Where the locals go: Tour teaches Bloomington history

There’s a dirt path beneath the Book Corner on Walnut Street that leads to a hidden, closed vault.

At the bottom of the basement stairs, a second vault opens to anyone who visits, but this one, located past a pile of dirt and debris, is a bit more complicated to reach.

“About 10 years ago, someone got down here and waited till we closed,” said Margaret Taylor, owner of the Book Corner. “He took money from the register and got out the back without a key.”

More than 50 years ago, Monroe County Bank occupied the store’s location — a fact Local First Indiana tour guides Alex Simmons and Lisa Simmons, who are not related, shared on the organization’s first “Where the Locals Go” tour of downtown Bloomington.

The tour will continue each Saturday until Oct. 1.

“We want to attract as many people as we can,” Alex said. “Parents Weekend and Homecoming are both coming up, so we kept it through October.”

Alex and Lisa, while not hosting every tour, are self-proclaimed Bloomington fanatics.

“I’m a born native, and Lisa is a transplant,” Alex said.

Even with “transplant” status, Lisa knows her way around downtown and shared some history about her former place of employment,

Greetings.

In Feb. 2002, while Lisa still worked at the shop, an electrical shortage set Greetings aflame.

“You can see right along the top, where it’s dark, that’s actually left over from the flames,” Lisa said, standing in front of the building. “They can only clean it so much.”

Alex Simmons talked about riots that caused damage the last time the IU basketball team made it to the Final Four.

“This part of Kirkwood here and Dunn was just full of people in the streets,” Alex said. “They were climbing up the poles and hanging on these lights above us. It was so crazy and wild that they actually tried to set Greetings on fire again while it was under  construction.”

A block past Greetings, Alex and Lisa stopped in front of the Village Deli, where tour-goer Esther Briggs pointed across the street.

“I’d just like to point out that a local of Bloomington is making himself a bouquet of flowers on the church’s lawn,” she said.

The tour headed down Fourth Street before returning back to Kirkwood Avenue to talk about the Monroe County History Center, which is at the corner of Sixth and Washington Streets.

Before becoming a history center, the building was a Carnegie library, a county library that received money from  steel industry giant and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

“If a city wanted a library and put up land and some seed money, he paid the rest,” Lisa said. “There are more Carnegie libraries in Indiana than anywhere else.”

But even before becoming a library, a segregated school occupied the space in the 1800s.

The tour, set to end at the Farmer’s Market by City Hall, instead ended near the old courthouse on the square.

“It’s a lot shorter when we’re just going through it ourselves, because we already know everything,” Alex said.