The Birdsell–Liston district · a whole commercial city, walking distance wide

1930 – 1970

Segregation's unintended monument: Because white South Bend's businesses would not reliably serve them — and many would not serve them at all — Black South Bend built its own commercial center in the blocks around Birdsell and Liston streets, Linden Avenue and West Washington. The landmark tour's inventory of the mature district counts three hotels (the Liston Hotel and the Pigues Hotel among them), three groceries, two funeral homes, three pool halls, Linden School, the churches, and the Prince Hall Masons' lodge. The Urban League's survey of 1958 counted approximately eighty-one Black-owned businesses in South Bend: 25 hotels, restaurants and taverns; 17 barber, beauty and dry-cleaning shops; 16 professional services — dentists, doctors, lawyers, undertakers; 9 retail stores; 8 amusement centers; 5 garages and service stations; and 1 real-estate and finance concern.

The names the record keeps include Uncle Bill Harris's Café, the "Big House" restaurant on Birdsell, Mama Hodges on Main Street, the Higgins/Haynes Funeral Home, and St. Peter's Masonic Lodge; downtown, Robertson's department store at 211 South Michigan was remembered as one of the few stores that let Black customers try on clothing. For years the South Bend–Mishawaka Chamber of Commerce published a pamphlet directory — The Directory of Negroes in Business in St. Joseph County, later the Directory of Blacks in Business — listing the trade. The district's end had no single cause, and the Commission reports the community's own debate without settling it: urban renewal's demolitions of the 1950s and 1960s (Elmer Joseph, who ran a West Side tavern, testified that renewal in 1968 "relocated or dramatically limited" the businesses there), discriminatory bank financing, and the integration that followed the 1960s laws, which let Black customers spend where they chose. One survivor stands: Frankie's BBQ at 1621 West Washington Street, founded in 1968 and still operated by the same family — in the Commission's words, "one of the last remaining Black-owned businesses from that era."

Sources:

1. IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, African American Landmark Tour — the Birdsell–Liston district's inventory of hotels, groceries, funeral homes, pool halls and the Prince Hall lodge; Robertson's try-on policy.
2. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Part VII — the Urban League's 1958 count of about eighty-one Black-owned businesses by category; the named businesses after Garner's Placing History; the Chamber's directory; Frankie's BBQ (1968); Elmer Joseph's testimony and the debated causes of the district's end.