Urban renewal · 606 families, and the lake that became a Superfund site

1949 – 2020

What was called renewal, counted by the renewed: The federal Housing Act of 1949 made South Bend eligible for urban-renewal money, and the Commission's accounting of what it bought is the section's hardest number: by the late 1960s an estimated 606 South Bend families had been displaced by urban renewal projects, nearly three-quarters of them families of color. The Chapin Street project alone displaced 116 families, 104 of them families of colorRelocation was its own gauntlet: Mrs. G. L. Ivory, a social worker for the Renewal Authority in 1960–62, testified that she made "an average of 75 calls every week" trying to house displaced Black families, and that ninety percent of the answers came back in four forms — "Oh no, it's for white only"; "I'm sorry, we don't rent to your people"; "Just for white only"; "Oh no, honey, not to your people." Dorothy Smith's family was displaced three times: from Maggie's Court by one project, from the Sample Street property she bought by land contract with the compensation money by another, and into LaSalle Park, where she was "forced to buy" one of Colpaert Realty's plaster-board boxes.

The Linden Avenue redevelopment moved Olivet A.M.E. off Monroe Street in 1969. At LaSalle Park the community fought the plan to its own terms — the renewal fight of 1961–64, in which neighborhood leaders held demolitions to a twenty-percent cap and won the park and recreation center that followed (the July 1967 entry carries the climax) — and inherited instead the lake itself. Beck's Lake had been drained by the city in the 1920s for a sewer project never built; from the 1930s Bendix and other factories dumped toxic waste there, and the city then sited its Black war-worker housing beside it and let the drained bed serve as a legal dump, with burning days, through the 1950s — conditions Lynn Coleman described to the Commission in detail a lifetime later: smoldering loads, ground hot enough to melt sneakers, foot-long rats, unpaved streets.

Bendix reported its dumping involvement in 1984; the EPA assessed through the 1980s; the site was placed on the Superfund National Priorities List in 2013, and the Commission reports the cleanup still incomplete — residents, in its words, "have been living in this toxic environment for more than eighty years." On the old Maggie's Court ground the city built the Rabbi Shulman Apartments; in 2020 the Housing Authority announced the building's closure and the displacement of 100 residents, conditions inside documented by the Commission — up to mushrooms growing from a waterlogged rug — with demolition and replacement, five years on, barely begun.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Parts V.D, VII and IX — the 606 families and the Chapin Street count; Mrs. Ivory's relocation testimony; Dorothy Smith's three displacements; the Beck's Lake draining, dumping, rat and street record in Lynn Coleman's testimony; the 1984 Bendix report, the 2013 Superfund listing and the incomplete cleanup; the Rabbi Shulman Apartments' 2020 closure and conditions.
2. IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, African American Landmark Tour, "The Lake" — the LaSalle Park renewal sequence of 1961–1964, the community's twenty-percent demolition cap, and the park and center that followed.