LaSalle Square: the west side's center

BUILT MIDDLE 1970S · BENDIX DRIVE, SOUTH OF LINCOLN WAY WEST · ANCHORS KROGER AND TARGET, BOTH LOST

Built for the Bendix neighborhoods: LaSalle Square rose in the middle 1970s on Bendix Drive, just south of the Lincoln Way West corridor — the date the Common Council's zoning record gives the multi-tenant center — to serve the west-side neighborhoods that the Bendix works had filled with, in the Redevelopment Commission's words, "several generations of working middle class families." The Commission's 2006 concept plan for the area remembers what it was: a center that "once provided major retail opportunities for west side residents," grocery-anchored by a Kroger and a Target, standing in the shadow of the Bendix plant that Bosch and Honeywell later occupied. It was never a regional draw; it was the west side's own shopping, and its record is the record of a neighborhood center whose neighborhood's employer shrank beneath it.

The anchors leave: The Commission's concept plan names the two blows plainly: LaSalle Square "lost its anchor stores, Kroger and Target," and "the Portage Avenue/Cleveland Road retail and commercial development also contributed to loss of opportunities for the LaSalle Square area" — the new big-box node on the northwest side drawing the same trade the west side once kept. What followed is documented in the city's own paper: rezoning petitions in 2001 and 2002 to put a charitable gaming facility and then a day-care and banquet hall into the center, both withdrawn; the county library's announcement that it would close its LaSalle Square branch; and, in the words of the Lincoln Way West Gateway Association carried in the Commission's minutes, the transformation "from a bustling retail center to an area dominated by non profit and religious organizations." The old Target building passed to charitable reuse — by 2011 the city's staff memoranda describe it as housing the St. Vincent de Paul Society. The LaSalle Square Area Redevelopment Plan followed in September 2008, with senior housing rezoned onto the center's west edge the same year and the future land-use map carrying the Square as mixed use: the center's second life, planned as its first one ended.

Sources:

1. South Bend Common Council, meeting minutes, August 8, 2011 (zoning history, APC #2595-11) — the LaSalle Square multi-tenant shopping center constructed in the mid-1970s; the 2001 and 2002 rezoning petitions and their withdrawal; the LaSalle Square Area Redevelopment Plan of September 2008 and the 2008 senior-housing rezoning.
2. South Bend Redevelopment Commission, regular meeting minutes, October 20, 2006 — the LaSalle Square concept plan: the Bendix heritage; the lost anchors, Kroger and Target; the Portage Avenue/Cleveland Road competition; the library branch closure announcement; the Gateway Association's account of the center's transformation.
3. South Bend Redevelopment Commission, staff memorandum, April 12, 2011 — "the old Target store in what was the LaSalle Square Shopping Center, on Bendix Drive south of Lincoln Way West," then housing the St. Vincent de Paul Society.