The Northeast Neighborhood: Sorinsville to Eddy Street

1870s — present

The university's neighborhood began as the founder's speculation: in the 1870s Father Edward Sorin platted a 120-acre development northeast of his university and called it, in Notre Dame Magazine's telling, Sorinsville; its crossroads, Five Points — Eddy Street, Corby Boulevard and South Bend Avenue — became the city's off-campus corner for a century. The neighborhood organized early and never stopped: the Northeast Neighborhood Council, established in 1966, is by its own account the oldest continually operating neighborhood association in the city, bounded by Angela Boulevard and Edison Road, Twyckenham Drive, Colfax Avenue and the river. The modern transformation was institutional work: Notre Dame planted its Robinson Community Learning Center in the neighborhood in the 1990s, and on 24 August 2000 the Northeast Neighborhood Revitalization Organization — the NNRO — was incorporated, a body of the University, the City, area institutions and neighborhood residents (seven residents and seven institutional members, in the Congress for the New Urbanism's account), staffed from 2002 by South Bend Heritage.

Its Notre Dame Avenue Housing Program, launched in 2001, built more than fifty faculty and staff homes in the neighborhood; its largest work, with Kite Realty from 2005, is Eddy Street Commons, built with some $35 million of city tax-increment financing for streets, sewers and a garage — a first phase opened in late 2009 with 170,000 square feet of retail and office space, 266 apartments, 123 condominiums, 78 townhouses, two hotels and a garage, and a second phase that added the Robinson Center's new quarters and some 450 more apartments, the whole development approaching $300 million, with a Trader Joe's announced in October 2020. The census measured the result, in the university's reporting of it: between 2010 and 2020 the Northeast Neighborhood added 636 residents and 927 housing units — a quarter of the whole city's growth in the decade — and its total property value rose from $11.6 million in 2003 to more than $133 million. The NNRO marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025 and now runs a Community Land Trust in the neighborhood — the revitalization organization becoming, in its second generation, a landholder for affordability.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Magazine — "Sorinsville" (Sorin's 1870s plat); University of Notre Dame — Eddy Street Commons and Northeast Neighborhood reporting (the census result; property values)
2. Indiana Secretary of State — NNRO certificate of incorporation, 24 August 2000 (in the City of South Bend's agreement file); NNRO memorandum of understanding, City Council minutes, 7 May 2007; NNRO board minutes, 15 February 2024
3. Northeast Neighborhood Council — the association's own account (established 1966; boundaries) — northeastneighborhoodcouncil.org
4. South Bend Heritage — NNRO at 25 (2025) and the Community Land Trust — sbheritage.org
5. Congress for the New Urbanism — Eddy Street Commons project profile