Jeff LaFave and Lauren Slavin, Herald-Times
Downtown Bloomington has not always stood so tall.
Even as recently as the 1970s and ’80s, large portions of the downtown area were in disarray. At night, the limestone city felt like a ghost town. Threats were made as far back as 1959, when county council member Robert E. Turner floated a plan to raze the “monstrosity” of a courthouse and replace it with a six-story office building.
Many also worried the crumbling and structurally unsound south side of the courthouse square would have to be demolished altogether, until CFC Properties spent 1985 to 1988 renovating Fountain Square’s buildings and saving other downtown structures from decline.
Still, “people were fleeing to College Mall and doing lots of suburban things,” said city planner Tom Micuda. “Downtown was in rough shape.”
The city’s plan to revitalize downtown included encouraging new residents to move to the core of Bloomington, an optimal situation for an ever-growing segment of the population — Indiana University students. The figures keep growing: IU Bloomington enrollment is up nearly 8,500 students from just a decade ago.
And developers stepped up to the challenge to relocate their apartment projects from suburbia to the center of town.
Downtown tenants now occupy 42 apartment housing projects built since 2000. Projects directed at the student market have added or will add almost 3,500 bedrooms from 2000 through the present, with 850 of them either under construction or with plans approved since 2010, according to the city.
Plans for a Certified Technology Park north of City Hall did not take off at the same rate downtown housing projects did. In 2007, Michael McRobbie became president of IU and shifted the university’s focus away from a joint tech park initiative with the city. Instead, the university developed its own tech park on a 2-mile stretch of land at East 10th Street and the Ind. 45/46 Bypass. The university opened the IU Data Center, Innovation Center and Cyberinfrastructure Building to house its tech employees and supercomputers.
Without that partnership with IU, development of the downtown tech park stalled, and the city questioned whether Bloomington was big enough to sustain two tech parks. The 12 acres of land IU owned within the state-designated Certified Technology Park went up for sale, and in 2011, the city took control of the property and began planning how to best use what officials now call the tech park’s “core properties.”