Remembering Joe's Shelby Street Diner

For more than 40 years, a simple 1950s-style diner operated on the Southside of Indianapolis walking distance of the campus of the University of Indianapolis and its previous iteration, Indiana Central University.

It was still in operation as of November 2019, based on a customer’s review of the establishment that I found online from that date. But at some point thereafter, it closed. And it did so without fanfare, apparently. I could find no record of news stories documenting its official closure.

While on a recent shoot at UIndy in late June, I drove past the site of the former diner, Joe’s Shelby Street Diner, conjuring memories of the many, many times I'd driven past the place in my years living in Indianapolis. My son Ben and I even stopped there to eat once, sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s. 

When I concluded my recent shoot at UIndy, I decided to grab the photos of the diner that you see in this post. Afterward, I did some research to see what I could learn about Joe’s operation over the four decades that it was open.

I moved to Indy’s Southside in 1983, and in those early years of driving past the diner at 3623 Shelby Street, I remember its name being Shelby Street Diner. 

At newspapers.com, I found a December 2016 obituary for Phillip Joseph “Joe” Long, 73, in which Long (obit picture is shown at right) was identified as the diner’s owner and operator for 10 years. At the time of Joe’s death, he was residing in Port Richey, Fla., and the obit identified him as a former resident of Beech Grove, Ind., an Indianapolis suburb.

And in a late 1990 feature story in The Indianapolis News, the writer said Long had purchased the diner in June of that year and that Joe's son, P.J. Jr., helped his father run the business. Betty Croasmun is identified in the story as a cook at the diner and a former owner-operator. The story said she and husband, Bill, co-owned the diner from 1984-88 and that the Croasmuns decided to sell because they had grown tired of the long, daily hours of work.

Betty went by the last name Harris when she first started working there for Bonnie Webster, whom Harris said had owned the diner for 10 years before Betty and Bill took over in the mid-1980s, according to an interview she gave Rex Redifer of The Indianapolis Star in February 1985. She also told Redifer that the eatery was closed for about a year in the transition before Croasmun and Harris decided to jump-start it again. 

The Star article also says a “local businessman,” Dale Middleton of Greenwood (an Indianapolis suburb), bought the property and spruced it up. At the site of his 2022 online obituary, family posted a memories video containing a montage of life pictures that includes a photo of a package beer and liquor store and Quasar TV that shared space in a building at 3601 Shelby Street on property immediately north of the diner. The photo below is how that property looks today. 

Bonnie Ellen Pratt Webster died in January 2018. According to her online obituary, she had worked in restaurants all her life — at RCA, the Shelby Street Diner (as owner), Dutch Oven and Ryan's Steakhouse in Indianapolis. “Bonnie was an excellent cook,” the obit said. “She enjoyed canning, and many people asked and were after her homemade fudge recipe, better than any fudge you can commercially get.”

The math in the timing of and years of ownership between what the 1985 Star article assigns to Webster and what the 1990 article in The News assigns to the Croasmuns doesn’t quite line up. It’s the later News article that states Joe Long took over in June 1990. 

But all that isn’t too important at this point, given that the eatery has been shuttered ... yet again. That’s  the bottom line.  

In several editions of The Indianapolis Star from 2011, I found a substantial-sized ad for Joe’s Shelby Street Diner in the newspaper’s weekly Dining Guide. The ad details some of the eatery’s top breakfast menu items (pancakes and biscuits and gravy were two items cited as customer favorites). But the illustration with the ad is a large photo of a cheeseburger and fries, which are cited as favorites by customers in restaurant review sites such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, Reddit, The Reflector and LoopNet. 

Said one reviewer in an online discussion board thread in which she had learned Joe’s no longer was open: “I used to go there when I was a little kid. They had awesome chicken sandwiches and vanilla Coke. Dang, childhood memories right there.”

Interestingly, the diner’s Facebook page is still active and contains some pictures of the diner’s 1950s-style decor, right down to its narrow black-and-white-square — and extremely narrow — checkered floor. It contains this promotion for the place:

Looking for an authentic diner experience? Come to Joe’s Shelby Street Diner! It’s a ’50s place! We’re  home to the one-pound burger, the hub cap tenderloin, half-pound footlong hot dog, and much more! We are open Monday thru Saturday 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. We also offer daily lunch and dinner specials.

