Landmark acts II: urban renewal — what was built, what was demolished, who paid

1961 – 1970s

LaSalle Park, 1961–1964: South Bend's first great renewal fight was not downtown but in LaSalle Park, the Black neighborhood built around Beck's Lake on the west side, where redlining had done its work and the streets were unpaved, the sewers undone. In 1961 city entities and two real-estate agencies rushed out a redevelopment proposal; the neighborhood's answer, organized within two days, was precise: pave the streets, lay the sewers, help us fix our houses — do not demolish our community. The Redevelopment Commission's formal plan, unveiled in March 1962, ran the other way in scale if not wholly in kind: 240 acres, 800 homes affected, 150 tagged for demolition, at a cost of about $3.5 million, two-thirds federal. After two more years of stiff opposition the city came back in July 1964 with a plan the neighborhood's own twenty-percent cap had shaped: some 130 homes to be eliminated, about ninety percent of the area to stand and be rehabilitated — and still 133 families lost their homes. The university's African American landmark record, from which this account is drawn, prints the era's epitaph without ornament: the bulldozers were approved before anyone knew what would happen after they left.

Chapin Street and the downtown: On the near west side the Chapin Street Urban Renewal Project, marked by its 1968 plaque, took out a whole neighborhood downtown — the dense commercial corridor at Chapin and Western, the bakeries, groceries and bars of a walking city — and left Alonzo Watson Park on the west of the street and public housing on the east, joined by a green pedestrian bridge. Downtown itself the renewal era rebuilt in the image of the automobile: the Building South Bend history records a twenty-year project of urban renewal that destroyed much of the historic downtown, its streets converted to one-way speedways for through traffic. The same years put a roadway — the inner belt linking Chapin Street to Lincolnway West — through the fine houses of the West Washington neighborhood, an intrusion the neighborhood association was still working to soften forty years later.

Model Cities and the turn: The federal answer to renewal's reputation arrived in the same neighborhoods: in the 1970s the federally funded Model Cities program worked in the Near West Side not with bulldozers but with residents, and the Near West Side Neighborhood Organization — still the neighborhood's voice — was founded as an offshoot of that project. The era's preservation turn belongs to the same ledger: the city at one point threatened to demolish Tippecanoe Place, the Studebaker mansion, for a parking lot; instead Ruth Price's survey won the West Washington neighborhood National Register district status in 1975, and the mansion stands.

The count: The city's own Reparatory Justice Commission, empaneled by the Common Council in September 2023 and reporting in March 2026, put the whole program's human arithmetic in one sentence: by the late 1960s, an estimated 606 South Bend families had been displaced by urban renewal projects — nearly three quarters of them families of color. The Chapin Street project alone accounts for 116 families in its table. That count, and the neighborhoods' own records, are the standing evidence; the civil-rights dimensions of the story are told in the Black history & civil rights section, and the demolished streetscape in the neighborhoods record. What belongs to the government record is the responsibility: these were acts of the city, voted, funded and executed by it, and the city has now counted them itself.

Sources:

1. Indiana University South Bend, African American Landmark Tour, "The Lake" (Beck's Lake / LaSalle Park) — the 1961 proposal and the neighborhood's answer, the March 1962 Commission plan (240 acres, 800 homes, 150 demolitions, $3.5 million), the July 1964 revision (130 homes, 133 families, ninety percent to stand).
2. City of South Bend, Reparatory Justice Commission, final report (filed March 2026) — 606 families displaced by the late 1960s, nearly three quarters families of color; the Chapin Street project's 116 families; the Commission empaneled by the Common Council 28 September 2023.
3. The Chapin & Western record (Round the Bend / the 1968 Chapin Street Urban Renewal Project plaque) — the corridor demolished, Alonzo Watson Park and the public housing, the pedestrian bridge.
4. The Near West Side (West Washington) Neighborhood Association's history — the 1960s inner beltway demolitions, Model Cities in the 1970s and the founding of the Near West Side Neighborhood Organization, the Tippecanoe Place threat, the National Register district of 1975.
5. University of Notre Dame, Building South Bend, "History" — the twenty-year renewal of downtown, the one-way conversions, the loss of the historic fabric.