The map has a new building on it, and I had to come up with a pun to match: The Forge, the office building across from The Mill in the Trades District, is now on Bloomington 3D. This weekend, working with Claude Code, we also added pickleball courts and Indiana University’s campus to the map, built a tour of the city’s international markets, redesigned the Monday email, gave the events page filters, and cleaned up a few dozen directory listings. This week’s featured business is Amplify Bloomington, which happens to sit across the street from The Forge. Here is everything we forged, with the screens to show it.
The Forge joins the map
The Forge opened in November 2024 at 617 N. Madison Street, across Madison from The Mill. It is a three-story office building, about 22,000 square feet, meant for tech companies that have outgrown the startup stage. Folia was its first tenant, and Bloom and ViVum AI were named among the first companies to move in. It has a green roof and a rooftop solar array that was expected to cover nearly 30 percent of its electricity.
Most buildings on the map come from a lidar survey of the county. The Forge went up after that survey, so the map had nothing to start from. I sent photos I took standing in front of it, and Claude found the building in recent aerial imagery and traced its outline. Google’s own pin for the building lands inside that outline. The rust-colored brick, the glass box over the entrance, the gray tower with the Bloom sign, the solar canopy and the concrete sign wall out front all come from those photos.
I should be honest about the limits. The heights are estimates read from the photos, and I did not photograph the west or south sides, so those walls are best guesses. The card says so. If you work in the building and see something off, tell us and we will fix it. Earlier in the day we also made The Mill’s sign light up after dark and before dawn, so the two buildings now glow across the street from each other.
This week’s featured business: Amplify Bloomington
Amplify Bloomington is the Business of the Week on the homepage. It grew out of The Mill and describes itself as a civic alliance that supports regional entrepreneurship and innovation. Its coworking space is in the Trades District, and it helps local founders with scaling, access to capital and mentorship. It also connects Indiana University research with local employers and city leadership. Two people loved its listing this week.
If you are starting something, or you work for yourself and want a desk and some company, it is worth a visit. The listing has its contact details, and its card on the 3D map sits right across the street from The Forge.
One more change goes with it. When the map has nothing else to feature, such as a game or a concert, it now opens on the Business of the Week instead of the courthouse square. Today that means it opens on Amplify.
A tour of Bloomington’s international markets
The Indiana Daily Student published a guide to the city’s international groceries and markets this summer, and it made a good map. There is now a guided tour with eleven stops: La Bonita, World Foods, Kabul Corner, 4th Street International, Little Italy Market, Btown Bodega, La Bodega, Olive Leaf, Apna Bazaar, Rong Cheng and B-Town International Market. Each stop has its own card, and the grocery and specialty food pages in the directory now point to the tour.
A redesigned Monday email, and an events page you can filter
The weekly email has a new look. Each event has a logo or a letter badge, a short description and add-to-calendar links for Google and for Apple and Outlook. Repeating events are folded into one line. The email you get when you sign up is designed now too, and so are the pages you land on when you confirm or unsubscribe. We also made those links safer: some mail programs open every link in a message to scan it, which could have unsubscribed people on its own. The links now show a button first, and only the button does anything.
Behind the scenes there is a new page for me under Tools called Weekly email, with the subscriber list, a send history, a preview and a test send. The next email goes out Monday morning at 8:00.
The events page got the same treatment. It shows the next 30 days from our public calendars, and you can narrow it by when (today, tomorrow, this weekend, next 7 days) and by type (music or community). Each event has an add-to-calendar link and a link to its place on the map. The homepage card uses a compact version of the same list.
Yesterday: pickleball courts, and all of Indiana University
Sunday was a big day for the map. Pickleball and tennis courts are now drawn in 3D, with painted lines, nets, fences and light poles. RCA Park has its six pickleball courts, two tennis courts and the woods around them, and the Switchyard Park courts have string lights. Karst Farm, Park Ridge East and the IU Northwest courts are there too. We only drew courts we could confirm, so a few places that looked like courts on a satellite photo were left off.
The bigger project was Indiana University. The map now has 26 more campus places, including the Indiana Memorial Union, Ballantine Hall, Franklin Hall, IU Cinema and the Hoagy Carmichael sculpture, with notes in our own words from IU’s public campus map. There are three campus tours based on IU’s own routes. The campus itself got paved: walkways and plazas, parking lots, bike racks, emergency phones that glow at night, and signs for accessible entrances and parking, all taken from IU’s public map data.
Any business or place that is a stop on a tour now says so on its directory page, with a button that flies the map to it. The Bluebird’s card also has a new button, See who’s playing, that flies up to its marquee.
Cleaning up the directory
We kept going on the directory refresh this weekend. We rewrote and fact-checked the listings for The Sip, Atlas, Blockhouse, Soma and its sister businesses, Bethel Lane Farm Stop and the five international markets, working from each business’s own website. We merged duplicates, moved listings out of categories that did not fit, removed a few we could not verify, and corrected addresses. We also added Enrich Barbershop at 126 E. 6th Street, a new listing.
As before, anything we could not confirm we left alone. A wrong phone number costs a local business a customer, so we would rather leave a listing thin than guess.
If you own a business here
Look yourself up in the directory and tell us what is wrong. Every page has a Suggest a correction link. If you have photos or changed hours, send them in. If you do not have a listing yet, adding one is free.
