The Near West Side and West Washington

1960s — present

The city's mansion street survived by organizing: West Washington Street, the Chapin-era avenue of the Oliver and Studebaker fortunes, faced the inner belt roadway in the 1960s and the renewal era at its edges; what saved it is told in the government file — Ruth Price's survey, and the West Washington National Register district of 1975, with Tippecanoe Place, the 1889 Oliver mansion, preserved at its center. The neighborhood around it, the Near West Side, took the Model Cities program of the 1970s and made an institution of it: the Near West Side Neighborhood Organization, founded as the program's offshoot, remains the neighborhood's voice. The same renewal era that spared West Washington demolished the Chapin Street commercial corridor at the neighborhood's south edge — the Polish and Hungarian near-west world of the entries above — and removed, in the Chapin Street project alone, 116 families, 104 of them families of color; the displacement counts stand in the government and Black history files, and the streets they describe are this neighborhood's southern half. The Near West Side (West Washington) Neighborhood Association carries the district today.

Sources:

1. Government, this history (the inner belt, Model Cities, the 1975 district, the Chapin Street project) — banked fragment
2. Black History & Civil Rights, this history (the displacement counts) — banked fragment
3. Notre Dame, Building South Bend — Tippecanoe Place — building.southbend.nd.edu