The world continues to deal with the global pandemic of COVID-19. On March 6th, Governor Eric Holcomb signed an executive order that declared a public health emergency for the state of Indiana. On March 23rd, Governor Holcomb issued a stay-at-home order and closed in-person eating at restaurants and more industries starting March 24th until April 6th.

Governor Holcomb issued a five-stage plan that would allow restaurants in Indiana, to have in-person dining at 50% capacity. The expectations were Cass, Lake, and Marion counties, which had to delay the start of stage 2. Prior to the five-stage plan restaurants nationwide and in Bloomington shut down entirely, and some never reopened. Many of those that closed temporarily still had to layoff staff.

The general manager of Nick’s English Hut, Pete Mikolaitis, knows all about the problems that occurred from the shutdown. “On the 17th of March, we furloughed probably about 95% of our staff,” Mikolaitis said. Nick’s started doing curbside pickup and carryout orders around mid to late April, but that didn’t solve all of their problems because, in his words,  “It wasn’t even enough to keep the doors open.”

The other problem Nick’s and other restaurants on Kirkwood suffered was that initially,  they had very little outside seating available to their customers with a 50% capacity order. Many people felt uncomfortable eating inside with a pandemic raging.

In an order to help restaurants, on June 17th, the Bloomington City Council approved closures on Kirkwood from Indiana Avenue and Grant Street to allow restaurants to move outside seating into the streets on the weekends. Mikolaitis states that before this, Nick’s only had three tables available for customers to eat outside. the change allowed Nick’s to expand to 20 tables for outside dining. Mikolaitis also noted, “Most of our business does happen Thursday, Friday, Saturday especially around IU football games,” and that during the weekdays, outside dining is determined more by the weather than anything else.

On September 24th, the City Council voted 9-0 to extend closures on Kirkwood through December until the order expires.  The council made this decision as they received data showing that the original closures generated thousands of dollars in extra revenue for restaurants on Kirkwood.

As the weather gets colder, restaurants, in an attempt to continue to seat people outside, have added heaters to try and keep customers warm while eating.

Due to the Kirkwood road closure, you could assume some people would take issue with losing parking spaces on Kirkwood and the inconvenience of having to drive around the block to find parking. However local residents like Jeff Richardson believe that the city council did the right thing. Richardson has only been a resident of Bloomington since October 1st but, he earned all three of his degrees from Indiana University from 1968 to 1980, where he lived behind Nick’s during the later years of his schooling. He has spent a lot of time in Bloomington after graduation due to working at Eli Lilly and Company and four years of working in state government.

Richardson believes that this isn’t a big “ask” for the community just because they don’t want to drive around the block because “I think it’s a brilliant idea [Kirkwood] is not a through street.”

It is too soon to tell how effective these closures were and if they’ll be extended again, but in the meantime, it does seem as if the closures helped keep local restaurants afloat during the current pandemic.