The building's afterlife: the hotel that rose beside it

2013 – present

The building emptied and stayed empty. The city listed the former Hall for sale at $2.8 million in 2013 and issued a call for offers; on December 30, 2013, it rejected four developer reuse proposals as incomplete. The uses floated in those years included an indoor rock-climbing facility, a casino, an event center and an Ivy Tech Community College culinary center — the Ivy Tech agreement was real and expired in 2015. In July 2015 the Redevelopment Commission settled the building's course: JSK Hospitality, through JSK Development, Inc. and its Southhold, LLC, would buy the Hall building for $1.2 million — $50,000 at signing and $150,000 of it held against the hotel's certificate of occupancy — and the adjoining Jefferson Street lot for $1, and would build a five-story, roughly 120-room hotel beside it, about $10 million of private investment, with the Hall structure serving as the hotel's grand entrance and lobby, restaurant and retail space, and JSK's headquarters. One term kept a piece of the old use alive on paper: the Gridiron was to remain available to the public thirty times a year.

The hotel was built; the Hall's part in it was not. The Courtyard by Marriott rose on the Jefferson lot — the city's record dates the hotel's opening to September 27, 2017, and a later compliance report dates the project's completion to April 2018, with $11 million invested and thirty-eight jobs created; both dates stand in the city record and are printed as they stand. Marriott would not incorporate the Hall building into the hotel, and on June 28, 2018 the Redevelopment Commission amended the agreement: the Hall building's price was cut from $1.2 million to $525,000, and the city's obligation to maintain the building's heating and cooling for three years after closing was removed. JSK and Southhold were left marketing the building to prospective tenants or holding it for their own offices. The Common Council's Resolution 4738-18, adopted September 10, 2018, reconfirmed 111 South St. Joseph Street as an economic revitalization area with a vacant-building tax abatement for the owner, and the abatement record over the following years treats the building throughout as what it was: vacant. There the documented record reached ends. As of the city's last records consulted, the 1995 building — the plaza, the theater shell, the Hall of Honor's rooms — stood vacant in the hotel company's hands beside the hotel that was supposed to absorb it; no later reuse, tenancy or demolition is established here, and the building's present use in 2026 is named as a gap rather than guessed at. The Gridiron's public-access term and the sculpture's fate are likewise unrecorded in the sources reached.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, via the Gannett account of December 30, 2013 — the $2.8 million listing and the rejection of the four reuse proposals.
2. City of South Bend, Redevelopment Commission memorandum of July 13, 2015, and Development Agreement of July 16, 2015 — the JSK/Southhold purchase terms: $1.2 million for the Hall building, $1 for the Jefferson lot, the hotel program, the Hall as entrance and lobby, and the Gridiron's thirty public days a year.
3. South Bend Tribune, via the South Bend Regional Chamber, June 29, 2018 — the June 28, 2018 amendment: the price cut to $525,000, the removal of the city's HVAC obligation, and the marketing of the building.
4. City of South Bend, Common Council Resolution 4738-18, adopted September 10, 2018, and the Community Investment abatement compliance record of September 5, 2018 — the vacant-building abatement, the hotel's September 27, 2017 opening date in the one record and April 2018 completion in the other, and the statement that the Hall-incorporation plans "did not come to fruition."