I was unable to ascertain the diner’s ownership from 2000 thereafter, or in the years before the Croasmuns, but as the photos I grabbed in my shoot in this post attest, the shuttered diner still was using the “Joe’s” name on the signs to the very end. 

Below are close up shots of the animated characters still on the outside windows:

Bike shop owner sells food, beverages along with gear, expertise in cycling

At 2242 Shelby Street, just a couple blocks north of Garfield Park on the Southside of Indianapolis, a shop opened this year offering a unique combo of retail fare -- bicycles and coffee/sandwiches.

Joe's Cycles had operated in Fountain Square next to Irma's Peruvian restaurant for several years. That shop's owner, Joe Cox (right), was the driving force and organizer of the one and only Fountain Square Grand Prix cycling criterium in 2012. Cox closed the Fountain Square shop three years ago because it lacked the space he needed to accomplish what he wanted to do: Build, repair and sell bicycles -- and operate a coffee shop. Both objectives were important to Cox.

In January, Cox landed at the Shelby Street location, next door to former Indianapolis Fire Station 29, and had a soft opening on Feb. 3 when he joined several Garfield Park area artists and other businesses for their First Friday open merchants' observance.

Three months later, Cox's shop is officially open and operating at almost full force. On his shop's Facebook page, he has a blurb that describes the business as "a boutique with an eclectic mix of bicycle related products, specializing in custom bicycle and wheel building." He doesn't say anything about the food and beverages he serves, but I've been to the shop, and I know that Cox values that aspect of the business as much as his bicycle sales and service.

The shop has a modest display area featuring cycles and gear stamped with the Bianchi brand. Bianchi is the world's oldest bicycle manufacturing company still in operation (it celebrates its 125th anniversary this year). Bianchi has associated with such Grand Tour cyclists as Fausto Coppi, Marco Pantani, Felice Gimondi, Jan Ullrich and Laurent Fignon. In addition to bike sales, Cox does repair and maintenance work on bikes; he has a separate building on the grounds to do that.

Cox acknowledges that bikes and a coffee and sandwich shop might seem an odd combination for a retailer, but he says that's what he did at the Fountain Square site, an experience he so much enjoyed that he wanted to do it again once he found the right location with the right amount of space in the Garfield Park neighborhood, where he happens to live.

Staging the Fountain Square Grand Prix on Aug. 18, 2012, satisfied a longtime ambition of Cox's. In fact, he had imagined -- hoped, really -- that perhaps sponsors and local cycling enthusiasts would be so excited about the event once they saw how it galvanized the historic and burgeoning Indy cultural district that they would jump at the chance of helping to make it a fixture, adding it as Indianapolis' third major cycling criterium (the two others are the Indy Crit in July and the Mass Ave Criterium in early August). The apparent hope to make the FSGP an annual event was so strong, in fact, that I saw promotions of the 2012 Grand Prix periodically described as "the inaugural," as if perhaps the deal had already been sealed to do it annually. Alas, that wasn't the case, but not because Cox didn't try.

Cox said the onus of responsibility -- both in organizing and financing the 2012 FSGP, which featured a program that included outdoor concerts sprinkled throughout Fountain Square the night before the race and quite a few arts and food vendors selling their goods in the heart of Fountain Square on the day of the race -- proved too overwhelming and too much for one individual. Hence, the 2012 FSGP went into the books as the only one. If there is any consolation, Cox does feel he laid the groundwork for how Fountain Square could be transformed for a major event. In fact, he pointed to the Virginia Avenue Folk Festival, which on Saturday staged its second annual show, surpassing FSGP's accomplishment.

When I was at Joe's Cycles for a second visit on May 13, I watched as Cox explained to a newly hired staffer -- a young cycling enthusiast who will be attending Indiana University in the fall -- the intricacies of making an Americano and prosciutto panini sandwich, which is what I had ordered. In the accompanying photo, that's a Caprese salad (left) with my panini. Which reminds me ... all of the ingredients Cox uses come from local merchants. Meats are from Goose the Market, and I forget where he said his coffee and Caprese salads are from, but I do remember him saying that are from local providers. I took all the pictures you see in this post today, using the camera in my iPhone 6s Plus.

