The West Washington Historic District — the Street the Industrial City Built

Listed 17 January 1975

The district: West Washington Street was the address of the men who built industrial South Bend, and its district was one of the earliest in Indiana. Listed on the National Register on 17 January 1975, the West Washington Historic District runs in an irregular pattern roughly bounded by Main Street, Western Avenue, West LaSalle Avenue and McPherson Street, and takes in more than three hundred buildings developed between about 1854 and 1910 — the upper-class residential quarter of the plow, wagon, sewing-machine and woolen fortunes. Its two monuments have their own entries above: Copshaholm and Tippecanoe Place stand four blocks apart on the same street. Around them the district holds the second rank of the street's houses at survey depth: the Morey House at 110–112 Franklin Place and the Morey-Lampert House at 322 West Washington; the Chauncey N. Lawton House at 405 West Wayne; the Hager House at 415 West Wayne, a Bungalow/Craftsman house of 1910 by Austin & Shambleau; the Kelley-Fredrickson House, which was itself moved, to 702 West Colfax, in 1987; and at 627 West Washington the Queen Anne house Peter Studebaker built in 1895, nine years after his brother Clement's mansion rose down the street. The former First Presbyterian Church and the old courthouse stand in the district too, and are entered with the churches and the courthouse square.

The fight for it: The district exists because the neighborhood was defended. The Government section of this history records the renewal era's arithmetic — the inner belt roadway driven through the fine houses of West Washington in the 1960s, and the city's threat against Tippecanoe Place itself. Against that stood Ruth Price's survey work, which won the neighborhood its National Register district status in 1975, among the first such designations in the state, and the Near West Side Neighborhood Organization that grew out of the Model Cities years. The district's listing did not stop every loss, but it changed the terms: from 1975 the street's houses stood in a documented district, and the record of them — survey cards, nominations, the neighborhood's own files — has only thickened since.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places, West Washington Historic District, ref. 75000049, listed 17 January 1975, and the district's property records in the county listings — the boundaries, the 1854–1910 development and the count of buildings.
2. National Register nominations, Downtown South Bend Historic Multiple Resource Area — the Morey, Morey-Lampert, Lawton, Hager and Kelley-Fredrickson sheets and the Hager House's Austin & Shambleau attribution.
3. Historic South Bend Homes (Northern Indiana Center for History) — the Peter Studebaker House of 1895 at 627 West Washington.
4. Government section of this history — the inner belt, the Tippecanoe Place threat, Ruth Price's survey and the 1975 designation.