Bloomington, IN
A Bloomington and IU tradition on Kirkwood since 1927, one block from campus. Founder Nick Hrisomalos, a Greek immigrant, opened it as a candy and sandwich shop during Prohibition and rented half the building to the haberdashery where his friend Herman B Wells worked; the liquor license arrived with repeal in 1933 and has never left the address. The Wall of Fame on the stairs to the Hump Room is signed by IU and Olympic athletes. The stromboli is the signature; Sink the Biz is the house drinking game. Closed Mondays, and Sunday runs noon to 6; plan a Tuesday-through-Saturday lunch.
Monroe County Airport sits southwest of Bloomington on top of Indiana Limestone, and the karst country makes itself known: in 2013 the county plugged sinkholes under the field with geogrid to keep the runways honest. The main runway grew from 5,200 to 6,500 feet, long enough that Boeing 727s could work it, and airlines called here until 1997, when federal subsidies ended over the airport's proximity to Indianapolis. Cook Group, Bloomington's medical-device giant, runs one of the field's two FBOs. More than a hundred aircraft are based here, among them better than ten hot air balloons; in 1985 a Vickers Viscount from Ray Charles' touring operation ran off the runway on landing and never flew again.
Indiana University's Bloomington campus is one of the most beautiful in the country — 1,900 acres of limestone gothic buildings set among old hardwoods, built almost entirely from the same Salem limestone quarried a few miles south around Bedford. The local stone gives the whole campus a unified warm-grey palette that shifts color with the light, and from the air that grey stone and the dense old-growth canopy are what set the campus apart from the town grid around it. The landmark a pilot will recognize is Memorial Stadium, on the north edge of campus — now the home of the 2025 national champions. Under coach Curt Cignetti (google him), Indiana football — the losingest program in the history of the sport coming into the season — went 16–0 and beat Miami for the first football national title in school history, behind Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza. The stadium and the domed Assembly Hall (basketball) next to it are the most identifiable structures on campus from altitude. At the heart of the old campus, the Sample Gates limestone arch opens onto Dunn's Woods, a preserved remnant of the original forest with the oldest buildings curving around it. If you land and make the trip into campus, two collections reward it: the Lilly Library holds a Gutenberg Bible, a Shakespeare First Folio, and the manuscript of Lincoln's last public address; and Thomas Hart Benton's sweeping mural cycle "A Social History of Indiana," painted for the 1933 World's Fair, is installed in the IU Auditorium. Bloomington itself is a college town in the wooded hills of south-central Indiana, with the Brown County hills and the Nashville art colony just east and Lake Monroe to the southeast.
Theodore Clement Steele was the leading painter of the "Hoosier Group," the Indiana Impressionists who carried American Impressionism into the Midwest around the turn of the 20th century. In 1907 Steele bought 211 acres of ridgetop in the wooded hills of Brown County, built a house and a big north-light studio, and named the place the "House of the Singing Winds" for the way the wind moved across the hilltop. His wife Selma planted gardens that became nearly as celebrated as his canvases. Steele''s arrival pulled other artists to Brown County. By the 1910s and 1920s the village of Nashville, a few miles east, had become the largest art colony in the Midwest — a community of landscape painters drawn by the same things Steele was: the soft folded hills, the autumn haze, the color, and the cheap land. The colony still operates. The Brown County Art Gallery and the Brown County Art Guild in Nashville hold the Hoosier Group legacy, and Nashville itself has grown into a town of galleries, craft studios, and shops that fills with leaf-peepers every October. The T.C. Steele State Historic Site preserves the house, the studio still hung with his paintings, and Selma''s restored gardens on the ridge, beside the Selma Steele State Nature Preserve. Brown County State Park — Indiana''s largest state park and the nature counterpart to the art colony — lies just E, and the two together make the Bloomington-Nashville hills one of the most-visited fall-color destinations in the state.
The limestone quarried around Bedford and Bloomington built a startling share of monumental America — the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the National Cathedral, and some 35 state capitols. The Empire Quarry is the most famous: the pit that yielded 18,630 tons of stone for the Empire State Building. The belt between the two towns is pocked with these workings, active and abandoned, their sheer pale walls dropping to floors of still blue water.
Indiana's only national forest — 200,000 acres of hardwood hills covering southern Indiana. Hemlock Cliffs, Wesley Chapel Gulf, the Knobstone Trail (Indiana's longest), and the iconic French Lick / West Baden region all sit within or near the forest. The hills are a glacial-era surprise in flat Indiana — the Wisconsin glacier stopped just north of here, leaving the south side rugged and forested. Spectacular fall color October 15-30, peaking earlier than the rest of the state.