The Colfax Cultural Center: the system's shared house

1898 building · cultural center from the 1980s · 914 Lincoln Way West

The building: Every arts system has a working house — the address where the small organizations actually live — and South Bend's is a former school. The Colfax School was constructed in 1898 on Lincoln Way West, in the public library's history of the city's school buildings, and its last school bell rang in 1976; the Michiana College of Commerce occupied it from 1977. In the 1980s the building was purchased and developed by South Bend Heritage — the neighborhood housing organization whose fifty-year history records the project — and converted into the Colfax Cultural Center, the use it still carries. The university's community resource guide describes what the conversion made: low-cost studios and galleries for artists, and performance space for dancers and actors — the cheap square footage on which the system's smaller half runs.

The tenants: Southold Dance Theater's studios stand at the center's address, 914 Lincoln Way West, its classes a few doors from the galleries. South Bend Heritage itself hosts the annual Art & Social Justice Exhibition in the building — in its thirty-fifth year in 2024 — the center's own recurring show. The center's entry in this section is deliberately institutional rather than architectural: the building stands in Architecture and in the library's school history, and what stands here is its function. When the museum's studios are full and the universities' rooms are booked, the Colfax is where the region's dancers rehearse and its unaffiliated artists rent wall and floor — the documented bottom rung of the ladder the Fischoff's finalists and the Morris's stages top.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County Public Library, Colfax School history — the 1898 construction, the 1976 last bell, the Michiana College of Commerce tenancy, and the 1980s conversion to the Colfax Cultural Center.
2. South Bend Heritage, fifty-year history — its purchase and development of the center, and its annual Art & Social Justice Exhibition there, thirty-fifth in 2024.
3. Indiana University South Bend, Community Resource Guide — the center's low-cost studios and galleries and its performance space for dancers and actors.
4. Southold Dance Theater, published address — 914 Lincoln Way West.