The armory line, I · 727 South Eddy Street, 1928

1928

The city's first purpose-built armory still stands, and keeps its 1928 face: The armory at 727 South Eddy Street was built in 1928 and served for its first decades as the city's National Guard armory, with an indoor shooting range behind its brick drill-hall walls — 16,200 square feet in all. When the Guard's South Bend home moved on, in the settlement of 1963 told next, the building passed to the city's uses: it became the Newman Recreation Center, a public gymnasium where the neighborhood played basketball and dodgeball, and then a city storage building, falling into disrepair. The city sold it to developer Brad Emberton and Kurt Janowsky, and a year-long renovation, completed about 2018–19, stripped the gymnasium years away and restored the fabric substantially as built in 1928 — original red brick, the munitions-room doors with their iron bars, wood from the old bleachers in the bar. It operates today as "The Armory," an event venue in the Market District across from the river. It is the one building in this record where the Guard's first South Bend century can still be read in the walls.

Sources:

1. Edible Michiana, "New Life for the Armory" (2019, updated 2025) — the 1928 construction, the armory and indoor shooting range, the Newman Recreation Center years, the city storage and the sale to Emberton and Janowsky, the 16,200 square feet and the renovation restoring the 1928 fabric, the building's present use as an event venue at 727 S. Eddy Street.