South Bend Neighborhoods: The History of the City's Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods

South Bend's neighborhoods were not found; they were filed. Every one of them began as a piece of paper at the county recorder's office — a plat, drawn by a proprietor who expected the city to grow over his land and meant to be paid when it did. The town itself was the first of them: a polygon of quarter-acre lots that Alexis Coquillard and Lathrop Taylor recorded in March 1831. After it came the additions, decade by decade — a bank's outlots west of town, a rival town across the river, a priest's speculative village, a dead founder's field his children held for forty years before platting, a brewing family's bluff, a streetcar suburb in curving streets, a Studebaker president's six hundred acres — until the map of the modern city is, if you read it closely, a stack of those papers, each still legible in street names, lot lines and the names residents use.

This section reads that stack. It tells the original plat and the early additions whole; takes the named neighborhoods one by one at the depth their records carry — the record here meaning the plat literature, the National Register nominations, the historic district guidebooks of the preservation commission, the neighborhood associations' own accounts, the city's plan documents and the press of record; and closes with the annexation course that made one city of the plats, and the neighborhood framework the city runs today. Where the record gives two dates, both are printed. Where a name's origin is tradition rather than document, it is printed as tradition, with its carrier. Where the record runs out — and for some subdivisions it runs out quickly — the entry says so.