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INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Indianapolis City Market will close for renovations Thursday, forcing a dozen or so businesses to temporarily relocate.
Just Cookies and a few others will close for good, according to the cookie shop owner, David Stockton. “It will be a rough ride home Thursday night; a lot of wonderful memories here in this building. We’ve met a lot of great people along the way.”
Stockton has worked from the market for 35 years, surviving the COVID-19 pandemic and the downtown Indianapolis riots. He opted to retire a little early. “We were hoping that we could eek out a few more years, but it didn’t work out that way.”
Late last summer, Gersham Partners and Citimark agreed to develop the nearly 150-year-old City Market building along with some other buildings around it. Another private company will take over day-to-day operations of the market when it reopens in approximately two years.
Brenda Barrett, the owner of Jack’s Barber Shop, said she was lucky to find a new place for her business on Delaware Street. “My rent is going to be triple what I’m paying here, but I have a lot more square footage and it’s going to be amazing.”
Barrett was frustrated that city officials did not tell her until Dec. 13 that she had to vacate City Market by the end of February.
Other vendors says they were told they had to reapply if they wanted to return to City Market after the renovations.
“If they don’t let the merchants come back, it would be the first time in Market history that they haven’t allowed the merchants to return. I’ve been here through two other renovations, and they put us up in the wings. Now, they are telling us to get out,” Barrett said.
Back at the cookie shop, Stockton remembers serving hot cookies to visitors when Lucas Oil Stadium hosted the Super Bowl in 2012, and feeding members of the media covering the Mike Tyson rape trial in 1992.
But more recently, turning a profit for the remaining businesses has been difficult. “We’re going to be very interested to come down and see what it looks like in two years because this building certainly is very old and the infrastructure needs a lot of work,” Stockton said.
News 8 contacted the Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development to find out about the process vendors will need to go through to return to City Market but did not hear back by Tuesday.
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