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1890 — present
The city's garden suburb grew on a lawyer's estate: Horatio Chapin's family — his widow Rhoda's estate divided in the settlement of 1887 — platted the Chapin Park Addition in 1890, his children Mary Chapin Anderson and Edward Chapin converting the family ground on the west bluffs into building lots; subdivision continued until 1910, when the drive along the bluff took the name Riverside Drive, and most of the district's houses were built between 1902 and 1918. The University of Notre Dame's Building South Bend project, which surveyed the district, lists what the addition drew: most of the city's major architects and builders worked in it — the Freys, the Ellwoods, Woolmans, Hibberds and Kuhns among them — and many of the city's business and political leaders lived in it, including Fred Keller, whose own 1905 house stands at 609 Portage Avenue. The district was listed in the National Register in 1982 — its eastern third only, the western ground never entered — and became a local historic district on 28 January 1985.
Two younger plats adjoin it on the same bluff and were made districts in their turn: River Bend, designated a local historic district in 1992, built on the 1903 plat of Hammond and Whitcomb; and North St. Joseph Street, designated in 1998, on the plat Whitcomb and Hammond had drawn. Together the three districts tile the northwest bluff — one family's estate and two speculators' plats, all under preservation law now. The neighborhood's steward is the Near Northwest Neighborhood, Inc., formed in 1969 and incorporated in 1971, seated at 1007 Portage Avenue, which besides its preservation advocacy operates the loan and repair programs that have kept the district's houses standing; the city puts the parent neighborhood's population at more than 3,900.
Sources:
- University of Notre Dame, Building South Bend — the Chapin Park, River Bend and North St. Joseph Street district pages (the 1890 addition, the 1903 and later plats, the 1982 listing, the local designations)
- Communities and Heritage, this record (the 1982 and 1985 protections; the Near Northwest Neighborhood's incorporation) — banked fragments