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1961 — present
LaSalle Park is the one neighborhood in South Bend whose creation is fully documented because the city itself was its author: the city purchased Beck's Lake and the LaSalle Park ground in 1959 — the same purchase season in which it bought Leeper Park's ground across town, the parks file records — and the park was established in 1961, named for the ground it faced; the naming statement itself is not in the record reached, and the lake-and-river La Salle of the city's French memory should not be confused with the east-bank park of the same name in the parks record. The neighborhood around it was designated an urban renewal area, and the fight over its shape is the city's best-documented neighborhood struggle: the 1962 plan proposed 240 acres, 800 new homes and 150 existing houses tagged for demolition; the 1964 amended plan, shaped by the neighborhood's own insistence on a twenty-percent cap, eliminated about 130 homes, and 133 families lost their homes in the clearance — set beside which the government file prints the whole course, from the mayor's framing of renewal as "slum elimination" to the Public Improvement Board's allocating of blocks for new single-family construction in 1964.
The neighborhood that survived the plans is one of the city's organized own: a LaSalle Park Neighborhood Association stands in the city's framework, an IGNITE grant recipient in the 2023 round, and in February 2026 the Plan Commission adopted the LaSalle Park Neighborhood Plan — the newest of the city's neighborhood plans — its process carried in the parks file's account of the planning framework. The ground's older wound is now federal record as well: Beck's Lake, at the neighborhood's edge, is a Superfund site for the dumping era that preceded the neighborhood, its cleanup carried in the epidemics and public health file.
Sources:
- Government and Parks & Plans, this record (the 1959 purchase, the 1961 establishment, the 1962 and 1964 plans, the February 2026 plan adoption) — banked fragments
- City of South Bend, IGNITE grant announcement (2023) — southbendin.gov