Indianapolis International

In 1926 the City of Indianapolis leased 200 acres on the southwest side for its first municipal airport, run by the Indiana National Guard's 113th Observation Squadron and named for Lt. Richard H. Stout, a decorated WWI veteran and Guard pilot killed in a crash at Fort Benjamin Harrison's Schoen Field. Transcontinental Air Transport made it a stop on the 48-hour New York-to-Los Angeles system: overnight train to Columbus, then Ford Trimotors west through Indianapolis. The field was too small to grow; Curtiss's local manager, WWI ace Harvey Weir Cook, pushed for the larger municipal airport that opened in 1931 and was later renamed in his honor. In WWII the Army leased Stout for a dollar a year as headquarters of the I Troop Carrier Command, directing glider training nationwide and worldwide air transport. Today it is the Indiana National Guard's Joint Forces Headquarters; the 1927 terminal building still stands.

Constructed in 1909, the first racing facility to call itself a speedway, and home of the Indianapolis 500 since 1911; it is still the highest-capacity sports venue in the world. The 2.5-mile oval's infield covers 253 acres; Churchill Downs, Yankee Stadium, the Rose Bowl, the Roman Colosseum, and Vatican City would all fit inside it at the same time, and four holes of the Brickyard Crossing golf course actually do. The track was bricked over in its first year; three feet of it survive as the Yard of Bricks at the start/finish line, the last of the surface that gave the Brickyard its name.

Before the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was famous for racing, it was famous for aviation. In 1918, the U.S. Army opened an Aviation Repair Depot at the Speedway, repairing and testing JN-4 Jenny training aircraft and Liberty engines. The Speedway provided hangars and a flight test field — planes took off and landed on the infield and straightaways. The depot repaired 313 aircraft and 350 engines in 1918 alone. Italian engineers from the Pomilio Brothers Corporation developed aircraft here. Allison Experimental Company (later Allison Engine, now Rolls-Royce) got its start producing engine parts nearby. The Speedway's aviation chapter is largely forgotten, but it helped establish Indianapolis as an aviation and engine manufacturing hub.

Indianapolis devotes more acreage to honoring its war dead than any other American city, and only Washington, D.C. has more war memorials. The center is the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Monument Circle, a 284-foot limestone obelisk dedicated in 1902; raised for Indiana's Civil War dead, it honors Hoosier veterans of every war before World War I, and at completion it was the second-tallest monument in the country behind the Washington Monument. It stands at the exact center of the original city plan: Alexander Ralston, who had helped survey Washington, D.C., laid out Indianapolis in 1821 with the streets radiating from this circle. An observation level near the top is reached by 330 steps or a small elevator, and from it the flat grid of central Indiana runs to the horizon. Five blocks north, the Indiana World War Memorial Plaza is a corridor of formal malls, fountains, and monuments; its centerpiece, the Indiana World War Memorial, is a massive limestone building modeled on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, housing the Shrine Room beneath a single suspended American flag. The American Legion keeps its national headquarters on the plaza. On the downtown canal, the USS Indianapolis Memorial honors the cruiser torpedoed in 1945, the worst single loss of life at sea in US Navy history, near the Medal of Honor Memorial along the canal walk.