Chapin Park — an Estate Become a Neighborhood

Listed 4 February 1982

The ground: Immediately north of downtown, across the river bend from the courthouse square, Chapin Park is a banker's estate that became a neighborhood. Horatio Chapin, the merchant who presided over the town's first board of trustees and managed the State Bank's South Bend branch, bought the forty-acre tract from the State Bank of Indiana in 1855 and built his Gothic Revival house on it shortly after, surrounded by an orchard. At his death in 1871 the estate divided between his son Edward and his daughter Mary; Edward platted the western half and laid out Park Avenue in 1890, Mary platted east of Park Avenue soon after, and in 1891 the builder Christopher Fassnacht bought and platted the southern portion, moving the Chapin House itself in the process. Building ran to about 1910, and the district achieved the appearance it keeps today.

The district: The Chapin Park Historic District, listed on the National Register on 4 February 1982, holds some 270 buildings on the nomination's count — 260 contributing buildings and three contributing sites in the Register's summary — in a continuous evolution of styles from the Gothic Revival of the 1850s through Second Empire, Shingle, Queen Anne and Neo-Jacobean. Its named buildings include the Judge Andrew Anderson House of about 1875, Hodson's Castle of 1888, the South Bend Civic Theater building of 1898, the Christian Science Church of 1916 and the YMCA of 1928. The city's own survey, by Crumlish/Sporleder & Associates, judged that the proposed district contained the highest concentration of architecturally significant structures to be found in South Bend. The Chapin House itself carries two addresses in the record: the district nomination's inventory places it at 407 West Navarre Street, moved there from its original site in 1891, while its individual listing of 11 August 1980 and the preservation commission's guidebook place the house — built between 1855 and 1857, the oldest existing structure in the district — at 601 Park Avenue. Both addresses stand in the record as printed here. The neighborhood added a local historic district by ordinance in 2005, and the adjoining Riverside Drive local district, designated in 1985 along the river from Leeper Park, overlaps the Chapin Park district's eastern third.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Chapin Park Historic District (James D. Conley, April 1980; entered 4 February 1982) — the 1855 purchase, the estate's division and platting, the Fassnacht purchase of 1891, the approximately 270 buildings, the styles, and the survey's judgment; the inventory's entry for the Chapin House at 407 West Navarre.
2. National Register of Historic Places, Horatio Chapin House, ref. 80000064, listed 11 August 1980, at 601 Park Avenue; and the Historic Preservation Commission's Chapin Park Local Historic District guidebook — the house of 1855–57 at 601 Park Avenue and the local district ordinance of 2005.
3. Building South Bend, "Riverside Drive" district record — the local district of 1985 and its overlap with Chapin Park.