Sunnymede and East Wayne Street

1925 — present

The city's premier streetcar-and-automobile suburb was a real-estate firm's showpiece: Whitcomb and Keller platted the Sunnymede Addition in 1925 — the first of six Sunnymede additions the firm would file — in the ground east of the city between Eddy Street and what is now Greenlawn Avenue (then Eighteenth Street), from Jefferson Boulevard south to the Grand Trunk tracks. The firm designed the subdivision, in Notre Dame's Building South Bend account, to be one of South Bend's most exclusive, on the principles of the period's best practice — curvilinear streets, trees and dedicated park areas, Olmstedian in all but the firm's own word — and marketed it to the city's successful business and professional class; its resident architect, Clifford (H. R.) Stapp, engaged by the firm from 1917, drew the gates that still mark its western entrances, built in 1925. The houses that filled it were the large, substantial residences of the 1920s and 1930s, and its most famous address came at the end of the first campaign: 1417 East Wayne Street, Knute Rockne's home from 1930, which the famous locations file treats at its own size.

The street the addition fronted is older than the addition: East Wayne Street, the continuation of the downtown grid east through the Lowell ground, was designated a local historic district by ordinance in 1987 — Ordinance No. 7796-87 — and the preservation commission's guidebook for the district, published in 2003, is its documentary anchor. No documented statement of the name "Sunnymede" beyond the plat's own use of it stands in the record reached; the name is printed as the firm's chosen word, its etymology a gap rather than a guess.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, Building South Bend — the Sunnymede addition of 1925, its six additions, its extent
2. Historic Preservation Commission of South Bend and St. Joseph County — East Wayne Street Local Historic District guidebook (2003), Ordinance #7796-87 (1987)