Stephen J. Luecke: fifteen years

1997 – 2012

The councilman appointed: Stephen J. Luecke (born 1950), raised in Freeport, Illinois, one of seven children, was elected to the Common Council from the First District in 1987 and served nine years, twice its president. When Kernan resigned in January 1997, the vacancy was filled under the party-caucus law by the votes of the city's Democratic precinct committeemen; Luecke, Kernan's endorsed candidate, was chosen unanimously and took office on 3 January 1997 — the second mayor in the city's history to enter the office without winning it at a general election, and the first to make the city forget it: he won the office outright in 1999, and again in 2003 and 2007, the last time with 62 percent of the vote.

The administration: Luecke's fifteen years — 3 January 1997 to 1 January 2012 — made him the longest-serving mayor in South Bend's history, a fact the Common Council itself entered in its commendation resolution of 12 December 2011. His era's monument is the Morris: the old Palace Theatre, saved for the city in 1959 and working as the Morris Civic Auditorium, closed in 1998 for a renovation of some $17 million, publicly and privately funded, and reopened on 3 March 2000 as the Morris Performing Arts Center, a 2,564-seat hall that has ranked since among the world's top hundred theaters of its class. His administration carried the downtown work forward — the East Bank and the long clearance of the Studebaker ground, where the demolition of the company's 82-acre main campus ran on across his tenure toward the technology park that would rise on it — and continued Kernan's Mayor's Night Out practice. He was, in the shape of his career, the consolidation of the Kernan model: the mayor as the city's standing negotiator and caretaker, re-elected on competence. When he announced in December 2010 that he would not seek a fourth elected term, the city faced an open mayoral seat for the first time in twenty-four years.

Sources:

1. The biographical record of Steve Luecke — council service 3 January 1988 to 3 January 1997, the appointment on Kernan's departure and endorsement, re-elections 1999, 2003 and 2007; the 2007 result, 62.14 percent, from the election record.
2. South Bend Common Council, Resolution No. 4135-11 (12 December 2011) — commending "South Bend's 31st Mayor Stephen J. Luecke, the longest serving mayor in our city's history," his nine council years and fifteen as mayor, raised in Freeport, Illinois.
3. The Morris Performing Arts Center's own history (Morris Center / Morris 100) — the theater's 1922 opening as the Palace, the 1959 rescue and $1 sale to the city, the May 1998 closing, the ~$17 million restoration and the grand reopening of 3 March 2000 at 2,564 seats; the city Redevelopment Authority memoranda of 2010 — the Morris owned by the Redevelopment Authority, the 26-month project at $17.4 million in soft and hard costs.
4. WNDU (8 December 2023) — the twenty-year demolition of the Studebaker campus and the ground's second life.