South Bend's Main Roads: The Corridors That Made and Remade the City

Corridors · the roads that made and remade the city

South Bend exists because routes crossed here. The river's southern bend was a portage landing first, and every later corridor inherited the geometry: the Michigan Road came up from Indianapolis to the bend and turned west for the lake; the Vistula Road ran east along the river toward Ohio; the named auto trails of 1913 and 1915 crossed each other at Michigan and Washington streets, in the middle of downtown, and the state put a bronze marker on the corner to say so. The numbered highways then did to the trails what the trails had done to the wagon roads — US 31 took the Michigan Road's own line up Michigan Street, US 20 took its western exit — and the twentieth century's two great rebuildings, the Indiana Toll Road of 1956 and the St. Joseph Valley Parkway, moved the through traffic off the city streets altogether, first to the city's north edge and then around its south and east. The last rebuilding, the new US 31 freeway of 2014, left the old road behind entirely south of town. This section tells the corridor story whole: the state road built with the proceeds of ceded Indian land, the taverns that stood along it, the concrete half-mile of 1915 that began permanent road building in northern Indiana, the renamings that record who the city has chosen to honor on its street signs, and the fights, still running, over where the traffic goes.