The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Casino opened January 2018 without a hotel · Tower grand opening 1 March 2023
Lead: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi's Four Winds South Bend casino, on Prairie Avenue on the city's south side — its trust-land course told in the Before the City and Government accounts of this record — opened in January 2018 deliberately without a hotel: the Band's own account says the casino was built first, to test the market. The market answered. On 1 March 2023 the Band held the grand opening of its hotel tower: twenty-three stories, 317 rooms of which eighty-three are suites, with the Cedar Spa and the Ribbon Town Conference and Event Center. By the Tribune's October 2024 count it is the largest hotel in St. Joseph County, its 317 rooms just ahead of the DoubleTree's 290. In five years the city's largest lodging house went from a downtown convention hotel raised beside a 1977 convention center to a tribal casino tower raised beside a 2018 casino floor — the present map's plainest statement of where the traveler's night in South Bend is now spent.
Sources:
- Four Winds Casinos / Pokagon Band of Potawatomi (the January 2018 casino opening without a hotel; the tower's grand opening, 1 March 2023; 317 rooms, 83 suites; Cedar Spa; Ribbon Town).
- South Bend Tribune, October 2024 (the county's largest hotel, 317 rooms).