Construction around Bottleworks District finishing, 9th Street at College Avenue reopening

INDIANAPOLIS — The fencing, orange cones and tape are coming down along College Avenue and 9th Street in the Bottleworks District.

The intersection of 9th and College has been closed for more than a year as construction on Phase II of the Bottleworks District has created new office space, retail storefronts and a parking garage.

Exterior construction is in its final days, and soon, 9th Street into Bottleworks and the east side of College Avenue will reopen.

”We can get more foot traffic of people walking Mass Ave down College and into Bottleworks,” said Miranda Ryder, a manager at Stretch Lab Downtown Indy.

Stretch Lab is one of many businesses in the Bottleworks district. The assisted stretch facility is along the shuttered 9th Street and just outside the construction zone. The business opened in late 2022, just months before 9th Street closed.

”I’m very excited to not hear a lot of the buzzing and the banging all day long, but we’re excited for our community to just keep growing,” Ryder said.

With Phase II of Bottleworks set to open soon, 200,000 square feet of office space will occupy the top floors of the building. Lance Evinger, the vice president of acquisitions with Hendricks Commercial Properties, said half of that space is already occupied.

Ryder is hopeful those businesses will bring customers right to her front door.

”We have a lot of corporate workers,” Ryder said. “We have a lot of people who sit at a desk, so that right there they can come down on their lunch break, come see us and go right back up.”

The ground-floor storefronts will soon be home to new businesses, as well.

”We have a new restaurant, Piedra, that will be opening probably by the end of May, and Penn and Beech Candle Co., they’ll be opening, May or June this summer,” Evinger said.

In the immediate future, drivers and visitors at Bottleworks can expect it to be easier to navigate and find parking, as a new parking garage will open inside Phase II.

”It’s so helpful just for traffic flow to have 9th Street open again,” he said. “To have that expansion to the parking garage and double the available parking for our guests.”

Construction around the already established Bottleworks businesses has been a constant theme. Before Phase II started in 2022, the nearby North Split construction had Bottleworks congested with detours and cloudy with construction dust. 

The completion of the Phase II project will be a nice break from construction for the neighbors and businesses nearby, but other plans are coming down the pipeline.

”Nothing to announce yet, but you can expect probably in the next few months an announcement about additional development at Bottleworks,” Evinger said.

More announcements are also set to come about what other retail and restaurants will occupy the new ground floor storefronts along College Avenue.