Near Eastside Section of Indianapolis Benefits From Super Bowl Bid INDIANAPOLIS - The Colts" uncharacteristically wretched season - the perennial N.F.L. playoff contenders finished 2-14 - has dimmed some of the luster of the first Super Bowl to be played here, on Feb. 5. But residents can take some consolation from a mini-building boom in anticipation of the big game, with its 150,000 expected visitors and worldwide television audience. The centerpiece is a 1,000-room J. W. Marriott hotel, a 34-story swoosh of Colts-blue glass that will serve as media headquarters. And the city will spend a total of $187 million on infrastructure like bridges, sidewalks, streets and parks. For fans there is Tailgate Town, a winter playground with a turf field, interactive games and an 80-foot-high zip line. It will connect to the Indiana Convention Center, where the league will have the 800,000-square-foot N.F.L. Experience fan festival. Finally, due east, some $12 million is being spent on improving Georgia Street, a three-block-long pedestrian promenade where fans can enjoy food and live entertainment, linking the convention center with the Conseco Fieldhouse arena. But away from the spotlights, the biggest beneficiary has been the Near Eastside, a 44-square-block area a mile east of downtown. With high rates of crime and poverty and a foreclosure rate that led the nation in 2004, the neighborhood had trouble even attracting a grocery store to serve its 40,000 residents. Fortune smiled on the area when Mark Miles, the board chairman of the Super Bowl Host Committee, decided the neighborhood would become part of the 2008 bid, after Indianapolis lost out the previous year to Dallas. The Near Eastside neighborhood had produced a quality-of-life plan in 2007, the result of more than two years" committee work under the guidance of James Taylor, the executive director of the John H. Boner Community Center on East 10th Street, the heart of the Near Eastside. One of the things participants said was needed was a community center. The need dovetailed neatly with the city's Super Bowl bid. Since 1993, the league has given $1 million to the Super Bowl host city to build a community center that it calls a Youth Education Town, with the stipulation that the grant be matched, said Alexia Gallagher, the director of the N.F.L. charities and youth football fund. The neighborhood's high school, Arsenal Technical, had already been chosen as the site where the city would build a practice facility and turf field for the National Football Conference's Super Bowl team, a project expected ultimately to benefit the high school's athletic program. Ultimately the University of Indianapolis agreed to install the turf field there; it will later be installed at Arsenal Tech. The Super Bowl bid included a proposal for what became the Chase Near Eastside Legacy Center, on the grounds of Arsenal Tech. At more than 27,000 square feet, the center will have fitness operations, a media studio, a mobile computer lab, an educational greenhouse and garden, an instructional kitchen and an art studio. Some 4,000 to 5,000 local students will benefit from programs run by 12 different organizations including the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis School of Physical Education and the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Indiana, the Indianapolis Symphony and the Indianapolis Arts Center. Adults will also have use of the center. Financing for the Chase Legacy Center came from several sources, including $5.5 million from the Lilly Endowment, $1 million from United Way of Central Indiana, $250,000 from the Lumina Foundation and $200,000 for the turf field from the N.F.L, in addition to $1 million seed money. Chase bank came forward with another $1 million to leverage $4 million in New Market Tax Credits. Chase, the largest bank in Indiana with the tallest building in downtown Indianapolis, has invested $12.1 million in the Near Eastside, said Dennis L. Bassett, the bank's state chairman. Beyond the community center, plans to revitalize the Near Eastside include rehabilitating housing, improving the streetscape and diversifying the retail mix. Just east of Arsenal Tech are the boulevards and grand homes of Woodruff Place, one of Indianapolis's earliest suburbs, built in the mid-1800s and once separated from downtown by cornfields. "You go one street over" from Woodruff Place, said Mr. Taylor, a social worker who has led the urban renewal efforts for 14 years, "and probably 80 percent of the residents are at the poverty line or near the poverty line." He said the average price for houses on the Near Eastside acquired for redevelopment was $11,000. The Boner Center is on the north side of St. Clair Place, an area to the east of Woodruff Place. By the time the national anthem is sung to start the Super Bowl, Mr. Taylor expects 250 homes in that area to have been renovated, reconstructed or improved. The St. Clair Senior Apartments, next to the Boner Center, have been constructed and already opened with 33 one- and two-bedroom apartments, as well as 3,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor. Two condominiums were included in the rehabilitation of the existing Jefferson Apartments at East 10th and Jefferson Streets to help pay for the renovation of 18 rentals that are "homeownership incubators," Mr. Taylor said. The East 10th Street corridor, once mostly mom-and-pop stores, now has a 4,000-square-foot food co-op, among other new businesses, and new sidewalks, storm sewers and street lights. All these programs are part of a pot that started in 2008 with $38 million in local, state and federal money that has grown to $150 million and counting, said Mr. Taylor, coming from myriad financing sources. "If I gave you the spreadsheet, it would probably make your head a little bit dizzy," Mr. Taylor said. Ms. Gallagher said she got "goose bumps, chills, the whole nine yards," when she returned to Indianapolis last October after participating in the groundbreaking ceremony a year earlier for the Legacy Center. "It was absolutely amazing what they've been able to accomplish in such a short time," she said. For Ruth Shaw, 77, a 37-year resident of St. Clair Place who raised six children there and refused to leave in the face of declining conditions even when her children begged her, the neighborhood's revival is the result of Near Eastside tenacity. Mrs. Shaw was there at the first quality-of-life meeting held at Arsenal Tech in 2005. "The city thought nobody would be there," she said of that first meeting. Instead, more than 400 people came to that gathering, and they continued to meet at the Englewood Christian Church community hall. "People in this neighborhood don't give up," she said.