The gravity at the edge of town: Notre Dame

1875 - 2023

The terms of the article: Notre Dame's own record, its basilica, its galleries, its football, stands in the NOTRE DAME and NOTRE DAME FOOTBALL sections, and this section does not retell it. What belongs to CULTURE is the effect of the university on the city around it, stated as plainly as the record allows: South Bend is a factory city of about 100,000 people with, at its northern edge, a world university's full cultural plant, and no honest account of the city's culture can leave that plant out or pretend the city built it. The university's art collection began in 1875, with Luigi Gregori's gallery in the Main Building, before the city had a museum, a symphony or a paved cultural institution of any kind. The gravity is that old.

The stages: In September 2004 the university opened the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, $64 million, 151,000 square feet, designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer and underwritten in part by Edward J. DeBartolo's $33 million gift of 1989. Its five venues sit on separate foundations so no sound leaks between them: the 900-seat Leighton Concert Hall, where Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra gave the inaugural performance on 19 September 2004; the 350-seat Decio Mainstage Theatre; the 100-seat Philbin Studio black box; the 200-seat THX-certified Browning Cinema, the city's only true art cinema; and the Reyes Organ and Choral Hall, with a hand-built organ of about 2,550 pipes. It was the first new performance venue on campus since Washington Hall in 1881. The Fischoff Competition moved there in 2002, into the Leighton, before the building had fairly opened its doors to the public. The Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, founded in 2000 by English professor Paul A. Rathburn from his Shakespeare in Performance course, opened with The Taming of the Shrew that August; Rathburn led it for its first five years and died in February 2020, and its community arms, ShakeScenes, casting local actors of all ages, and the Young Company, take the stages back out into the city, as does the university's role as American base for Actors From The London Stage.

The museum: The Snite Museum of Art opened in November 1980, on Fred B. Snite Sr.'s $2 million gift of 1976 in memory of his son, and for four decades it was, in practice, the largest art museum in the region, drawing about 50,000 visitors a year before the pandemic to a collection of some 30,000 works. The Snite closed in spring 2023 and became a research centre, and on 1 December 2023 its successor opened: the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, 70,000 square feet in the first phase of a planned 132,000 square foot complex, $66 million, designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, on the lead gift of South Bend's own Ernestine Raclin and her daughter and son-in-law Carmi and Christopher Murphy. It stands in a sculpture park on the campus's south edge, facing Angela Boulevard and the city, expressly accessible to the community, joined with DeBartolo and the architecture and music halls as a campus arts district. The honest summary is the one this section has used throughout: the university's culture is not the city's culture, but the city's culture happens in its field. South Bend's own institutions, the Morris, the museum of 1947, the Civic, the Fischoff, are smaller, older in spirit, and theirs. The gravity bends the light; it does not supply it.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame News release, 8 September 2004 (the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center: the September 2004 opening and community open houses of 17 and 19 September; the $33 million DeBartolo gift of 1989; the five venues and their seats, Leighton 900, Decio 350, Philbin 100, Browning 200, Reyes 100; the Marsalis inaugural of 19 September 2004; the first new performance venue since Washington Hall, 1881).
3. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and Notre Dame Magazine (the collection from 1875 and Luigi Gregori; the Snite's opening of November 1980 on the 1976 Snite gift; about 50,000 visitors a year; the spring 2023 closing; the Raclin Murphy opening of 1 December 2023, 70,000 square feet of a planned 132,000, $66 million, Robert A. M. Stern Architects; the Raclin and Murphy lead gift; the Hayes Family Sculpture Park and the campus arts district).
4. Notre Dame Magazine, All the campus a stage, and the College of Arts and Letters obituary of Paul A. Rathburn, 14 February 2020 (the Shakespeare Festival founded 2000 as Summer Shakespeare; The Taming of the Shrew; Rathburn's first five years and his death on 12 February 2020; ShakeScenes and the Young Company; Actors From The London Stage).