A radiating white cross on a blue field, a red circle, a star at the center. Indianapolis's flag is not a decoration: it is a plan, the plan of a city born from a pencil stroke.
In 1821, Indiana needed a capital. There was no existing town, so one was drawn, at the exact geographic center of the state, in the middle of a marshy forest along the White River. The surveyor Alexander Ralston, who had helped lay out Washington alongside L'Enfant, reused the same idea: a "Mile Square," diagonal avenues radiating from a central circle, the Governor's Circle. Indianapolis was a city conceived before it was inhabited.
Adopted in 1963, the flag abstracts this plan into four strokes. Where so many cities brandish an unreadable seal, Indianapolis shows its founding geometry. The star marks the point where everything converges, and the flag, for once, says exactly what the city is.