Planned by Washington D.C.'s own city designer
Indianapolis is one of the few American cities built to be a capital rather than growing into one. In 1820, Indiana's legislature picked an empty spot near the geographic center of the state and commissioned a city from nothing. The layout went to Alexander Ralston, who had assisted Pierre L'Enfant on the original plan for Washington, D.C., and it shows: downtown Indianapolis still radiates outward from a central circle much as L'Enfant's avenues radiated from the Capitol. Judge Jeremiah Sullivan proposed the name, welding "Indiana" to the Greek word for city. The town became the actual seat of government in 1825 and stayed a modest crossroads until a natural gas field was discovered nearby in 1886; free gas lured glass and auto factories in until the field ran dry around 1912. In 1910, Madam C.J. Walker, the first woman in America to become a self-made millionaire, moved her hair-care company here and built its headquarters and factory. The city now claims the world's largest children's museum and, every May, the largest single-day sporting event on the planet in the Indianapolis 500.
