City Market redevelopment plans hit snag

INDIANAPOLIS — When the City of Indianapolis and Gershman Partners and CitiMark announced in 2022 that the City Market campus would undergo a $175 million redevelopment that would include an updated Market House, an apartment building on the east end and a newly designed Whistler Plaza on the west end, there were smiles, congratulations and backslaps all around and a late 2023 construction date.

“I think it’s going to be vibrant,” said Mayor Joe Hogsett.

“The property we are standing on today, the East Market, will be an 11-story 60-65 apartment mixed-use building anchored by retail and potentially office,” said developer Eric Gershman.

“You’re gonna have more people living here than anywhere in the state of Indiana on this block,” said Metropolitan Development Director Scarlett Andrews.

Well…maybe not.

The City has announced that Gershman and CitiMark have pulled out of the City Market redevelopment project in order to concentrate on renovating the Gold Building at Ohio and Delaware streets into 350 apartments and continue working on fixing up a parking garage and the office building at 251 East Ohio Street.

The Department of Metropolitan Development is currently seeking a new partner to tackle the proposed $15 million overhaul of Whistler Plaza into a public gathering and green space with easier access to the historic catacombs below street level.

“Nothing has changed on the financing of Whistler Plaza,” said DMD Director Megan Vukusich. “We’re finally getting to a point where we have final construction documents so to actually go out and build those improvements, this request that we’re now going out to the development community is really to finish and finalize those construction documents that we have in place, those will be part of the request that we put out and then construct and deliver that plaza back to the city.”

Vukusich said the estimated $25 million renovation of the 138-year-old City Market is still in the assessment phase and the imagined East Plaza apartment building will now wait for another developer to design and build.

”We are doing assessments of the Market House in alignment with Whistler Plaza improvements and we’ll get to those maintenance items hopefully alongside those improvements,” Vukusich said. ”Through that process, we learned that really we should focus our energy on Whistler Plaza first rather than the Market House because we want to attract a private operator for the Market House and the state that it was in, it wasn’t going to be as attractive for a private operator.”

A source familiar with the project told FOX59/CBS4 that, like the Signia Hilton Hotel construction and Convention Center addition taken over by the City when a private developer could not arrange financing, the City determined that moving on from Gershman and CitiMark was the surest way to get the City Market site redevelopment back on track.

A block north, at Old City Hall on Alabama Street, the developer of a long-anticipated boutique hotel/residential project has yet to break ground.