Indianapolis, IN

After years of disuse, St. Peter Claver Center to reopen with food bank, after-school care

Published

4 months ago

September 13, 2025

After years of disuse, St. Peter Claver Center to reopen with food bank, after-school care

Nearly 50 years after it was dedicated as the St. Peter Claver Center, the once-thriving Near Northside building is getting a new lease on life.

Community members, including Trinity Church pastor Kim McCrackin and Marion County Recorder Faith Kimbrough, gathered outside the storied event space at 3110 Sutherland Ave. on a gray afternoon Sept. 13 to publicly commemorate the church’s plans to remodel and reopen the community center as the Trinity Youth and Family Services Center.

From beneath the drumbeat of heavy rain on umbrellas, McCrackin reminisced about the place where she would come to sing, dance and be among friends as a teenager.

“When you came here, baby, you dressed up,” she said.

The St. Peter Claver Center began in 1978 as a meeting space for the Knights and Ladies of St. Peter Claver, the nation’s oldest predominantly Black fraternal organization. For nearly 20 years, the space hosted meetings, dances, fashion shows, banquets, even speaking engagements from the likes Maya Angelou. But after the roughly 25,000-square-foot venue changed hands a few times in the 1990s, including its most recent stint as the Omega Events Center from 1998 to the early 2000s, the building fell into disrepair.

McCrackin, an Indy native who has been a pastor for about 25 years, said she spent nearly three months in 2014 tracking down the Omega Center’s owners in the hopes of purchasing it.

She then established the Indianapolis branch of the predominantly Black, Florida-based Trinity Youth and Family Services, holding church services out of a small auxiliary building on the center’s property while steadily making repairs to the main structure.

There remains much work to be done. McCrackin said Trinity had to essentially gut the building after buying it. Graffiti pocks the exterior brick walls and there is substantial damage to the roof. A sign out front reading “St. Peter Claver Center” has been nearly bent in half. The pastor estimates that in order to completely renovate the building, Trinity will need to raise around $1.5 million.

The ambitious project already has buy-in from Trinity congregant and lifelong Indy resident Brigitte Winters, who remembers coming to the St. Peter Claver Center in her 20s with her friends for dances where beloved local DJ Thomas “Sparkle Soxx” Griffin would spin records deep into the night.

“It was so fly back in the day,” Winters said.

Longtime Indy resident Bessie Manning would frequent the center with other kids from her church, often waiting in a line of cars to get dropped off. She and her husband, George, mourned the loss of a community staple when the backgammon nights and fashion shows stopped, leading to years of neglect.

“I hate that it went downhill,” Bessie said. “If they can get it fixed up, it’ll be real nice.”

With the money Trinity hopes to receive from community donations and grants, McCrackin plans to revive the center with various functions including a food pantry, after-school programs, a playground, a fellowship area and an event space to be rented for different community celebrations, weddings and funerals. If possible, she intends to rent buses to transport food to lower-income residents who can’t come to the Trinity Center.

“We’re gonna go to them,” McCrackin said. “Somebody’s got to treat somebody right at some point.”

After the afternoon ceremony, during which Kimbrough presented McCrackin with the physical deed to the Sutherland Avenue property, the driving rain dried to a slow drip and the 20-some people present began forming a line to fill plates and clamshell boxes with chicken, ribs, goat, macaroni and cheese, salad and green beans.

Among the group was McCrackin’s mother, Doris, an Indy resident of 70 years who used to attend the Claver Center for dances, fashion shows and bingo nights. Doris hopes that under her daughter’s guidance, the community staple that once served them both can do the same for a new generation.

“There’s just so much going on, we just need to get people on the right track,” she said. “If you show them love, maybe you can bring them in.”

Contact dining reporter Bradley Hohulin at bhohulin@indystar.com. You can follow him on Twitter/X @BradleyHohulin and stay up to date with Indy dining news by signing up for the Indylicious newsletter.

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Indianapolis, IN

Father dies, 2 children injured after car plunges into Indianapolis pond

Published

10 minutes ago

January 13, 2026

Press Room

Father dies, 2 children injured after car plunges into Indianapolis pond

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — A car went into a pond early Tuesday on the northeast side of Indianapolis, leaving a man dead and two children injured.

Investigators say the man drove his car into a pond off of Pendleton Way, near I-465 and Pendleton Pike, just after midnight.

