Landmark acts I: the closing, and the government's fifty-year answer

1963 – 2010s

December 1963: The civic fact is simple and total. Studebaker had built vehicles in South Bend for 111 years; at its postwar peak it employed some 24,000 people there, more than the rest of the city's industry combined. On 9 December 1963 the Tribune broke the news that the South Bend works would close; production ended 20 December, with 7,000 still on the payroll, thousands more already laid off and hoping for recall, and a pension fund whose shortfall cut benefits the workers had earned. The government that received the blow was not the government that had been elected to meet it: Mayor Bruggner, an acting successor in his last weeks, sat at the first emergency planning, and on 1 January 1964 Mayor Allen took office with the wreck already on his desk. No act of the city's government caused the closing and none could have prevented it; everything the government did for the next fifty years was, in part, an answer to it.

The first answer — work and machinery: The immediate work was relief and placement, done with the union, the state and Washington; the durable work was machinery. The city already possessed, in its Redevelopment Commission and department, the instrument Indiana law had given it for blighted ground, and the decades after 1963 are, in the government record, the story of that instrument being applied ever more widely: to the near-west neighborhoods (the renewal entry below), to the downtown, and at last to the factory ground itself. The economic-development function — the mayor's office as the city's standing recruiter and deal-maker, retaining Bendix and the other survivors plant by plant — was invented in these years out of necessity and has belonged to the office ever since, under Allen's successors of both parties and then of one.

The ground itself: The Studebaker complex was too big to reuse at once and too central to abandon. The government's formal claim on it came on 10 January 1986, when the Redevelopment Commission's plan for a Studebaker Corridor Development Area was drawn, and the Commission, by Resolution 762, designated the district, declared it blighted, approved the plan and established a tax-increment allocation area over it — the legal frame inside which the land could be assembled, cleared and sold at development prices. Clearance took a generation: the main campus's buildings came down over some twenty years. On the cleared ground rose the answer's final form — Ignition Park, the city's technology park, and the Renaissance District around the surviving Building 84, where Purdue Polytechnic and the regional partnership now work, and from whose floor a South Bend mayor announced a run for the presidency in 2019. The company's own story — the wagons, the cars, the closure from the inside — is told in the Studebaker section; the government's half of it is this: fifty years of redevelopment law applied to one wound until the wound became an asset.

Sources:

1. WNDU, "60 Years Later: South Bend moves forward after Studebaker's departure" (8 December 2023) — the 111 years, the 24,000 peak and 7,000 at the end, the pension losses, the 9 and 20 December dates, the twenty-year demolition of the 82-acre campus, Building 84's new tenants, the 2019 announcement.
2. Eugene Register-Guard (Associated Press), 15 December 1963 — the first emergency planning under Mayor Bruggner; the payroll dwindled from 23,000 to 7,000; a payroll estimated at $32 million.
3. South Bend Redevelopment Commission, Resolution No. 762 (1986), with the Studebaker Corridor Development Plan dated 10 January 1986 — the designation, the blight finding, the relocation-payment conditions and the tax-increment allocation area.
4. Discover Indiana (Indiana Historical Society / IUPUI), "Studebaker Assembly 84" — the campus, the December 1963 announcement and the company's promise to help its 7,000 employees find work.