South Bend Architecture: The Built City, From the Navarre Cabin to the Century Center

Architecture · The Built City, from the Navarre Cabin to the Century Center

South Bend's built record is unusually well documented, because the city surveyed itself before it was too late. Between them, the National Register of Historic Places, the Indiana survey records held in the state's SHAARD database, and the property-by-property files of the Historic Preservation Commission of South Bend and St. Joseph County — now published by the University of Notre Dame's Building South Bend project — hold a researched record for nearly every building in this section. Read through those files, the city explains itself in fieldstone and terra cotta: a fur trader's cabin of 1820 that has been moved four times and still stands; a courthouse that was picked up, turned around and set down again in the winter of 1895–96 rather than demolished; two of the great Richardsonian Romanesque houses of the Midwest, built within a decade of each other by the plow king and the wagon king of West Washington Street; a downtown that the National Register took in a single day's batch in 1985; a skyscraper finished a week before the Crash; and a convention center by Philip Johnson on the river. The losses are printed here as plainly as the survivals — the Oliver Hotel, the Colfax Theater, the theater district's dead — because the register itself keeps their names. The congregations behind the churches belong to the Religion section, the banks behind the bank buildings to Banks, and the campus across the line in the Notre Dame district to the Notre Dame section; this section is about the buildings.