The city holds the west plaza
The Charles L. Whistler Memorial Plaza rebuild is a public project. The Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development had partnered with Gershman Partners and Citimark on the plaza. The department took both firms off the work in 2025, and the two firms turned to converting the Gold Building at 151 N. Delaware Street into more than 300 apartments. The city loaned them up to $18 million in September 2025 to keep that conversion moving.
In late 2025 the department entered a $15.3 million contract with The Hagerman Group to oversee the plaza renovation. It contracted the engineering firm Shrewsberry & Associates for up to $435,000 in April 2025 to serve as the city’s representative. WFYI records the plaza budget as $15 million. WISH-TV records the project as under way underground.
What phase one builds
Phase one is the campus’s western outdoor space, between Market Street and Delaware Street. The published design gives the plaza new seating, green space and a pedestrian walkway through Wabash Alley. Wabash Alley is the passage that splits the block between the Gold Building and the City Market properties. Twenty trees go in for shade.
Underground work to surface the catacombs began in June 2026. Merritt Chase, the landscape architect on the job, records the first construction step as the removal of a 1970s building addition inside the plaza footprint. The west wing of the market building comes down in the weeks after the city’s 17 June update.
The catacombs come into daylight
The catacombs are the surviving basement of Tomlinson Hall, a public meeting hall whose second floor held a 4,200-seat auditorium. The hall opened on 2 June 1886, and a fire destroyed it on 30 January 1958. Demolition that year removed the above-ground structure and left the 20,000-square-foot basement. The structure holds no crypts and no human remains.
Crews wrap the columns in waterproofing material while the roof above comes out. The basement is filled temporarily with a flowable fill to hold the original masonry. The firm tested the method on a small corner of the basement first. Principal Chris Merritt said the intent is to bring the history of the hall into daily public life.
The west wing foundation stays as an overlook on the plaza’s north side, with a section of the catacombs behind glass panels below it. The design moved the exposed arches off the southwest corner, so the plaza opens toward pedestrians arriving from Market Street. Director Megan Vukusich attributed the change to cost savings.
Phase two runs on its own clock
The City Market building is 140 years old and served as the city’s original farmers’ market. Its restoration is phase two. No construction has started on it.
Board chair Craig Mince told the Indianapolis Business Journal that a 2028 reopening is no longer feasible, and Vukusich told IndyStar that a reopening date is too early to tell. The department and the City Market Corp. will hold discussions with community leaders on how to restore and reopen the Market House.
Browning Day manages the selective demolition of phase one and aims to recycle as much material as possible.
The dates the record carries
Phase one completion reads as the end of 2027 in the accounts from WISH-TV and WFYI, and as the fall of 2027 in Merritt Chase’s own release. The market building carries no date at all. No reopening date, no phase two schedule and no construction start for the Market House appear in the accounts reviewed for this piece.
No capacity figure, no square footage and no event calendar for the plaza are published either.
What comes next
Phase two has no schedule, and the parking closure carries no end date. The closed spaces sit along Delaware and Market streets next to the site, and they take the kerb a hotel guest uses.
The Market House, which operated as a food hall, carries no reopening date.
The hotels at the plaza edge
Straight-line distances from the City Market’s OpenStreetMap point (39.7687817, -86.1534518), measured 22 September 2026: Aloft, 136 E. Market Street, 148 m; Home2 Suites, 115 N. Pennsylvania Street, 217 m; Hotel Indy, 141 E. Washington Street, 267 m; Hilton Garden Inn, 108 N. Pennsylvania Street, 269 m; Atlas Hotel, 433 E. Washington Street, 393 m; Sheraton Indianapolis City Centre, 31 W. Ohio Street, 456 m; Hilton Indianapolis Hotel & Suites, 120 W. Market Street, 613 m. The figures are straight-line and not walking routes.
The City Market sits 1,068 m (0.66 mi) from the Indiana Convention Center at 100 S. Capitol Avenue. A plaza that opens at the end of 2027 puts seating, shade and a through-block walkway at those doors.