The LaSalle Hotel and the LaSalle Annex

Built 1921 · Annex 1925 · Closed as a hotel 1973 · Reborn as apartments, 2015–2016

Lead: The LaSalle Hotel rose in 1921 at 237 North Michigan Street, on the Sheridan House's corner at Michigan and LaSalle — a nine-story house in a Renaissance Revival and Chicago School blend, by the architects Nicol, Schuler & Hoffman in the city's 2018 landmark staff report. Its room count is carried in two forms by its own National Register nomination and the encyclopedia summary of that nomination: 233 rooms in the nomination, 223 in the summary. Both are printed; the nomination's figure is the document of record and the summary's stands as its variant. The house had several dining rooms fitted for club use and a cafeteria, and it stood across from the South Shore Line's original South Bend station, joined to it — in the encyclopedia's account — by a tunnel, so that a traveler could pass from train to hotel without weather. The Register's narrative places it exactly: the first of three hotels at the intersection catering to passengers disembarking there.

The LaSalle Annex, at 302–306 North Michigan, followed in 1925, by the architect Willard M. Ellwood in Notre Dame's Building South Bend account: stores, a parking garage, hotel rooms, bachelor apartments, offices, a roller rink, a dance floor, a bowling alley, and a Turkish bath under one roof — a second hotel that was also half an amusement building. In 1930 an enclosed second-story connector was built across LaSalle Avenue between the LaSalle and the new Hoffman Hotel, told next, binding the intersection's houses into one managed complex. The LaSalle closed as a hotel in 1973. Charismatic Renewal Services bought the building in 1975; the city bought and mothballed it in 2004. After the city's 2013 request for proposals and design competition, RealAmerica of Fishers, Indiana, bought it in April 2015 and rehabilitated it as The LaSalle: sixty-seven apartments — fifty-one one-bedroom and sixteen two-bedroom — over some eight thousand square feet of commercial space, with the lobby and the wood-paneled Brandywine Room preserved. The conversion won Indiana Landmarks' Outstanding Historic Rehabilitation Award in 2016. Hotel and Annex both stand on the National Register, listed 5 June 1985. The LaSalle lodges no travelers now; it houses residents on the corner where Earl built in 1840, and its preserved lobby is the grand-hotel era's surviving public room in South Bend.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places nomination, LaSalle Hotel and LaSalle Annex (listed 5 June 1985; 233 rooms in the nomination, 223 in its encyclopedia summary; the intersection narrative; the 1930 connector).
2. City of South Bend landmark staff report, 2018 (Nicol, Schuler & Hoffman, architects).
3. Building South Bend, University of Notre Dame (the Annex, 1925, Ellwood).
4. Indiana Landmarks and the rehabilitation record (the 1973 closing; 1975 and 2004 sales; RealAmerica, April 2015; 67 apartments; the 2016 award).