01-05-2025
Handy Man Antoine helps care for his father's neighborhood
Antoine Bellamy never lived in the Ransom Place neighborhood, but many residents know him as "Handy Man Antoine."
For years, he's helped residents with home maintenance tasks, including cleaning gutters and mowing lawns, among other tasks.
He takes pride in his work for the community and sees it less as maintenance and more as preservation.
While growing up in New York City, Bellamy remembered listening to his father and grandmother share stories about their time living in the Ransom Place neighborhood, a historic Black neighborhood developed in the 1880s, northwest of downtown
His grandma would tell him stories about Madam C.J. Walker, America's first female self-made millionaire, who would visit the neighborhood to talk to her lawyer, Freeman Ransom, for whom the area is named.
But the stories he enjoyed were his father's tale of Oscar Robertson, who lived across the street in the Lockefield Gardens.
"He would tell us that he used to play basketball with Oscar Robertson; they mostly played in my grandmother's backyard when they were kids," he said.
Robertson eventually led the neighborhood school, Crispus Attucks High School, an all-Black high school at the time, to the state championship in 1955 and later joined the National Basketball Association.
"Because of my father's stories, we loved Oscar Robertson."
As an adult, he knew he wanted to help care for the neighborhood his family loved dearly.
But, as time passed, he noticed the neighborhood's history being lost, as investors bought homes looking to rent them to Indiana University School of Medicine students.
"People are forgetting the (cultural) value of the area," he said. 'It's tripled the cost for most of these houses.'
Every day, he does his part to try and preserve the neighborhood's glory, even if it's just a day of mowing the lawn.
"Some people call this neighborhood the 'Campus,' but it will always be Ransom Place."
