Walk east on Kirkwood past the Sample Gates this month and the storefronts tell one story. Cafe Pizzaria's old sign is gone, replaced by two doors that share a dining room: Ciao Bella's fresh pasta on one side, Roll n' Dip's build-your-own tacos on the other. Around the corner at Walnut, the space that held gyros and saganaki for almost fifty years sits dark, its awning still reading The Trojan Horse though the kitchen has already moved north toward Ellettsville. On the square, a pub with a pinball room went quiet in July.
If you've lived here longer than a semester, none of that surprises you. Kirkwood turns over restaurants the way it always has. What might surprise you is what happened to the street underneath those storefronts, which flipped for the first time since 2020 and then almost flipped back a second time, in a fight that had almost nothing to do with any of the businesses above.
Two Storefronts, One Recipe Nobody Could Buy
Cafe Pizzaria closed without warning in August 2024, ending a 71-year run at 405 E. Kirkwood Ave. that made it Bloomington's oldest pizzeria. Two years later, the space reopened as two separate businesses at once. Ciao Bella, an Italian spot with house-made pasta and gelato, opened Aug. 13, 2026, sharing walls and an interior walk-through with Roll n' Dip, a build-your-own Mexican counter that debuted the same month. Customers move between the two without stepping back outside.
According to the new ownership group, they had hoped to acquire the Cafe Pizzaria name and its recipes along with the building, but another party secured those rights first. What they got instead was the address and the foot traffic, which on Kirkwood is most of the value anyway.
The Corner That Anchored the Square Since 1978
The Trojan Horse has held the southeast corner of Kirkwood and Walnut for 48 years, long enough that regulars talk about its departure like the end of an era rather than a relocation. Co-owners Kristen and Michael Shelley are moving the restaurant to the former Wee Willie's location at 4618 W. Richland Plaza Drive in Ellettsville, with a reopening planned for this month. The Shelleys live in Ellettsville themselves, and they've said the move is about gaining room to expand and about making the restaurant easier to reach for people who don't travel far from home.
It's a real loss for the courthouse square's daily rhythm, and downtown didn't lose only that corner. The Orbit Room, a pub known for gourmet hot dogs and a pinball room at 107 N. College Ave., closed in July after eight years when co-owner Michael Klinge said running it was no longer sustainable.
The Street Underneath Them Flipped for the First Time Since 2020
This is the part that's easy to miss if you only track storefronts. From 2020 through 2025, Kirkwood was closed to car traffic in five of those six years, first as a pandemic response, then as an annual outdoor dining program that let restaurants push tables into the street. This year, the city ended that streak. Bloomington's Board of Public Works decided in February to keep Kirkwood open to vehicles in 2026, replacing full closure with a parklet model. A parklet takes a restaurant's on-street parking spots and converts them into a small platform for outdoor seating, without shutting the whole corridor to traffic.
The city council pushed back. On June 10, it voted 5-4 to pass Ordinance 2026-12, which would have made the seasonal closure permanent starting in 2027, five blocks between Indiana Avenue and Walnut Street shut to cars every April through November. Mayor Kerry Thomson vetoed it twelve days later, citing the absence of a funding plan and pointing to Senate Enrolled Act 1, the state law reshaping local property and income tax structures, as a reason for caution on new recurring costs.
"Kirkwood is a place of memory, movement, commerce, and gathering, it is often the heartbeat of our civic life."
That's how Thomson framed the veto in her letter to the city. The council had until its next meeting to override it with six of nine votes. On July 22, the override failed 4-4, after councilmember Dave Rollo reversed the vote he'd cast a month earlier. Kirkwood stays open to cars for now, with a 2027 corridor study left to decide whether the fight starts over again.
The Number That Cuts Against Both Sides
Here's what neither side's argument fully accounted for. More than 25 restaurants line the Kirkwood corridor. Last year, when the street was fully closed for months, only five of them actually installed outdoor seating in the street itself. The other twenty stayed open the entire time, closure or no closure, feeding people through their own front doors just as they do now. A city survey on whether to continue a full closure came back almost evenly split among the businesses it would affect.
That gap matters for how you read this year's restaurant turnover. Ciao Bella and Roll n' Dip opened this year without ever operating under a full street closure, and their shared walk-through layout doesn't depend on sidewalk tables to work. The Trojan Horse's move to Ellettsville was framed by its own owners around space and accessibility, not street policy. None of the year's biggest storefront changes were casualties of the traffic fight. They were happening on their own timeline, on a street that just happened to be having an entirely separate argument about itself at the same time.
What This Means for a Walk Down Kirkwood This Month
If you're headed downtown this September, expect Kirkwood to look like an ordinary street on most days, cars included, with parklets sitting in front of whichever restaurants applied for one this season. Full closures are reserved for programmed events like Taste of Bloomington and Pridefest, not the everyday lunch rush. That's a real change from the summers of 2020 through 2025, when the whole corridor from Indiana Avenue to Walnut Street went car-free for most of eight months at a stretch.
You'll also notice the pavement itself looks different in places. The city put nearly $4.7 million toward infrastructure work along Kirkwood Avenue and nearby streets this year, including repaving, new curb ramps, and stormwater upgrades, with a separate sidewalk maintenance contract covering East Kirkwood between Indiana Avenue and Walnut Street finishing by mid-July. Alley bollards were added downtown too, funded through parking meter revenue, to help with festival setup safety.
Here's the short version of what's new and what's gone on the corridor:
- Ciao Bella and Roll n' Dip — 405 E. Kirkwood Ave., opened August 2026, sharing the building that housed Cafe Pizzaria for 71 years
- The Trojan Horse — leaving 100 E. Kirkwood Ave. after 48 years, reopening at 4618 W. Richland Plaza Drive in Ellettsville this month
- The Orbit Room — closed in July after eight years at 107 N. College Ave.
- Kirkwood's traffic pattern — open to cars for 2026, with parklets replacing the seasonal full closure used most years since 2020, pending a 2027 corridor study
None of this changes what Kirkwood is for the people who live near it. It's still the fastest way from downtown to the Sample Gates, still the block where you run into three people you know on a Friday night. It just means the street looks a little different underfoot than it has since before most current IU sophomores started high school, and whatever restaurant news comes next on Kirkwood will be writing itself against this year's backdrop, not the one you might still be picturing.
If you're weighing a move near downtown Bloomington and want a read on how a neighborhood is actually changing, not just what a median price tells you, Amanda Sells Indiana has been watching this corridor and the rest of Monroe County for more than two decades. Schedule a Free Consultation and get the version of Bloomington that doesn't show up in a portal search.
