Tippecanoe Place — the National Historic Landmark

1886–89 – present · 620 West Washington Avenue

The fame: Clement Studebaker's house is the one building in the city the federal government has singled out at the highest level of its historic register: listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 2 July 1973, and designated a National Historic Landmark on 22 December 1977, on the Park Service's nomination — the mansion's Richardsonian Romanesque pile of glacial boulders, 40 rooms and 20 fireplaces, four stories over a bluff on West Washington, held as nationally significant in the nation's own inventory. Landmarks are the register's fame test applied by the government itself: of the country's tens of thousands of Register listings, only a few thousand carry the Landmark designation, and this is South Bend's. The Architecture history in this record owns the house whole — Henry Ives Cobb's design, the 1886–89 build, the name's two documented theories, and the size the sources do not agree on (24,000 square feet in the restaurant-era accounts, 26,000 in the university's survey; both stand in Architecture's record).

The afterlife that kept it famous: The house entered its second public life as a restaurant in 1980, on a two-million-dollar conversion, and fed the city for forty-six years; the restaurant closed in January 2026, announced on 5 January, and the mansion's next chapter stands open in the record as this section is written. A landmark that was also, for two generations, the room where the city celebrated is famous twice, on two different kinds of evidence.

Cross-reference: Architecture (arch-tippecanoe) owns the building, the name and the closing; this entry carries the designation and the fame.

Sources

1. National Park Service — Tippecanoe Place: National Register listing 2 July 1973; National Historic Landmark designation 22 December 1977; the nomination record (Clement Studebaker House).
2. The Architecture history in this record (Architecture, arch-tippecanoe) — the house whole: Cobb, the 1886–89 build, 40 rooms and 20 fireplaces, the cost, the name theories, and the size conflict; the restaurant's closing in January 2026 after 46 years.
3. Discover Indiana — the 1979 investor purchase and the 1980 restaurant conversion at about $2 million.