The peak

1945 — 1960

The postwar city was the richest version of South Bend that has ever existed: By the census accounting of 1950, more than half of all employment in the city was in manufacturing — a proportion few American cities matched — and Studebaker alone employed close to 24,000 people in South Bend that year. The population climbed to its all-time high: 115,911 in 1950 and 132,445 in 1960, a city of union wages, new subdivisions, parish schools and full factory parking lots, fourth in Indiana and sure of itself. Downtown at the peak was a retail capital in its own right, anchored at 211 South Michigan Street by Robertson's — founded in 1904 by George A. Robertson, and raised in 1923–1925 into the city's largest department store on the very parcel where the Studebaker brothers' blacksmith shop had stood: six stories, a tea room on top, 400 employees at its height, the city's first escalator in 1948 and the first store in town with building-wide air conditioning. The store — owned from 1932 by the brothers Sig and Will Welber — was also remembered in the landmark tours for a rarer distinction: it treated Black customers fairly, let them try on clothing, and was among the first downtown employers to hire Black secretaries. The era had its documented public moments besides: in 1949 the bandleader Lionel Hampton, booked at the Palais du Royale ballroom and told the concert would be held for a black audience only, threatened to boycott his own engagement — and the evening proceeded, integrated, a small early victory in a city whose Black community, by then a substantial share of the whole, was pressing on every segregated arrangement the factory age had left standing.

Underneath the peak, the structure was already moving. The factories' products were aging trades: horse-drawn thinking in an automobile industry consolidating around Detroit, plows for a farm economy mechanizing past them, cabinets for sewing machines going electric and stand-alone. In April 1954 Singer announced the closing of the cabinet works that had anchored the West Race and Western Avenue for 86 years; the ninety-day shutdown began in January 1955, and early that year the largest sewing-machine cabinet factory in the world went quiet — the first of the great names to go, nine years before the greatest. The census of 1960, the peak count, was taken in a city that had already lost Singer and did not yet know it had begun the long descent.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend reference history — manufacturing at more than half of all city employment by 1950; the Hampton concert of 1949 at the Palais du Royale proceeding as an integrated event after his boycott threat.
2. Studebaker National Museum — Studebaker's South Bend employment of close to 24,000 in 1950.
3. The History Museum, South Bend — Singer's closure announced in April 1954 and the ninety-day shutdown begun in January 1955.
4. Michiana Jewish Historical Society, Indiana Memory (St. Joseph County Public Library), and the IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center landmark tour — Robertson's: founded 1904 by George A. Robertson, the flagship at 211 South Michigan built 1923 and opened on the site in 1925 on the Studebaker blacksmith shop's parcel, sold in 1932 to Sig and Will Welber, 400 employees at its height, the first escalator (1948) and first building-wide air conditioning in the city, and its standing with Black customers.
5. University of Notre Dame, Building South Bend — the Robertson's building's 1923 construction on the former blacksmith-shop site.
6. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses — South Bend, 115,911 in 1950 and the peak of 132,445 in 1960.