Through the door at the State Theater
Canon PowerShot S95
2018
50 years ago if you drove through downtown Logansport, Indiana, you’d have found its streets lined with buildings. Most of them dated to the 1800s.
Logansport boomed through about the middle of the 20th century. Good jobs were plentiful in that railroad and manufacturing town. But as happened in so many midwestern cities in the late 20th century, the boom ended and good jobs dried up. Downtown vacancies rose and buildings fell into disrepair. A great number of them ended up being razed. Downtown Logansport is full of parking lots today.
Yet today Logansport keeps showing up on lists of small towns worth living in. The city topped this list at Realtor.com. I’ve seen it in the years I’ve been involved with Logansport through my Michigan Road work: people there want to be proud of the place they call home, and they’re doing the work to show it. The old buildings are never coming back, but those that remain (like the State Theater, from which I made this photo) are being restored. And where parking lots remain, you’ll increasingly find public art to guide and please the eye.
