Bloomington
Buskirk-Chumley Theater
The Buskirk-Chumley opened in 1922 as the Indiana Theatre, a 616-seat Spanish mission revival movie palace built by Harry P. Vonderschmitt on Kirkwood Avenue a block from the Indiana University gates. The room hosted Hoagy Carmichael, premiered his 1950 film "Young Man with a Horn," and quietly desegregated in 1948 under manager A. B. Clark and IU football player George Taliaferro. Kerasotes operated it as a cinema until 1995, when the building was donated to the Bloomington Area Arts Council, renamed for the local Buskirk and Chumley families, and reopened as a downtown performing-arts house under nonprofit management.
// prior contact
The Monon train chase, October 1958
Five Monon Railroad crewmen filed the formal account of what they saw on the morning of October 3, 1958, and the case file lives a few blocks north of this stage in the archives of the Monroe County History Center. Engineer Harry Eckman, fireman Cecil Bridge (a former Air Force bomber pilot), brakeman Morris Ott, conductor Ed Robinson, and flagman Paul Sosbey tracked four fluorescent-white objects in V formation along the Monon line between Wasco and Kirklin for an hour and ten minutes, watching them shift formation, run through white-yellow-orange color changes, and descend to about two hundred feet above the locomotive. Robinson signaled them with his flashlight; the objects scattered, then reformed over the tracks once the train moved on.
- sighting
capacity
616
year opened
1922
venue type
theater
doors
tba
// market
Bloomington, IN MSA
city
79,986
2024 est.
metro
165,231
2024 est.
// coordinates
114 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN 47408
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