The Natatorium: preservation as repair

1978 — 2020

The building that tells the story: The Engman Public Natatorium on West Washington Street, the city's first municipal swimming pool, barred Black swimmers outright from 1922 to 1936 and admitted them on segregated days until 1950; the long campaign against that regime is the Black History account's record, and this entry keeps only the building's keeping. The pool closed in 1978 and the building stood vacant for more than a quarter-century. Beginning in 2005 the IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center led the partnership — the university, the South Bend Heritage Foundation and the City of South Bend — that transformed the derelict pool building into the Center's home; the new center opened in May 2010, its displays walking visitors through the building's own history, a peace garden growing where the pool was. A sign by the garden states the building's standing in the city's own words: "This is the last building standing that tells the story of segregation in South Bend." IU South Bend, which had leased the building since the renovation, bought it outright in a purchase completed in early 2020. It is the preservation regime's clearest moral case in this record: a building saved not for its architecture but for its evidence — kept because what happened in it must not become unprovable. The Museums account carries the Center as a museum; the Heritage account notes what kind of act its keeping was.

Sources:

1. Museums account in this record — the Center's formation (2000), the natatorium partnership from 2005, the May 2010 opening, the garden sign's sentence, and the IU South Bend archives' keeping of the South Bend Civil Rights History collection.
2. Indiana University News, 26 February 2020 — the university's purchase of the Engman Natatorium as the Center's permanent home, completed in early 2020.
3. Black History account in this record — the natatorium's exclusion regime (1922–1950) and the desegregation campaign, cross-referenced and not retold.