Plans as maps: the city drawn as it was meant to become

Parks and boulevards, sewers, growth, and the census tracts

The working drawings. A third kind of sheet fills the library's plans drawers — maps made not to sell or to insure but to govern. The case's inventory gives the city's set: an 1898 Map of Sewers and Paved Streets, the young municipal plant drawn as one system; a 1925 standards-and-engineering map of the National Board of Fire Underwriters' Committee on Fire Prevention, the insurance industry's own grading of the city's fire defenses, companion in spirit to the Sanborn survey; a 1954 map of the Northern Indiana Transit bus routes, the transit system's geography at its late peak; and the population distribution maps of 1920, 1940 and 1950, the census turned into dots and shading by the city's own staff.

The 1912 park and boulevard plan. The case's prize plan is the 1912 Plan of the Park and Boulevard System for South Bend, Indiana — one of the digitized sheets — the City Beautiful-era design that proposed to bind the riverfront and the parks into one landscaped system, drawn in the years when American cities commissioned such plans as civic scripture. The plan's designer is not named in the finding aid, and no attribution is asserted in this section: the great landscape firms of the day worked across Indiana, and the name belongs to the update cycle's pull from the park board's own record, not to a guess printed here. What the sheet itself documents is the ambition — a river treated as the city's front lawn a generation before the riverfront parks this history's Parks record describes were built out piecemeal along its lines.

The growth map and the tracts. Two map series belong equally to the Government and Population files of this history and are cross-referenced, not retold, here. The city's own 1922 sheet, "City of South Bend, Indiana: Growth of City Area," draws the annexation series as one map — the plat of 1831 swelling by dated additions to the boundary the Government file narrates annexation by annexation. And the census-tract maps fix the modern statistical geography: the county's 1960 census tracts, the Area Plan Commission's tract maps of 1965 (at about 1:47,520) and 1967 for South Bend and Mishawaka (at about 1:24,000), and the tract-and-block mapping of the 1960 census in the library's plans drawers — the framework inside which the Population file's neighborhood numbers are counted. Around them the planning drawers hold the postwar analytical set: a 1954 manufacturing land-use map and its companion employee-residence map, the 1960 Base Map of St. Joseph County, a 1973 map of the St. Joseph River, the Michiana Area Council of Governments' 1975 Regional Composite Land Use Plan, and a 1980 St. Joseph River Basin map — the river, a century after the surveyors meandered it, still generating its own sheets.

The preservation map. The case closes the planning record with the map as civic memory: Southold Restorations' undated Map of Local Historic Landmarks and Other Historic Points of Interest, and the library's undated pamphlet map of the city's historic districts — the landmarks drawn for protection and for walking tours, in the Historic Preservation Commission's era.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County Public Library map case finding aid (20 December 2021) — the plans and working maps: the 1898 sewers and paved streets map; the 1912 park and boulevard plan (digitized); the 1922 growth-of-city-area sheet; the 1925 fire-underwriters' map; the population distribution maps of 1920, 1940 and 1950; the 1954 transit routes map; the 1960 census tracts and blocks; the 1954 manufacturing land-use and employee-residence maps; the 1960 county base map; the 1973 river map; the 1975 MACOG plan; the 1980 river basin map; Southold Restorations' landmarks map.
2. Indiana State Library, "St Joseph County Maps" — the St. Joseph County Land Use Planning Committee's preliminary land use map (1940); the Area Plan Commission census-tract maps of 1965 and 1967, with scales.
3. Government and Population files of this history — the annexation series and the census geography, cross-referenced.