West Washington and the Near West Side

1850 — present

The first mansion street in the city grew on the Bank Outlots: West Washington Street, running west from the court's square, became the address of the industrialists as their fortunes rose — the Studebakers' Clement Studebaker at 620 West Washington on the northwest rise called "the hill," James Oliver's Copshaholm at 808 — with the mill owners and machine makers, the O'Briens, Bakers, Adlers, Bowshers, Birdsells and Casadays, as their neighbors, and, in the horse era, the workmen and craftsmen of their own shops living in the same neighborhood beside them. The Near West Side association's history names the social order plainly: the mansions on the heights, the workers' houses below, all of it one walking-distance district. The ground's second industry arrived with the standard-gauge age: the district's southern edge along Sample Street became an industrial spine, and the neighborhood between river and park filled with the frame houses of the city's first factory generations.

The district's modern course is the renewal course in miniature, told here at neighborhood size and carried whole in the government file: the 1960s inner beltway project cleared houses to link Chapin Street to Lincolnway, its damage reduced — but only in 2006 — by the association's own work; the Near West Side Neighborhood Organization was founded in the 1970s as an offshoot of the Model Cities program, among the oldest neighborhood organizations in the city; and the district's resident-driven survey, in which Ruth Price organized the residents to take the district's history themselves in the middle 1970s, won its National Register listing in 1975 and a local district in the same campaign, over a city plan to raze the district's centerpiece for a parking lot. The association still stands in the city's framework — among the city's recognized organizations in 2021, an IGNITE grant recipient in 2023, and its members worked the Near West Side plan process with city staff in 2025, the association noting that "we are more than West Washington."

Sources:

1. Near West Side (West Washington) Neighborhood Association — "History of the Neighborhood," westwashington.org (the hill, the factory families, the beltway, the organization)
2. Heritage and Government, this record (the 1975 listing and the renewal course at their own sizes) — banked fragments
3. City of South Bend, IGNITE grant announcements (2023); Department of Community Investment budget presentation (2026) — southbendin.gov