What South Bend built for its children

Two traditions run through the leg. The first is commercial and riverfront: a trolley company's amusement park teaching the city the habit of the family outing, a vaudeville palace changing its act every ten minutes, drive-ins and rinks at directory size, an arcade that ended up across the city line in a shopping center. The second is civic, and it is the stronger line: a duck pond a parks department dug that grew into the state's oldest zoo, a library that built children rooms of their own and employed a Story Lady, a philanthropist, Ella Morris, whose name stands on both the saved theatre and the glass houses, a park, Potawatomi, where zoo, conservatories, playground and splash pad share one fence, a hospital that built a museum about children's own bodies, and a ballpark designed from its first drawings so that a parent in the concession line never loses sight of a child.

The honest edges of the record. This section prints its thin places thin: four drive-ins whose dates nobody could fix, two rinks known from one year's directory, a club movement whose founding year its own site rounds to "50 years," an arcade whose opening lives in one patron's recollection. What is not thin is the shape of the whole: South Bend, more than most cities its size, put its children's amusements in public hands and public ground, the parks department, the library, the city-owned zoo and the city-built ballpark, and the newest entry in the leg, a museum three mothers built for a five-year-old who did not live to see it, belongs to that same civic line by instinct. The duck pond is the emblem: dug for ducks in 1902, still holding children at its fence today.

Sources

1. Synthesis of the articles above; every factual claim in this closing article is carried in the cited articles of this section.