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The Place — Notre Dame, Indiana
The federal frame — a place the Census draws, and nobody governs
Notre Dame exists twice. It exists on the ground, where anyone can see it: three college campuses, a post office, two small lakes and a river edge, packed into a little over a square mile immediately north of South Bend. And it…
The land and its taking — the plot at the gazetteer point
Every place in this county sequence gets the same question put to its ground: by what cession did the United States take this soil from the people who held it, and does the treaty text, read at the place's own point, actually say…
The post office and 46556 — the place's oldest federal presence
A place with no government of its own has exactly one federal institution that is unmistakably its own, and it is the post office. The University of Notre Dame's own mail office states the fact in one sentence: since 1851 the…
Government in place of a city — who actually governs a place with no government
Ask who governs Notre Dame and the honest answer is a list, not a name. An unincorporated community has no municipal government: no council to zone it, no city police to patrol it, no municipal tax to fund it. The reference…
Holy Cross Village — the retirement community on the brothers' ground
On the western side of the place, along State Road 933, stands the community that makes Notre Dame something more than a dormitory with a post office: Holy Cross Village at Notre Dame, a nonprofit continuing-care retirement…
The corridors — the roads that hold the place to the world
Notre Dame has no main street of its own, because it does not need one: it is held on all four sides by other people's roads, and the roads are its public face. Walk the frame clockwise from the west and every side is a corridor…
The annexation record — the campaign of 1969, the consent of 2006, and the standing fact
Once, seriously and in public, South Bend tried to swallow this place whole. The attempt is the best-documented episode in the place's civic non-existence, and it is told here at the size the verified record supports — who…