IT’S SO FAMILIAR that an obvious question may not register: What is it the ruins of? The answer is an 1898 office tower. At 26 floors, the St. Paul Building was New York City’s first “skyscraper,” named for the adjacent St. Paul’s Chapel now famed for miraculously escaping damage when the Twin Towers collapsed less than 100 yards away. On the building’s face was a trio of high relief atlas figures sculpted by Karl Bitter called The Races of Man. Before the building was demolished in 1958, a national contest solicited proposals to preserve the statues, worth $150,000 ($1.7 million today). Indianapolis artist Elmer Taflinger sketched the winning design. A proposed reconstruction of the building’s facade in Holliday Park, it also included major landscaping, including one European hornbeam for each U.S. state. (The trees couldn’t tolerate our winters and were replaced with silver leaf lindens.) The project took 20 years to finish due to Taflinger’s continual need of funds and habit of improvising. As buildings in Indianapolis were torn down, he salvaged bits to work into his project. Among those were a horse trough formerly at the base of a monument in Fountain Square, Greek columns from the Sisters of the Good Shepherd Convent, statues of goddesses from atop the Marion County Courthouse, and part of a church altar. Time was not kind to the Ruins, though, and it eventually sat decaying behind a chain-link fence. But in 2012, a four-year push to save it began, bolstered by thousands of donations to the Holliday Park Foundation, says co-chair of the revitalization committee, Lisa Hurst. “We hope the community treasures this priceless asset they helped bring back to life.
