South Bend Parks and City Planning

Parks and Plans

South Bend's green framework began as a square drawn on a plat and a swamp the city used for a dump. The town's founders reserved a public square in 1831 and put the courthouse and the jail on it, but they set aside no park, and for the city's first half-century there was no public pleasure ground at all. The first park came out of the dump itself: a riverfront tract of overflowed swamp along the St. Joseph, filled for fifteen years with street cleanings, established as the City Park by ordinance on 17 March 1879, named for the councilman who had fought for it, laid out by a landscape artist, and opened to the public on 18 August 1899 as Howard Park. Around that beginning the whole framework grew — a park board elected in 1891, abolished in 1901, and restored in 1910; a superintendent, Herman Beyer, who planted the system into being; a harvest of gifts in 1906 that added seventy-eight acres in a single year, including the old county fairgrounds; a park and boulevard system drawn by George Kessler between 1911 and 1915 that still shapes the riverfront; golf courses given by the Erskine family and built by bond issues; and, in the modern era, a run of master plans — the first comprehensive one in 1954, then five-year plans in 1982, 1987, 1998, 2014 and 2021 — alongside the city's comprehensive plans of 1973, 2002 and 2006 and the new plans of the 2020s. This chapter tells the parks and the plans together, at the size the record gives them: the department's own chronological history, its published inventory, and the first county history, written by the man the first park is named for.