Lafayette Boulevard: Automobile Row

1911 - 1970s

The row: Downtown South Bend's dealer district had a name and a street: Lafayette Boulevard, running south from the center of town toward the Studebaker complex, close enough to the factory that the walk from the works to the showrooms was a short one. A local history tour of the boulevard, recorded in 2026, walks it building by building. At 225 North Lafayette stands the showroom W. R. Hinkle built for his Ford dealership in the early 1920s, later the home of Romy Hammes Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, which kept a large used car lot across the street. Directly opposite, at 220 North Lafayette, the Medow store sold cars, later Chrysler, Dodge and Imperial lines, so that a buyer could cross the street and comparison shop without moving his own car. At 135 North Lafayette a later garage business occupies a former dealership site, and at 125 North Lafayette stands the rebuilt 20th Century Garage, which housed Nichols Buick until 1952. South of the center, the tour places the Yeager Motor Company at 225 South Lafayette, a Buick dealer for decades, and Bob's Nash at 226-228 South Lafayette in 1955, then the big Gates Chevrolet building at Western Avenue and Freeman Spicer, the hometown Studebaker store, at 520 South Lafayette.

What the row means: Read the tour's list slowly and its shape explains itself. Ford and its rivals faced each other across one street. Buick appears twice. The factory's own marque had its store at the row's south end, nearest the works. This was not a scattering of garages but a district, the downtown every mid sized American city built in the automobile's first half century and then, in the second half, abandoned for the corridors. The houses whose records survive at full size get their own articles in this section: Hinkle and Hammes in the next article, Feferman after it, Gates and Freeman-Spicer at their turns. The rest stand here at the size the tour record supports, named and placed, no more invented for them than the record holds. Where an address or a date in this article rests on the tour alone, it is printed as the tour reports it.

Sources:

1. Round the Bend Now and Then, Lafayette Boulevard Automobile Row tour (posted 2 September 2026): the addresses and tenancies as walked, including Nichols Buick until 1952, Yeager, Bob's Nash 1955 and Freeman Spicer at 520 S. Lafayette.
2. Building South Bend, University of Notre Dame (the Hinkle building at 225 N. Lafayette and the Hammes succession, corroborating the tour's north end).