The city's tributary: Bowman Creek, and the creek the boatmen named

THE FEEDERS INSIDE THE CITY LINE

One creek inside the city has a documented life of its own: Bowman Creek is a two-mile tributary of the St. Joseph that belongs wholly to South Bend. The city's own account of it, in the mayor's news release of 27 April 2010 that opened its modern restoration, gives the course: the creek originates near the AM General test track along West Chippewa Avenue, winds two miles through the city's southeast side past Riley High School and the Studebaker Golf Course, and drains into the St. Joseph River across from the Farmers Market. For most of that short course the modern creek is not visible. The same release states that it runs mostly underground or within enclosed storm-sewer pipes; the scholarly assessment prepared for the restoration puts it that the creek "has been rerouted underground through pipes and culverts for more than half of its downstream length," and calls it one of the most environmentally impaired tributaries in the St. Joseph River watershed.

The creek runs dry during droughts and floods during rainstorms, in the city's words, and for decades served its neighborhood as a dump behind fencing meant to stop the dumping. Its impairments were measured in the study the city co-sponsored in 2013: elevated levels of E. coli, ammonia and phosphorus. The creek's trouble and the river's are the same system: Bowman Creek is a tributary of the combined-sewer city, and its cleanup was written into the river's — the federal consent decree of 2011 required the city to spend a minimum of $75,000 on a supplemental environmental project to reduce pollutants in Bowman Creek, and the city's wastewater utility committed $150,000 to the project, with more than $12 million in related works planned by the several governments. The city had begun improvement work on the creek as early as 1992, when its Bowman Creek Improvement Project was taking easements along the Fox Street blocks, and the Utilities Division began the modern effort in 2008 after discussions with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2015 the Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem — a partnership of Notre Dame, the city, Riley High School and the neighborhood — took the creek up as a standing project, and in 2018 the creek's banks in Ravina Park, on the southeast side, were rebuilt and stabilized in a city parks project that removed an outdated culvert and pedestrian bridge and armored two hundred feet of bank. The creek is printed here at the size of its record: the one city tributary whose burying, poisoning and partial rescue are all documented by the bodies that did them.

The other named creek in the city's river record is a boatman's landmark: Knoblock's navigation history, telling the arrival of the first steamboat, places the boys who ran to meet her at "McCartney's Creek, two miles below town," where the current swept toward the west bank to avoid a shallow on the east side. McCartney's Creek enters the river downstream — below, in the boatman's sense, being down the northward current toward the lake — and it survives in the record reached as that single naming: a creek mouth that was a navigation mark in 1833. No second tributary inside the modern city carries a documentation of Bowman Creek's class, and none is printed at that size. The city's other running water is the river's own: the races and the East Race, told with the dam below and in Industrial Revolution; and across the western divide, a few miles off, the headwaters of the Kankakee begin the other drainage, told in Before the City. Juday Creek, the trout stream of the county's northeast side, runs to the river through Granger and Mishawaka and is that city's feeder to name, boundary-printed here at the line.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, Office of the Mayor, news release, 27 April 2010 — Bowman Creek's origin near the AM General test track on West Chippewa Avenue, its two-mile course past Riley High School and the Studebaker Golf Course, its passage mostly underground or in enclosed storm sewers, its discharge to the St. Joseph across from the Farmers Market, the Utilities Division's work from 2008, the $150,000 utility commitment and the $12 million in planned projects.
2. Pre-Restoration Ecological Assessment of Bowman Creek (New College of Florida, May 2011) — more than half the downstream length rerouted underground through pipes and culverts; among the most ecologically impaired tributaries of the watershed.
3. Stanford Social Innovation Review, "The Creek Will Rise" — the Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem launched 2015; the 2013 city-co-sponsored study's findings of elevated E. coli, ammonia and phosphorus.
4. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, City of South Bend settlement (announced 29 December 2011) — the consent decree's supplemental environmental project: a minimum of $75,000 to reduce pollutants in Bowman Creek.
5. City of South Bend records, 1992 — the Bowman Creek Improvement Project's construction easements along Fox Street; and the Ravina Park bank stabilization project record (City of South Bend Venues Parks & Arts, 2018) — culvert and pedestrian bridge removed, banks stabilized.
6. Otto M. Knoblock, Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River (1925) — McCartney's Creek, two miles below town, as the steamboat-arrival landmark.