The Blog of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Two warm weekends, now a cold one. Cold, but not quite cold enough for the snowflake or two I saw late this afternoon to stick.

Indy on business meant a steady succession of parking lots, building atriums, elevators, company reception areas and meeting rooms, all of which blurred into a corporate haze after a while. During my 48 hours or so in town, I visited a fairly new downtown office tower, an older downtown building renovated into offices, a couple of characterless suburban office parks, and some other suburban office properties with slightly more visual interest. I can’t call it a comprehensive survey, but I did notice a couple of things. Building management in this city doesn’t seem to take much interest in controlling access to its buildings, at least during office hours, unlike some of the more suspicious Chicago-area managers; and no one locks their bathrooms. I approve of that second one.

One of the characterless office parks had streets with the following names: Priority Way, Advisory Way, Counselors Row, and Delegates Row. What was the developer thinking? Was there a company-wide contest to choose the least interesting names possible? My own entries would have been Water Reclamation Board Blvd., Committee of the Whole Ave., Subcommittee Street, and Executrix Way.

Better was a sign I saw on the way to one of my meetings, which told passersby the name of an older residential subdivision in north Indianapolis. “Sherwood Forest,” the sign said. As if to reassure nervous residents, the line underneath that name said, “Police Patrolled.” Really? I wondered. Who’s on the job? The Sheriff of Nottingham?

But back to the offices. The poshest office — complete with hardwood details, expensive furniture, and actual artwork instead of the bland kind of reproductions you see in bland offices — was occupied by a company that I suspected owned the worst-looking real estate. Another office had a display of gold and platinum records on one of its walls. It turned out that in their younger days, several of the execs with that particular real estate company had owned a chain of record stores, and had also been record wholesalers. Not only do the artists get special records when so many units are sold, it seems; so do the middlemen. They got one for Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” among other immortal disks.

In two separate meeting rooms in different offices I saw reproductions of 19th-century fox hunting scenes. I managed to note their titles: “The Meet at Blagdon,” and “Sir Richard Sutton and the Quorn Hounds.” Further investigation, if the number of Web sites offering these prints for sale means anything, reveals that they are popular items. It only goes to show the lingering cache of an aristocratic sport, I suppose. But why do you never see falconry on modern American meeting room walls?

Gail, our associate publisher, and Scott, our other account exec, were in town to sell ads in our upcoming special supplement to our magazine, “Real Estate Indianapolis.” I was there to ask questions, learn things, and Be the Editor. I did learn a remarkable number of things about the Indy commercial real estate market, most of which I will not bore blog readers with, since they are of professional interest only.

But I was impressed by some people’s enthusiasm for their business. This was especially the case with a fellow who leases industrial space for a living. By that, I don’t mean manufacturing space, necessarily, though that’s part of the definition of industrial space. Mostly I mean warehouses and distribution centers. On the whole, these facilities are invisible to the public at large, even though they can be as large as a million square feet (and that’s big) and are absolutely vital to the modern consumer economy.

He was eager to describe the perimeters of the warehouse/distribution business in metro Indy, and to facilitate things he whipped out a map. (A man after my own heart.) “Here… and here… and here,” he would point, “are the major hubs of distribution in Indianapolis,” and he would go into detail about how they got that way, who had developed them, and how one area compared with another, logistically speaking. He also talked at length about the reconstruction of the local airport and some other important infrastructure projects. All in all, it was an education just sitting down with the guy. You have to like an interview like that.

Later on, I met with a retail expert. We talked of winners like Costco and Walmart and losers like Kmart and Wards. Of Walgreen’s, Osco and CVS. Of Home Depot and its ilk. And then the conversation turned to doughnuts. “Is Krispy Kreme in this market?” I asked.

“Only two stores,” he answered. “They came in by opening five stores some years ago, but later closed three of them.”

No kidding? I’d never heard of a setback like that for the juggernaut KK. He also noted that there was exactly one Dunkin’ Donuts in the whole metro area, population about 1.3 million. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen any other chains either, though I can only think of Mr. Donut or Wenchell’s, neither of which I’d ever seen east of the Great Plains in any case.

“I guess Indianapolis isn’t a doughnut town,” he concluded.

Tomorrow: Lilly finds her pool, but I can’t find an elevator.