The museum that left — the College Football Hall of Fame

Opened 25 August 1995 — closed at the end of 2012

Its museum life: For seventeen years downtown South Bend held a national museum: the College Football Hall of Fame, opened 25 August 1995 at 111 South St. Joseph Street, in a 52,000-square-foot building connected to Century Center, two miles from the campus whose team filled its halls. Its full record — the dealing that brought it from Kings Mills, Ohio, its enshrinement festivals, its attendance and economics, the Atlanta decision — belongs to the Halls of Fame section of this history and is not retold here. This section records only its place in the museum map and its loss: the Hall closed at the end of December 2012 and reopened in Atlanta in 2014, and South Bend's museum count fell by the one institution that had been national in scope.

The afterlife: The building stayed. Sold into the hotel development that rose beside it — the Courtyard by Marriott opened on the Jefferson lot in September 2017 — the Hall building itself was not absorbed into the hotel, and the city's own records over the following years, its vacant-building abatement files among them, treat 111 South St. Joseph Street throughout as vacant. There the documented record reached in this history ends: as of the last city records consulted, the 1995 building stood empty beside the hotel that was supposed to absorb it, and no later reuse, tenancy or demolition is established here. The Gridiron plaza and the theater shell and the Hall of Honor's rooms are a museum's architecture without a museum — the failure entry in this record, printed at the same fullness as the survivals.

Sources:

1. The Halls of Fame record of this history — the Hall's opening on 25 August 1995 at 111 South St. Joseph Street, its 52,000 square feet, its closing at the end of 2012, and the Atlanta removal, from the National Football Foundation's and the city's records.
2. The Halls of Fame record of this history, from the City of South Bend's redevelopment and abatement files — the building's sale, the Courtyard by Marriott's opening in September 2017, and the vacant-building record of 111 South St. Joseph Street.