When the Madam C. J. Walker Building first opened in 1927 on Indianapolis’s Indiana Avenue, it marked a significant moment in the city’s history. The building was the brainchild of its namesake Madam C. J. Walker, a woman who was born to former slaves on a plantation near Delta, La., but in time became the first self-made female millionaire through a line of cosmetics and haircare products designed for Black women. Incensed when she was forced to pay a ‘Black tax’ to enter a segregated theater in 1914, Walker vowed to create her own theater, contained in a mixed-use structure that housed the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, a ballroom called the Grand Casino, a beauty salon, a drugstore, and the Coffee Pot restaurant and café. The company and the building’s businesses would go on to employ more than 3,000 women, and the Walker building was also the “first Black-owned and operated theater building in the country” according to the application for the National Register of Historic Places.
Although Walker did not live to see the building’s opening—she died at the age of 51 in 1919—it remained a central feature of Black life in Indianapolis in the following decades, with performers like Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole performing in a 1,500-seat auditorium adorned in an African Art Deco motif, including spears, sphinxes, and Moorish arches. Yet, like too many important structures in disinvested Black communities, the building was almost torn down in the late 1970s. According to the application for the building into the National Register of Historic Places, however, “a group of concerned citizens formed the Madam Walker Urban Life Center as a nonprofit organization” to save the building. In 1980, it was added to the National Register and, in 1991, it became a Historic National Landmark. While a partial renovation reopened the building in 1988, many of the building’s original features still laid dormant, waiting for further restoration.
When Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis announced their intention to partner with the Madam Walker Legacy Center in 2018 to bring more programming to the building, the center contracted Moody Nolan to carry out an ambitious, $15.3 million restoration of the entire structure. Moody Nolan led the design and historic preservation, while local firms HCO Architects and WDi Architecture acted as the architect of record and associate architects, respectively. The center will celebrate its grand reopening, and host its 95th anniversary, with a block party on the weekend of Juneteenth, June 17-19.
The firm was a natural choice for the project: As the nation’s largest African American-owned and operated architecture practice, the company has brought cultural sensitivity and specificity to its work since architect Curtis Moody, FAIA, founded the firm in 1983 with engineer Howard E. Nolan.
Today, with its flagship offices in Columbus, Ohio, and more than 330 employees working in a dozen cities nationwide, the firm carries on the legacy of its founders, with Moody’s son, Jonathan Moody, AIA, stepping in as president and CEO in 2020. Most recently, Moody Nolan received the 2021 AIA Architecture Firm Award, with fellow architects emphasizing Curt Moody’s longstanding commitment to uplifting a diverse set of voices within the architectural practice, a legacy the firm carries on today.
With the Legacy Center restoration, the firm demonstrated its unique power to uplift the existing strengths of the community it served, while bringing a careful attention that other firms could easily miss. While its four decades of practice have resulted in a set of best practices that it carries from project to project, Moody Nolan also benefits from its geographic breadth, often with at least a few staff members hailing from the communities for which the firm plans and designs. The result, according to Jonathan Moody, is a level of attention to detail that helps build trust when embarking on a new endeavor.
“We often find with our projects that someone on the team already has some kind of a direct tie to some of the specifics of that place,” Jonathan Moody says. This allows the firm to engage in more sensitive and informed decisions with community stakeholders.
That trust was critical in the firm’s involvement in planning for the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor, a master plan project for a community that African Americans have called home in Buffalo, N.Y., since the founding in 1845 of the Michigan Street Baptist Church, built by and for African Americans. While historic preservation projects serve to honor the long histories of communities that have deep experiences of community identity, while also struggling with generations of disinvestment and official neglect, there’s often a concern that restoration projects will create a gentrified or essentialized image of the community’s history, something marketable and exciting that ends up neglecting the needs of longstanding residents. Moody Nolan took that concern seriously in Buffalo, going to great lengths to ensure to community members that its goal was not to promote any preconceived notions of what a successful future space might look like, but rather to begin with a deep respect for the perspectives of those most invested in the area already.
“We know that this church or this arch or this specific building tells a unique story that we can’t lose, and we’re finding that balance between what the continuing story will be and honoring the part of the story that got us here that people don't want to lose sight of,” Jonathan Moody says.
Of course, even as such a project offers a hopeful vision of a future community that honors a beautiful, if painful, history, the present moment of increasing racist violence adds a heaviness to the work. With the recent murder of 10 Black Buffalo residents in the neighborhood in May, the community became the latest in a longstanding history of direct, violent attacks, ones that threaten to unravel the work already being done to honor the beauty of Black neighborhoods. Moody says that the firm has felt the heaviness of continuing this project in the wake of the attack, especially noting the fear that the neighborhood, which had already made significant efforts to establish a grocery store, will be sent backwards by this experience.
“We’re so often talking about food deserts, knowing that most of the communities we talked to struggle to get over that hump to have a sustained grocery store,” Moody says. “East Buffalo got over that hump, but then suddenly, it’s like, well, what do we do now? It’s a difficult question.”
The intermingling of joy and pain, positive community identity and deep-rooted neighborhood neglect, is something that cannot be escaped in this kind of work, Moody says. That’s true for many different projects attempting to honor centuries-long histories of adversity and beautiful struggle, like the effort to restore Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood into the National Museum of Gospel Music, currently being undertaken by Wight & Company.
For Moody, these intermingled histories have also become bound up in the work itself, specifically in the firm's corroborative effort with Pei Cobb Freed & Partners for the International African American Museum, located in Charleston, S.C., and opens in January 2023. This site is located at Gadsden’s Wharf, where nearly half of the United States’ enslaved population first touched foot in North America during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Through work on a genealogy center that the museum will host, Jonathan Moody engaged in a personal journey as well: it helped him find his first recorded ancestor, Willis Spearman, traced back to nearby Newberry, S.C.
“The first ever document of his existence were his freedom papers from Gadsden’s Wharf,” Jonathan Moody says. “I’m talking with my cousins about planning our family reunion there, because it’s so empowering that the first document is not a negative thing; it's the birth of freedom for our family here in the Americas.”
Back in Indianapolis, the revitalized Madam Walker Legacy Center has restored the site to its intended, visionary approach to mixed-use design. During renovations, Moody Nolan peeled back layers of brick to discover that the street-level businesses originally had large windows, creating a welcoming space for nearby residents. The renovation has restored the site to honor Madam Walker’s original vision, ensuring that the building meets its 100th birthday just as it began.
“When the Walker Center started, it was often less about the event that was happening, and more about, ‘I have to be seen at that place',” Jonathan Moody says. “For years, nobody could see what was happening in the building, so for us, it was about learning the history and then saying, how do we use our craft to tell that story?”
