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1977 – today
The convention bet, 1977: The first monument of the post-Studebaker government was a wager that downtown could be a destination rather than a memory. The Century Center — designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, among the most famous architects alive, built from 1974 on the West Race where the Oliver hydroelectric plant had stood until 1973 — opened on 1 November 1977 with 30-foot glass walls looking over the river: convention halls, theaters, the art museum, an island park across the canal. It has been the city's flagship room for half a century, owned by the city and, in the present decade, run day-to-day by Visit South Bend Mishawaka — and its future is the open question of the Downtown 2045 plan, which proposes remaking its block and has already put even the art museum's tenure inside it in doubt.
The river and the ballpark, 1984–1987: The Parent administration gave downtown its recreations. The East Race Waterway (1984) turned a buried mill race into the continent's first artificial whitewater course, in the middle of the city. The Coveleski Stadium (1987) put a minor-league ballpark on the south edge of downtown — the fight over its cost made it the era's controversy, and its survival the era's fact: refinanced by Kernan in 1988, renamed in time for the South Bend Cubs, it anchors the south downtown still. Between them the two projects fixed the pattern of the rebuilding era: public money first, on the river and the game, in the belief that private money follows a city that looks alive.
The theater and the Hall, 1995–2000: Kernan's Hall of Fame and Luecke's Morris restoration close the century's account in the profiles above — the one a national prize won and in time lost, the other a 1922 palace returned to glory. Together they mark the shift of the rebuilding from the renewal era's clearance to preservation and attraction: the city's future was to be built out of its past's best rooms.
The reversal of the streets, 2013–2017: The Buttigieg administration's Smart Streets program reversed the renewal era's traffic engineering outright — the one-way pairs built to move cars through downtown became two-way streets built to keep people in it — and its Smart Sewer program carried the same philosophy underground. The Mueller administration's Downtown South Bend 2045 plan, unveiled in February 2025, is the present chapter: a twenty-year frame for the Century Center block, the old City Hall site behind the Morris, and the riverfront — the government still doing, with plans instead of bulldozers, the work it began in 1961. What the plan settles, the record will tell; this section's business is to have shown the line entire: a town that voted itself a city in 1865, governed from rented rooms, a plow-maker's hall, a shared tower and a schoolhouse, by thirty-three mayors whose acts — renewal and reversal, annexation and defeat, a factory's death and a downtown's long rebuilding — are the civic history of South Bend.
Sources:
- Century Center and the City of South Bend — the Johnson and Burgee design, construction from 1974, the opening; the South Bend Tribune (August 2026) — Visit South Bend Mishawaka's operation of the building, the $1.7 million of recent work, the Downtown 2045 proposals for its north wing and the art museum's lease.
- The St. Joseph River record and the East Race Waterway record — the 1973 proposal, the 1982–84 construction, the 29 June 1984 reopening, the first artificial whitewater waterway in North America.
- The Mayoralty of Joe Kernan record — the 1988 refinancing of Coveleski Stadium through the South Bend Redevelopment Authority.
- The Mayoralty of Pete Buttigieg record and the city record — Smart Streets and Smart Sewer; City of South Bend — the Downtown 2045 plan (February 2025).