National Register, SHAARD and the City Surveys

1970 – present

The county count: As of the National Park Service's postings through September 2026, St. Joseph County holds 102 properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places, and more than seventy of them stand within South Bend. One is a National Historic Landmark, the federal government's highest tier: Tippecanoe Place, designated in 1977. Four county properties were once listed and have been removed — three of them South Bend buildings, the Colfax Theater, the Morningside Club Residence and the Northern Indiana Gas and Electric Company Building, whose stories are told with the lost downtown below. Every listing stands on a nomination prepared for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, and the division's SHAARD database — the Indiana State Historic Architectural and Archaeological Research Database — keeps the nominations and the county's survey records open to anyone.

The surveys: The listings rest on a generation of local survey work. The City of South Bend Historic Sites and Structures Survey, conducted by the architectural firm of Crumlish/Sporleder & Associates, recorded the city's buildings address by address; the Chapin Park nomination, built on that survey, called the district the highest concentration of architecturally significant structures to be found in the city. The Historic Preservation Commission of South Bend and St. Joseph County administers the local side of the record — the local historic districts (Riverside Drive, designated 1985; Chapin Park, 2005) and the local landmarks — and its survey cards, one for every rated building in the city, are the files the University of Notre Dame's Building South Bend project now publishes online, property by property. The register is still growing: the St. Adalbert Church Complex was listed on 19 May 2025, the Edgewater Place and Taylor's Field districts on 16 January 2026, and the Bowman Creek Stone Arch Culvert on 31 August 2026 — the newest entry in the county as this history is written.

The 1985 batch: One date runs through the downtown record like a watermark: 5 June 1985. On that single day the Downtown South Bend Historic Multiple Resource Area — the nominations prepared by Elizabeth A. Straw and Karen Kiemnec in January 1984 — carried dozens of downtown properties onto the Register at once: the third courthouse, the J.M.S. Building, the Tower Building, the Palace Theater, the Blackstone-State Theater, the former First Presbyterian Church, the Cathedral of St. James, banks, hotels, lodge halls and commercial blocks. The downtown that stands today was, in large part, written into the federal record in that one batch, and the individual listings below follow its paperwork.

The campus at the boundary: One major listing stands at the city's edge rather than in it: the University of Notre Dame's Main and South Quadrangles district, listed 23 May 1978, which takes in the Basilica, the Main Building under the Golden Dome and Washington Hall. The campus stands in the unincorporated Notre Dame district, and its architectural record — the Dome's building and rebuilding, the architects of the quadrangles — belongs to the Notre Dame section of this history. It is noted here because the register carries it, and printed no larger.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places listings in St. Joseph County, Indiana (National Park Service list complete through its postings of 18 September 2026) — the 102 listings, the one National Historic Landmark, the four removals, and every listing date cited in this section.
2. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology — SHAARD, the Indiana State Historic Architectural and Archaeological Research Database.
3. Building South Bend, University of Notre Dame Architecture Library (buildingsouthbend.nd.edu) — the Historic Preservation Commission of South Bend and St. Joseph County's survey records, published property by property.
4. National Register nomination, Chapin Park Historic District (James D. Conley, April 1980) — the Crumlish/Sporleder survey and its judgment of the district.
5. National Register nominations, Downtown South Bend Historic Multiple Resource Area (Elizabeth A. Straw and Karen Kiemnec, January 1984; entered 5 June 1985).