John Waldron Arts Center

The John Waldron Arts Center at 122 S. Walnut St. is Bloomington’s 1915 City Hall, a three-story limestone building in the Beaux Arts style on the northwest corner of Walnut and 4th streets, a block from the Courthouse Square. It has been an arts center since 1990 and is managed for the City of Bloomington by Constellation Stage & Screen, with galleries, performance spaces, classrooms and meeting rooms.

The building was Bloomington’s first and only city hall. The city council awarded the contract by a vote of 3 to 2 to George A. Weaver of Indianapolis, who also built that city’s Claypool Hotel, at about $37,700. The city’s debt was a worry, and the price came down with wood doors and pine floors. The architects of record were Frank P. Riedel and Company, which built mostly in Lafayette, and John Lincoln Nichols, Bloomington’s first native architect, and a plaque in the second-floor hall lists their names. When it was finished it held the mayor’s office, the council chamber, a city court room that seated 500, police headquarters and a fire station with sleeping quarters and firemen’s poles.

City offices stayed until 1963, when the Municipal Building on Third Street opened, and the police until 1986. The fire station kept working from the west end, which got a one-story addition in 1950 and living quarters in 1972. In 1990 the city deeded the building to the Bloomington Area Arts Council, which renovated it with a third-floor auditorium, galleries and a small theater, and named it for John Waldron, a prominent 19th-century Bloomington politician, to recognize donor Cecile Waldron, whose husband was his great-grandson. WFHB Community Radio has broadcast from the connected firehouse at 108 W. 4th St. since 1994.

Ivy Tech Community College acquired the building in 2010, after the arts council warned that it would have to close without $120,000, and held a ribbon cutting on September 14, 2010, with then-Mayor Mark Kruzan and Chancellor John Whikehart. By 2020, Bloom Magazine reported, about 2,000 people a year took non-credit classes there, some 300 children attended art classes and camps, and five galleries showed the work of hundreds of artists, with performances by groups including Cardinal Stage, Stages Bloomington, Windfall Dancers and the Jewish Theatre of Bloomington. The city took the building back in 2020. After a task force reported in 2021, it hired Constellation Stage & Screen to manage it from July 2022, and a reopening celebration followed on October 13, 2022.

The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, listed in 1989, and is part of the Courthouse Square Historic District. Its nomination calls it “an impressive, small town version of a Beaux-Arts civic structure.” Look for the pedimented doorway on Walnut Street and the tablet above it that reads CITY HALL 1915. See current exhibits and shows on the City of Bloomington’s Waldron page, find it on the 3D map, or browse more art galleries and art centers in Bloomington.