Indiana Art and Culture Roundtable

Mike Crowther is the president and CEO of the Indianapolis Zoological Society.

Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night!

The Indianapolis Zoo is the largest zoo in the country that receives no tax funding.  Nevertheless, with an annual operating budget of more than $20 million and over 200 full-time employees, the zoo creates an economic benefit through our expenditures and employment impact.  Additionally, our growth over the past several years has largely come from markets outside of Central Indiana, so our value as a tourism generator has grown significantly (our attendance last year – in spite of the rainy summer – was 1.12 million visitors).  But I believe that the Indianapolis Zoo’s biggest contribution to the region is that we join so many other organizations in making Indianapolis, well, Indianapolis.

If you haven’t lived in other places, you probably don’t appreciate quite what we have here.  Sure, we’re not perfect, but we’re better than anywhere else I’ve been.  We may not have mountains or beaches, and some may question the breadth and depth of some aspects of our cultural continuum, but we have the best combination of resources, potential, experience, and attitude that I’ve ever seen.  And the cultural institutions of our city play an important role in maintaining and improving that combination.

Where, outside of Washington, D.C., can you find an institution to compare with the Eiteljorg Museum?  What other city of our size can boast an art museum with the collection and vision of the IMA?  Who has a symphony orchestra with better access, outreach, and ambition than ours?  World-class children’s museum?  Top-ten zoo? Opera? Theater? Check. Got it. Covered.

When the companies of our area recruit potential employees, they must frequently battle a preconceived “rust belt” image that casts us as tired, hopeless, and stodgy.  When these recruits spend a weekend here, however, they find diversity, challenge, and energy.  Seven years ago, when Greg and Claudia Schenkel spent a weekend showing my wife and me around town, I could almost feel my prejudices falling away, and when my wife woke up on a bright Sunday morning, threw open the curtains at our downtown hotel room, and gazed at the Capitol shining below her, her only words were “I think I’d like to live here.”  And it wasn’t simply that Indianapolis was clean and fun, it was that the nature of Indianapolis would feed our growth as individuals and as a family.

But it took vision to get to what Indianapolis has become, and I’m concerned that our vision may be fading.

I understand that no one wants to see money go to waste and that we all feel that we are the best custodians of our own wealth.  That’s why the Indianapolis Zoo and so many other cultural institutions have flourished over the past twenty years, as supporters have carefully watched how we have nurtured their investments in us into the fulfillment of their wishes.  But I’m worried that we’re on the edge of an era when too many people only care about hoarding their resources for themselves instead of using them to build a shining future where our children and grandchildren will be able to say “My family helped build this community!”  Fortunately, there are wonderful exceptions, and I’ve had the honor of knowing and working with many of them.  You can see many of their names on walls, buildings, gardens, and in annual reports all over our city.

My understanding of our Hoosier heritage is that we are the beneficiaries of strong, community-minded people who were neither naïve nor cynical.  They always kept some money in the bank (or under the mattress!), but they also built roads, monuments, schools, arenas, and a future that was better than their present.  Visit the Indiana State Museum, and see what Indiana was, and what it is becoming.  Visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and look through the eyes of others at worlds both similar and far different than our own.  Visit the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, and watch how our future is revealed by the interactions between children and wonders that are entirely new to them.  Visit the Zoo, and remember that the greatest gift we can give to our children and grandchildren is a future world they would choose to live in, instead of one they are forced to endure.

We must not retreat and hide, shying away from the rest of the world and keeping to ourselves like a miser in a cold, gray room.  We did that once, and it was called the Dark Ages.