A year ago, the two-story concrete building at West 11th Street and North Rogers was crumbling and vacant, its windows broken and its walls splashed red with graffiti. Ivy climbed from the ground to the roof.
The former auto shop and one-time gun store looked irredeemable, neighbors said.“I thought it had to be a tear-down,” said Doug Dayhoff, the president of Upland Brewery, which is headquartered just down the street. “It looked beyond repair.”
Where many saw disaster, though, two local businessmen saw opportunity.
Even though the building wasn’t for sale, Don Weiler and Craig Bailey convinced its owner to sell. Then they went to work, repairing the roof, the walls and the floors. The two co-own Bailey & Weiler, a growing design-and-build construction firm.
They added square footage, big windows and street lighting, and in the process practically reclaimed for downtown Bloomington a corner that to some had seemed lost. “This area has long needed revitalization,” said Debbie Buckley, a paralegal who has worked in the neighborhood for years.
“Let’s face it, it’s known as the rough part of town,” she said. “It’s a good thing for Bloomington to change that.”
After sitting vacant for more than three years, the building now houses an office for Bailey & Weiler, another office with two potential tenants, and a posh four-bedroom apartment just blocks from Courthouse Square.
Booming business forced the five-year-old Baily & Weiler out of home offices and into some formal office space, Don Weiler said. The co-owners looked at a series of properties around Bloomington — all potential renovations — before settling on downtown’s northwest corner.
It might have been cheaper to tear down the old building and start over, but neither Weiler nor Bailey wanted to do that, Weiler said.
“We felt that there were enough properties in Bloomington that were under-utilized that we could get what we needed without building something new,” he said.
The two were aware that they could help turn the building, which Weiler compared to a “concrete bunker,” into something that would help rejuvenate a neighborhood that has seen explosive residential growth, and could see expansions at Upland Brewery in the near future.
“You just hope it continues to spread,” Weiler said.
The renovations at West 11th and Rogers streets have already attracted some new people to the western edge of downtown. Four Indiana University seniors moved into the upstairs apartment in August, even though they’d rarely been to this part of town, said TJ Land, one of the roommates.
Despite being new to the neighborhood, Land and his roommates are aware how much has changed with the building in the last year, because they had looked it up on Google Earth.
“It was a craphole,” Land said. “But it worked out perfectly for us.”