When I visited the shop the previous Saturday, May 6, Cox said he was interested in getting more involved in the neighborhood. He already participates in the monthly First Fridays, and he said he was interested in finding ways to introduce his shop, especially its sandwich/beverage offerings, to events held at nearby Garfield Park. He said he already is delivering sandwiches to the Line 'Em Up saloon a couple doors north of his shop, and will avail the shop's edibles to customers of the Garfield Park Brewery (if it is interested in them, of course) when the brewery opens sometime this year a couple doors south.

Right now, the shop's hours of operation are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. It is closed Sundays and Mondays.

The front of Joe's Cycles (above), 2242 Shelby St., which is just north of the former Indianapolis Fire Station 29 (far left), which itself is undergoing renovation by its owner. 

Cox's trainee (above) works the cash register behind the food/beverage counter, where one customer (below) is seated. If there is no room at the counter, customers have the option to sit elsewhere inside (second and third photos below) or, weather permitting, in some cushioned seating outdoors (fourth and fifth photos below).

Above: Some of the Bianchi hats and bottles that Joe's Cycles has available for purchase.

Above: Joe's Cycles is accessible to customers in wheelchairs. This is the ramp to the shop, as seen leaving the shop and looking toward the separate building where Cox does his bike repair work. 

Above: Customers who drive to the shop can park in one of these three spots behind the shop. 

Above: A squirrel peeks between a tree and a figurine in the small landscaped area behind the shop.

Churches, neighborhoods, history ... and walks in the park, along the trail

In yesterday's post, I mentioned the walking regimen I've been observing. In addition to the tulips (shown in yesterday's post) that have lured me to take pictures while on my walks, I've stopped to photograph other things that jumped out at me elsewhere on my walks.

All those "things" make up today's post, a veritable potpourri of photography subjects.

I start with the Big Car Collaborative organization and its mission to nurture "creative place-making and socially engaged art" in Indianapolis, a mission that has attracted growing publicity and interest since its formation in 2004. Big Car has had three home bases in that period -- it started out renting space in the Murphy Building along Virginia Avenue in Fountain Square, then moved to an out-lot at Lafayette Square and, most recently, settled an abandoned factory on Cruft Street in the Garfield Park area.

The nonprofit group purchased, renovated and enhanced a 12,000 square-foot facility (formerly used to make airplane parts) just east of Shelby Street and just south of Southern Avenue. It painted the stone exterior of the building a rich violet, adorning the trim in various shades of that color and light blues, illustrated in the photo leading off the post. In addition to being home, it has become Big Car's place for artists to convene, teach, learn and display work.

It's also been the launching pad for Big Car's most ambitious project yet -- buying modest homes in the struggling neighborhood that can be converted to housing for aspiring artists, essentially creating an artists' colony that could help transform the Garfield Park neighborhood into the next cultural hot spot.

Above: A block away from the Tube Factory, at 2620 Shelby Street, Big Car has its home base for an ongoing "sound art" project called Listen Hear. It is next door to the Compassion Center soup kitchen. 

Neighbors of Listen Hear include several automobile-service properties. There is the Car Beauty Center (above) on the same side of the street as Listen Hear, Morris Super Rose auto repair and Garfield Park Automotive Center behind it at the southeast corner of Nelson and Shelby (first photo below), and Peterman's Tire Center (second below), on the north side of Nelson just across from Morris Super Rose. 

Above: This building at 2658 Shelby Street across from Morris Super Rose has had many uses over the years. One that comes to mind was a service that converted videotape content to DVD, but alas, it didn't last very long. The right half of the building is now used by Standard Studio/Gallery, owned and operated by oil painter Benny Sanders, who presumably put his hopes and trust in the Big Car vision of making the Garfield Park neighborhood a burgeoning art community. 

Above: The other section of space in the building (carrying the 2660 Shelby Street address) where Sanders' studio and gallery are located is available ... 

There are plans to enhance the section of Shelby Street where these buildings can be accessed, plans that begin with slowing and streamlining vehicular traffic that makes it challenging for pedestrians to make multiple stops to the shops. Officials feel many southbound rush-hour motorists use Shelby as a shortcut, or alternative, to I-65, where traffic can jam just south of the Raymond Street exist.

