The Bond-Built System: The Parks Since 1945

1954–2003

Lead: The modern system was built in a thirty-year run of bonds, purchases and small foundings that the department's chronology records year by year, and it begins with a plan: "1954 — First comprehensive park master plan developed." The same year was a founding year — Keller Park established, Sorin Park established, the Bendix baseball park completed (the ground that is Kennedy Park today); Kelly Park had been established in 1950 and Veterans Memorial Park in 1951, and Keller Park's land was the gift the Government history tells at mayoral size. The chronology's price tags chart the building: Potawatomi Pool $153,000 and band shell $23,000 in 1956; Beck's Lake and, after it, LaSalle Park purchased in 1959 — the west-side LaSalle, at Beck's Lake, a different ground from the bayou La Salle of Howard's day, the two printed here as the record gives them — with the Izaak Walton lease of ninety-nine years to establish a park the same year, and LaSalle Park established in 1961; Elbel Park bought for $35,000 in 1961; and in 1963 the department's $800,000 bond sale to develop Pinhook, Elbel and Voorde parks. Voorde Park, on Voorde Drive, stands in the 2021 inventory at 14 acres. J. D. Oliver Park followed in 1967, the first "mini parks" in 1968, Fremont Park in 1969.

The bicentennial decade renamed as much as it built. Boland Park came in 1972, and the same year the chronology records "Bendix Park and Pool changed to Kennedy Park and Pool" — the Bendix baseball ground of 1954 taking the Kennedy name the 2021 inventory lists at 38.55 acres on Westmoor Street. The National Youth Administration had worked the Bendix Park ground in 1939, raising a recreation-center building there that the New Deal record keeps; the renaming is the department's own note of the change. Bi-Centennial Park and Island Park were completed in 1975, Pier Park in 1976, and Boehm Park established in 1976 in honor of Paul Boehm, whom the chronology records as the city's first Recreation Director in 1955. Dean Johnson Park is also a 1976 founding in the chronology. The system's last first-run founding of the century in the chronology is Fredrickson Park, established 1984 — Arthur Fredrickson having donated the money for it in 1982 — and Seitz Park in 1985; the inventory carries the Fredrickson ground as Fredrickson Prairie, 14.24 acres. The newest neighborhood park of the record is Southeast Park, opened in 2003 replacing Johnson Park and named the Indiana Park and Recreation Association's Best New Park Development of 2004. The small parks' individual deeds and donors mostly rest at this chronology depth; the record names them, dates them, and does not invent their stories.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend Venues Parks & Arts, Master Plan Update 2021–2025 (the chronological history, 1954–2003: the first comprehensive master plan; the 1954 foundings; the 1956 prices; the 1959 Beck's Lake and LaSalle purchases and the Izaak Walton lease; the 1961 Elbel purchase; the 1963 bonds; the 1967–1976 foundings and the Kennedy renaming; Fredrickson 1982/1984; Southeast Park 2003 and its 2004 award; inventory: Kennedy Park 38.55 acres; Voorde Park 14 acres; Fredrickson Prairie 14.24 acres).
2. Living New Deal project record (the National Youth Administration's 1939 recreation-center work at Bendix Park, from Parks & Recreation magazine, April 1939).
3. Government leg of this record (the Keller Park land gift of Mayors Whitcomb and Keller).
4. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907–1908) (the east-bank La Salle Park of 1895–1908, distinguished from the Beck's Lake LaSalle of 1959–1961).