The long decline

1964 — 2000

The closing was a beginning, not an end: The census of a shrinking city reads like a tide going out — 125,580 in 1970, 109,727 in 1980, 105,511 in 1990 — and behind the numbers stood the arithmetic of the whole factory age unwinding. Manufacturing, more than half of all city employment in 1950, was 16 percent of the local economy by 2000, and the city had lost nearly 30,000 people from its 1960 peak. The great names went one by one. The Oliver works outlived its founders' industry by decades — through the White Motor purchase of 1960 and the farm-equipment consolidations — until White closed the original South Bend works, Factory No. 1 on the river, in 1985; its buildings stood vacant for seventeen years before most were demolished in 2002 for an industrial park, the plant's powerhouse surviving, restored, into a second life. The Singer complex had gone sooner: a fire in 1960, and urban-renewal money cleared most of the Western Avenue works that had once been the largest of their kind on earth; a single building, the Marycrest, survives in other uses. Downtown, the renewal era demolished and rebuilt in the confidence of the time, and the retail heart of the city thinned as trade followed the new subdivisions — much of it across the line into Mishawaka's commercial ground, which is that city's story to tell.

Downtown's anchor went in the same tide: Robertson's, the department store that had crowned Michigan Street since 1904, closed in 1986, its great building standing empty until the South Bend Heritage Foundation converted it to apartments for seniors. One industrial line, though, never quite left: the military-vehicle work at the Chippewa Avenue plant ran on under Kaiser-Jeep and then, from 1971, under American Motors' new subsidiary AM General — over 92,000 five-ton trucks built in South Bend for the armed services across the postwar decades — until AM General closed the Chippewa plant in 1989. The headquarters, moved to South Bend in 1986, stayed, and stays. The Bendix complex on Bendix Drive wrote the era's coda in two acts.

Sources:

1. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses — South Bend, 125,580 in 1970, 109,727 in 1980, 105,511 in 1990.
2. City of South Bend reference history — manufacturing's fall to 16 percent of the local economy by 2000 and the loss of nearly 30,000 people from the peak.
3. Oliver Corporation histories — the White Motor acquisition of November 1, 1960; the closing of the original South Bend works in 1985; the buildings' vacancy until the demolitions of 2002 for an industrial park, and the powerhouse's survival and restoration.
4. "Round the Bend" (South Bend architecture and social-history summaries) — the 1960 fire at the Singer complex and its urban-renewal clearance.
5. The History Museum, South Bend — the Marycrest Building as the surviving building of the Singer works.
6. City of South Bend economy references — the Bendix operations' division between Honeywell and Bosch, Bosch's ending of South Bend operations at the end of 2011 and vacation of the site in October 2012, and Honeywell's continuing aircraft wheel and brake production.
7. AM General references — the 1971 creation of AM General Corporation from the General Products Division, over 92,000 five-ton trucks produced at South Bend, the Chippewa Avenue plant's closing in 1989, and the headquarters' move to South Bend in 1986.
8. Clio and the IU South Bend landmark tour — Robertson's closing in 1986 and the building's conversion by the South Bend Heritage Foundation to senior apartments.