INDIANAPOLIS — The City of Indianapolis is looking to purchase the remaining land where Eleven Park — the development slated to build a soccer stadium for the Indy Eleven team — was planned to go.
In a letter obtained by 13News, Chief Deputy Mayor Daniel Parker sent a message to Ersal Ozdemir, who owns Keystone Group — one of the biggest real estate developers in Indiana. The Keystone Group has been behind plans to build the Eleven Park complex.
In the letter, Parker claims the city has a greater understanding of the Greenlawn Cemetery site, where Eleven Park is planned. The city claims it believes as many as 650 remains are still located on just one acre of the site. It goes on to say that the cost for proper treatment of those remains is now $12 million.
The letter claims the city wants to "right the wrongs committed more than a century ago when the resting place of Indianapolis' first residents were erased from the map and paved over."
The city calls for "painstaking" measures should anyone want to develop the site in the future.
The letter then goes on to offer Keystone "fair market value" for the roughly 19 remaining acres. The city already purchased an acre of the land in 2023 for $2 million for the Henry Street Bridge.
Keystone Group's senior vice president issued the following statement in response to the city's letter:
"For weeks, Keystone and Indy Eleven have requested to sit down with Mayor Hogsett’s negotiation team, and the response has always been the same: rather than discuss facts and negotiate in good faith, city officials would rather spread misinformation through press releases and play games with your tax dollars.
For more than fifty years, Indianapolis has achieved great success because it benefited from leadership that saw value in bringing the business and civic community together around bold ideas and big projects. Unfortunately, this current administration’s embrace of divisive politics and bare-knuckle intimidation with the City-County Council that have no place in our city.
We intend to correct the record as it relates to our ongoing efforts to work with the community to offer peaceful reinternment for those buried in a site that for over a century has been disregarded and disrespected. Rather than respond to Mr. Parker’s last-ditch effort to salvage the bungled rollout of a half-baked idea, it is our hope Mayor Hogsett will once again retake the reins of his own administration and join us in a thoughtful, adult discussion on the future of soccer and downtown development in our state’s capital city."
Eleven Park was slated to be a more than $1 billion mixed-use development with retail and living space in towers — anchored by a 20,000-seat soccer stadium on the southwest corner of downtown, on Kentucky Avenue just south of Victory Field and just west of Lucas Oil Stadium.
Renderings of Eleven Park
But city tax revenue support for Eleven Park is in jeopardy with Mayor Joe Hogsett's announcement last month to attract a Major League Soccer franchise playing in a stadium on Pearl Street on the southeast corner of downtown.
To bring an MLS team to Indianapolis, the city must have a soccer-specific stadium that is promoted and financed by the city and a competent ownership group to pay the MLS expansion fee. Last May, the city of San Diego reportedly paid a $500 million expansion fee to get a team.
Still, there is no guarantee that even if the city meets those requirements that an expansion team will come to Indianapolis. The city has also not released the name of the ownership group for the MLS bid.