The plans include installing a roundabout at the junction of Shelby and Southern Avenue, where the 2600 block of Shelby begins. (That also is the southeastern-most point of Garfield Park.) Currently, Shelby Street has four lanes south of Southern, but most of the time the far right lanes on each side is used for parking, opening up only during rush hour.

Once the roundabout goes in, the plan is to narrow vehicular traffic to one lane in each direction and permanently dedicate the outer lanes to either pedestrian traffic or parking (I can't remember which). There already is some municipal parking available in a lot in front of Garfield Baptist Church at the southwest corner of Southern and Shelby, but many people don't know it's public parking. It kind of looks like church parking.

And elsewhere ... 

I frequently venture north of Raymond Street when I'm out on my walks, following the Pleasant Run Trail as far north as Keystone Avenue before turning around and heading home. The official trail path heads northeast from Garfield park, ducking under Raymond Street before following Pleasant Run along the South Parkway. It crosses the creek and switches to the north side of the parkway a few blocks east of Shelby Street.

On April 14, I followed the trail path to Keystone, but when I turned around to do the return trip, I stayed on the south side of the creek, which is where I came upon the buildings you see below.

Three of the buildings are churches, one a school ... and the fourth, the "jewel" of them all, a structure that made the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, a former orphanage that dated to the 1860s.

This building, the former Bethany Temple Apostolic Church, 1401 E. Pleasant Run Parkway, South Drive, was damaged by fire on Feb. 1. A congregation known as the Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus now uses the building and has been slowly working to rebuild and/or restore the damaged portions of the structure. 

Christ's Open Door Baptist Church sits at 2001 E. Pleasant Run Parkway, South Drive. I did not remember this church from the all the trips I've made on the parkway.

Above: The outside of Indianapolis Public School 20 (also known as Otis E. Brown School) at 1849 E. Pleasant Run Parkway, South Drive. 

Above: Perhaps the biggest challenge for me in identifying the buildings I photograph this day was this one at 1404 S. State Ave. The dichotomy here was that I remember this one vividly from many previous pass-bys a long time ago (the parkway had been part of my route when training for four 500 Mini-Marathons in the 1990s). But it had been quite a few years since those pass-bys, and last month, when I took this picture, there was no signage identifying the structure or grounds. My foggy memory from the 1990s recalled the signage indicating it was a branch in the Fairbanks Hospital system. Fairbanks treats people with alcohol and other substance addictions. But while composing this post, I could find nothing to verify that memory. In fact, the only uses for it that I could find was as a "resource treatment center" for Acadia Healthcare, and before that, the General Germans Protestant Orphans Home (and Pleasant Run Children's Home, which now is on Tibbs Avenue). The Wikipedia entry found at the link in the previous sentence indicates that in 1984, the building -- which dates to 1867 -- was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The view above is from Pleasant Run Parkway, South Drive. If one approaches the grounds from State Avenue, you get to see the long access drive onto the grounds. 

Above: It was heavily overcast when I took this photo of Garfield Park Community Chuch (formerly Garfield Park United Church of Christ) at 743 E. Pleasant Run Parkway, South Drive. While trying to brighten it and make it more presentable in post-processing, I lost some cool cloud detail. Losing that detail opened the door to applying a tight crop at the top of the photo, just above the steeple. Below is a mostly original version of the photo; the only significant difference is that I added a little shadow detail so you could see more of the church (it was very dark). But at least you can appreciate the clouds I was talking about. 

Above: Just a bench I came across along the parkway. 

Images from a night of restlessness ...

I had a few nights of irregular sleep this past week; I'd crash early while watching television, only to wake up in the very late evening unable to fall back to sleep in my bed. So I decided to get outdoors and walk, appreciating the night vistas I might come across.

I didn't start either walk with the intent of taking pictures. But now that I've grown accustomed to carrying the cell phone with me at almost all times, I turned to it on two occasions when the snowscapes and landscapes grabbed my attention. You saw one example of that in the previous post -- the shot of the moon through some tree branches in Garfield Park.

It happened again Saturday night, which came after a long day of light snowfall. I started out intending only to walk the two blocks or so to drop off some mail in the neighborhood mailbox. But as I neared the box, I felt refreshed ... and eager to maximize the exercise opportunity. I reminded myself that I had the camera phone in my pocket, motivated by the iPhone shot of the moon several days before ... and of images I posted here from the very heavy snowfall two Sundays ago.