Four Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers entered the water to rescue the man and the children, Indianapolis Fire Department Chief Rita Reith said.

The children are a 9-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl, and the driver was their father, according to Reith.

Officers at the scene say the man and the girl were believed to be in cardiac arrest and that they started CPR.

The man was transported to a local hospital, where he died shortly after arrival. The children were taken to local hospitals, where both were said to be stable.

One IMPD officer was fully submerged in the pond during the rescue attempt. He was taken to Eskenazi Hospital for evaluation and is in good condition, according to Reith.

Reith says investigators don’t know why the father’s car went into the pond.

A police investigation is underway. No other information was immediately available.

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Indianapolis, IN

Meet The Indiana University Indianapolis Librarian Billy Tringali

Published

1 day ago

January 12, 2026

Press Room

Meet The Indiana University Indianapolis Librarian Billy Tringali

Photo by Michael Schrader

BILLY TRINGALI’S OFFICE at IU Indianapolis feels more like a Comic-Con booth than an academic’s hidey hole. Posters of saucer-eyed anime and manga heroes cover every vertical surface, and memorabilia line every horizontal one. “It’s like an open-air museum,” Tringali says. “There’s not an inch of wall that’s not covered.”

Tringali is IU’s instruction librarian for undergraduate health sciences, which sounds pretty buttoned up. Until he starts talking about what it entails. “I teach students to hunt things down,” he says. “I do basic AI literacy training. Essentially explaining that you don’t just trust what a chatbot says, because it’s probably lying to you.”

But that’s only part of the story. In addition to his day job, Tringali is also founder and editor of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, which makes him arguably one of the world’s leading voices in the scholarly study of the subject.Anime has exploded in the U.S., fueled in part by its omnipresence on streaming services such as Netflix. And manga with titles like My Hero Academia and One Piece are wildly popular among younger readers. Well, not just younger readers. Plenty of grown-ups read them too.

Tringali says people are attracted to anime and manga for simple reasons: accessibility and variety. There’s decades’ worth of materials to read and watch, with subject matter ranging from horror, to adventure, to esoteric philosophic ramblings—sometimes all three in the same work. “Whatever interests you, it exists in anime, and there is a massive backlog for you to explore,” Tringali says. “Anime and manga can be powerful teaching tools for enhancing cultural understanding and improving language skills.”

In addition to reading and watching pretty much everything in the anime/manga world, he’s also analyzed this corner of the pop culture universe in great detail. His journal is the only open access academic periodical that exclusively publishes works discussing the worlds of anime, manga, cosplay, and their fans. What began as a graduate school project now attracts scholars and aficionados from around the world. Every year, Tringali helps run a standing-room-only academic conference at Anime Expo in Los Angeles. “We pack the house,” he says. “Fans are really, really hungry for academic analysis of popular culture.”

His influence is such that within the community he’s known as the anime apostle. He got hooked on the genre early, spending his childhood sitting on his grandmother’s “horrendously purple” living room rug watching endless episodes of Pokémon. When he realized his local library didn’t offer manga, he established a substantial collection simply by donating books from his own trove. “I watched them all being cataloged and thought, Oh, this is going to be a huge problem for me,” Tringali recalls.

Today, his enthusiasm burns just as hot as it did during his Jigglypuff-besotted youth. He channels his devotion by helping students see not only the academic value in his favorite pop culture genre but also the importance of other subcultures. For instance, he’s developing a student sewing circle for cosplay fans who dress up as characters to learn how to sew their own costumes. For the anime apostle, it’s all about spreading the word.

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Indianapolis, IN

More big temperature swings this week

Published

2 days ago

January 11, 2026

Press Room

Our Monday brings clouds, but we’re also expecting many hours of sunshine to brighten things up. Winds turn more out of the west, which will allow us to warm temperatures back above average. Afternoon highs reach into the lower 40s.

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The “warm-up” doesn’t last too long. A midweek system brings the chance for rain and snow showers followed by more typical January temperatures.

Indianapolis Weather Forecast:
Monday: Sun and clouds. High: 42°
Tuesday: Mostly cloudy. Showers possible. High: 50°
Wednesday: Mostly cloudy. Scattered rain/snow showers. High: 42°

Indianapolis 7-Day Weather Forecast