The Blackstone-State Theater (1919–21) and Its Second Life

1919 – present

The Blackstone: The city's other surviving downtown theater was a Chicago speculation. The Blackstone Theater Corporation filed its incorporation on 9 January 1919 and took 99-year leases on lots 56 and 57 of the Original Plat, mid-block at 212 South Michigan Street; the city issued its building permit that September, and Ralph Sollitt and Son began construction of a theater designed by Henry L. Newhouse of Chicago — the survey card carries the firm as Newhouse & Burnham. The Multiple Resource Area nomination dates the building 1919; the preservation survey card records the auditorium's informal opening on 28 January 1921, with 15,236 South Bend area people through the doors by 31 January, and the News-Times of 27 January 1921 called it "Indiana's Most Beautiful Photo Play Theater." It is a four-story Neo-Classical structure of brick and terra cotta, in the nomination's words an outstanding example of a Neo-Classical theater and the only one extant downtown, designed for motion pictures and vaudeville, its facade patterned, the survey notes, after the old Roman Coliseum. The corporation went into receivership in 1931, and the theater took the name it keeps: the State.

The course since: The State ran until the mall-multiplex era closed it — the Tribune's account dates the closing to 1977, the nomination's to 1978, and both stand in the record. It was listed on the National Register on 5 June 1985, in the downtown batch. Bought in 1993 by the Watseka Corporation, it showed films again until 1997, was renovated into a nightclub in 1999, and closed again in 2016. In 2025 the South Bend Redevelopment Commission bought the theater, made improvements, and put it out for bid; in April 2026 the Commission received four proposals for its revitalization, and in August 2026 the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County presented a plan for a new movie theater in the building, backed by a $4 million award of state READI 2.0 arts and culture grants. As this history is written, the Blackstone-State stands publicly owned, listed, and awaiting the outcome of that process — the last of downtown's four movie palaces in anything like its original form, the Morris being the only one of the four still in continuous use as a theater.

Sources:

1. National Register nominations, Downtown South Bend Historic Multiple Resource Area — the Blackstone or State Theater sheet: the 1919 date, the Newhouse design, the Sollitt construction, the 1931 renaming from receivership, the closing carried to 1978, and the Neo-Classical judgment.
2. Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory survey card, 212–214 South Michigan (Historic Preservation Commission files) — the incorporation of 9 January 1919, the informal opening of 28 January 1921, the 15,236 attendees, and the News-Times billing of 27 January 1921.
3. South Bend Tribune (2026) — the 1977 closing, the Watseka purchase of 1993 and the nightclub years, the Redevelopment Commission's 2025 purchase, the four proposals of April 2026 and the Community Foundation plan with the $4 million READI 2.0 award.