French Lick, IN
Not Larry Bird's restaurant; his friends opened it in 2008, restoring an old storefront and naming it for his number and the cobbled brick street out front, and Bird loaned them most of his collection. When they went to pick it up, it was in a barn, the Olympic gear still in the duffel bag from Barcelona, never unpacked. Six of his game-worn jerseys hang beside his trophies and a murderers' row of signed jerseys, Jordan to Gretzky, and the house tradition is real: ask the staff and they will pull the 1992 Dream Team warm-up jacket from behind the bar and let you wear it for a photo; the state tourism office advertises it. Burgers, steaks, and the mushroom chips people mention on the way out. Open seven days at 480 S Maple; Monday is dinner only from 3, and Sunday closes at 7.
French Lick and neighboring West Baden were once known as the 'Las Vegas of the Midwest.' During Prohibition, illegal gambling operations run by political boss Thomas Taggart made these resort towns a destination for the rich and powerful. Al Capone was a frequent visitor. The French Lick Springs Hotel hosted the 1931 Democratic Governors Conference where FDR built support for his presidential run. Larry Bird grew up in nearby West Baden. The airport provides access to the restored resort hotels and casinos.
When it was completed in 1902, this 200-foot free-span dome was the largest in the world — bigger than the Pantheon in Rome, bigger than St. Peter's Basilica. It held the record until the Houston Astrodome in 1965. Called the 'Eighth Wonder of the World,' the hotel fell into disrepair but was restored in 2007. The circular dome is clearly visible from 3000ft. The dome is most photogenic from the south, with the valley's forested hills as backdrop.
The hills of south-central Indiana sit on a thick bed of Mississippian limestone, and where rainwater has worked down through it for hundreds of thousands of years it has hollowed out one of the densest concentrations of caves in the eastern United States. This is karst country: sinkholes pock the fields, streams vanish into the ground and resurface miles away, and beneath the surface run miles of mapped passage. Marengo Cave, found in 1883 by two children, is a US National Natural Landmark and one of the most decorated show caves in the Midwest — dense with flowstone, soda straws, and the draperies and "cave coral" that form where mineral-laden water drips over millennia. It has been operated as a show cave continuously for well over a century. A few miles south, the Wyandotte Caves are among the largest cave systems in Indiana, with passages worked by Native peoples for thousands of years to mine chert and aragonite; "Monument Mountain," a huge underground breakdown pile inside Big Wyandotte, is one of the tallest underground features open to visitors anywhere. The same limestone built the surface country. The Mitchell Plateau quarries supplied the Salem limestone that faced the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and the National Cathedral — the Bedford limestone belt runs through the same country. Spring Mill State Park, with its cave-fed gristmill and its boat-tour caves, sits in the same karst belt to the N.
You are landing at Virgil I. Grissom Municipal Airport. Seven miles south, inside Spring Mill State Park, the Gus Grissom Memorial holds "Molly Brown" — the Gemini 3 spacecraft Grissom flew in March 1965 on the first crewed Gemini mission. The airport carries his name; the park holds his spacecraft; he grew up twelve miles away in Mitchell, Indiana. Few general-aviation fields in the country bind their name, their region, and a national hero together this tightly. Virgil "Gus" Grissom was the second American in space (Mercury-Redstone 4, July 1961 — the "Liberty Bell 7" suborbital flight whose hatch blew open prematurely on splashdown and sank the capsule), the first American to fly in space twice (Gemini 3), and the commander of Apollo 1. He died with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the January 27, 1967 cabin fire during a launch-pad test. He was 40. The memorial at Spring Mill tells his story through the Molly Brown capsule, his spacesuit, and personal artifacts. Spring Mill State Park is one of Indiana''s oldest and finest. Its centerpiece is Pioneer Village — a restored early-1800s limestone milling settlement built around a three-story gristmill still turned by water carried on a long wooden flume from a cave spring. The mill grinds corn for visitors. The surrounding karst holds Twin Caves (boat tours run into the cave on an underground stream), Donaldson Cave, and Bronson Cave, all cut into the Mitchell Plateau limestone that built southern Indiana — the same Salem limestone quarried up around Bedford. Donaldson Woods is a 67-acre old-growth forest that was never logged.
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.