On Wednesday night, I took only a handful of pictures, one of which was the one of the moon. That walk took me as far north as Manual High School at Pleasant Run and Madison Avenue. But on Saturday night (technically, as it turned out, it was early Sunday morning), I couldn't stop snapping photos. I counted 60 frames when I pulled up the images at home afterward. With one exception, the pictures you see here are the results of that Saturday night/Sunday morning walk-through my neighborhood, Garfield Park-South.

For those who might actually live in the neighborhood or are familiar with it ... and who would like to figure out how I arrived at various places ... my course started at the north end of Allen Avenue near Southern Avenue and proceeded south past the mailbox to Cameron Street, east on Cameron to the north-south alley just west of Shelby Street (behind Dinner Bell market), where I turned south and walked two blocks to Albany Street before going east for a short jog to Shelby Street. From Shelby, I walked north to Yoke Street, where I turned west and walked to Manker Street, then north on Manker to the east-west alley between Willow Drive and Southern Avenue before completing the jaunt.

In most cases, I tinkered with the images only slightly in post-processing. Curiously, even the slightest post-processing adjustments in contrast or color significantly lightened the sky in many of the images. You might not believe they were taken after midnight, but I assure you, all of them were (except the new one from Wednesday night that I include here). And in at least three cases, the sky color changed from a dark bronze to a pleasant, light blue.

The images are noisy and a few reflect a focus softer than I'd normally settle for. iPhone obviously needed a high ISO and slow shutter to give me something to work with. I ran all of shots through Noiseware in post-processing, but it really didn't seem to mute noise that much in this batch.

It was hard to pick a favorite from the batch. I lead off with one of them, a vista looking east down Cameron Street from a point just east of Allen Avenue. I enjoyed the framing, the mid-point street lighting ... and the tiny red stoplights at Shelby Street at the far end.

Above and below: Views from two sides of the same home. I so much liked the way this was illuminated, that I wanted to show it from both sides. I believe this home is on Cameron Street.

Above: The crossing pattern grabbed my eye here. I'm not sure where this was taken.

Above: This image was another of my favorites. The way the snow dresses up the bushes in the yard, the home's neat architecture, and the spot door lighting all worked together to make this a neat composition.

Above: Any tinkering with the contrast or color on this image, taken along Albany Street, I think, made the sky incredibly bright, so I left it alone. 

Above and below: The grill (above) and hood (below) on these vehicles are what nudged me to photograph them. I took the one below in both available and flash; I used the flash version for the post. Is it me, or does it look like a frown face on the hood below? 

Above: Recent bad weather has thrown off the pickup schedule for recyclables in neighborhoods everywhere.

Above: I was interested to see how much detail the iPhone would give me of the steam drifting off this machinery in the alley west of -- and parallel to -- Shelby Street.  

Above: My original destination for the late-night/early-morning walk Saturday/Sunday.

Above: On Albany Street just before turning north onto Shelby Street (below), where shortly thereafter I pass the two-story building housing Dant Insurance Agency (two below). This structure was rebuilt after being severely damaged by a tornado on the day of the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race in 2004.  

Above: Vehicles in a used auto sales lot get no protection from the elements. 

Above: The entrance to the former Garfield Heights Church of Christ building just north of Berwyn Street. 

Above and next two below: Coming up on Dinner Bell Market on Shelby Street, just north of Cameron Street. 

Above and next three below: Different perspectives of Bethany Wesleyan Church, at the southwest corner of Shelby and Yoke streets.

Above: A conifer along Allen Avenue. 

Above: Also along Allen Avenue. This image is one of those in which the sky turned a pleasant blue with the slightest tweaking of contrast. 

Above: On Nelson Avenue, looking west toward the Allen Avenue intersection.  

Above: I think this one is on Manker Street, looking north from near Yoke Street.

 Above and next two below: More shots along Allen Avenue.

Above: A vertical orientation version of the scene depicted in the photo leading off the post. 

Above and next two below: Homes and a street vista on Manker Street. Incredible how bright the sky is, with just the slightest adjustment of contrast in the image. 

Above: This is the one image not taken during the weekend neighborhood walk-through. I took this on Wednesday night's walk, and it depicts a section of Manual High School in the upper right corner ... and Pleasant Run in the foreground. This was taken from the Madison Avenue bridge over the run.