The losses that taught the city

1960s — 1978

The beltway through the neighborhood: In the 1960s, in the Near West Side Neighborhood Organization's own published history, "the city of South Bend demolished several fine houses to construct an inner beltway linking Chapin Street to Lincolnway" — a road cut through the nineteenth-century West Washington neighborhood, whose impact that history calls "this misguided intrusion." The same history records the second teacher: in the 1970s "the city of South Bend embarked on a more destructive form of urban renewal, and threatened to demolish Tippecanoe Place to construct a parking lot." The mansion had stood empty through the 1930s after the Studebaker family's bankruptcy forced them out in 1933; the Architecture account in this record carries the threat among the renewal era's ledgers, and the threat is what the next entry answers.

The downtown toll, in the record's own words: The Oliver Hotel of 1899, billed at its opening as the nicest hotel in Indiana, was demolished in 1967; the Oliver Opera House of 1885 followed in 1978. When the downtown's National Register nominations were written in 1984, their authors stated the mechanism plainly: "Urban renewal, which has, until recently, played a major role in the demolition of many structures, has left little cohesiveness in downtown South Bend," and "Preservation in the Central Business District of South Bend has occurred on a very limited basis." The cleared ground south of Washington Street received the Century Center in 1977; the Corridors account in this record tells how that building and the Karl King Tower of 1976 together erased the Lincoln Highway's downtown path. No preservation organization and no preservation fight appears in the record before the 1970s: the Northern Indiana Historical Society had collected since 1867, as the Museums account tells, but collecting is not keeping standing, and the standing record's defense begins with the losses of these years.

Sources:

1. Near West Side Neighborhood Organization, "A History of the Neighborhood" (westwashington.org) — the 1960s beltway demolitions, the parking-lot threat to Tippecanoe Place, and the neighborhood's own sequence of answer.
2. National Register nominations, Downtown South Bend Historic Multiple Resource Area (Straw and Kiemnec, January 1984; entered 5 June 1985) — the nomination's own statements on urban renewal and the limited basis of downtown preservation.
3. Architecture account in this record — the Oliver Hotel (1899–1967) and Oliver Opera House (1885–1978) demolition dates from the Park Service's documentation of the Oliver family's building campaign; the Tippecanoe threat as carried in its house record.