Bottleworks District wins top prize from Indiana Landmarks
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Indiana Landmarks is presenting its top restoration prize to the Bottleworks District redevelopment on Massachusetts Avenue in downtown Indianapolis.
Hendricks Commercial Properties, which developed the Bottleworks project, won the 2023 Cook Cup for Outstanding Restoration for its work on the $300 million undertaking at the former Coca-Cola Bottling Plant.
Indiana Landmarks awards its Cook Cup prize annually to a property owner it says follows high standards in revitalizing a single, historic building in a way that positively influences a neighborhood or community.
“Hendricks’ adaptation of the former Coca-Cola Bottling Plant is a transformative project that exemplifies superior preservation practice and economic revitalization,” Indiana Landmarks President Marsh Davis said in a news release.
The Bottleworks District is a dozen acres and features a food hall, a 139-room boutique hotel and an art-house cinema, as well as onsite parking, dining and retail. Its design was inspired by the original Coca-Cola Bottling Plant, opened in 1931 by Jim and Lee Yuncker.
The two established the plant in a location where they had already been bottling ginger ale and other soft drinks for decades. They sought out architecture firm Rubush & Hunter for an Art Deco-inspired redesign once they decided to bottle Coca-Cola products. The result featured the site’s hallmark white terra cotta façade, as well as bronze storefronts, terrazzo flooring and colorful tile wall treatments.
“It was about really trying to understand the building and working with in instead of against it,” said David Kroll, director of preservation for Indianapolis firm RATIO, which served as the local project architect in Bottleworks’ recent redevelopment.
The bottling plant expanded in the ’40s and ’50s before being sold to Indianapolis Public Schools in 1968 for use as a storage and transportation facility. Hendricks won approval from Indianapolis leaders to redevelop the site in 2016.
“Everyone working on it had a sense of pride in what they were doing and understood these buildings’ importance to the community,” Hendricks’ development vice president, Gavin Thomas, said in a release about the Bottleworks project. “We were very much interested in doing the right thing and setting the bar high, which was a big driver of the results.”