The East Race embodies our community’s style of development: a healthy city can take things that seem like liabilities and turn them into treasure. Looking across to the left as we run, I can see Stephenson Mills, a once-shuttered underwear factory now back to life as trendy lofts overlooking the East Race; one adaptive reuse supporting another. Behind it sits the Commerce Center, once a coal-fired power plant and now an office space slated for further development. One summer, the owner allowed eleven artists to set up installations in its basement, which includes an abandoned pool that once served as the central amenity of a fitness center there after a prior repurposing in the 1980s.
That’s not even the most creative use of an old swimming pool in the city. Farther downtown, the former Central High School, where John Wooden once coached basketball, is full of people even though its bell rang for the last time in 1968. It, too, was reopened as apartments in the 1990s. Around the time I became mayor, a Navy lieuten ant named Gus Bennett took up residence in an apartment made out of what used to be the school swimming pool. Though it was potentially the least usable space in the building, Gus and his roommate, Dena Woods, saw a way to give it new life, hosting bands that would play in the deep end and filling the rest of the former pool with sofas where people could take in the concerts while others watched from around the railings above. Good local acts and traveling bands played there, a testament to the fact that a good eye can see future value where others see disuse. In many ways, that’s the story of the city itself.
To our right is the headquarters of AM General, the company best known for making Humvees used by the military, a continuation of the tradition of military vehicle–making in our city that dates back through World War II trucks to Civil War–era Studebaker wagons. It’s about 6:45, but we already see one person sitting at a desk in the office, probably servicing a Middle Eastern or European account. In Mishawaka, the day shift has been under way since five a.m. On the commercial side of the plant, workers have been assembling Mercedes-Benz R-Class sport-utility vehicles for sale to the Asian market. Now that that contract has ended, the facility is being retooled to make electric vehicles for SF Motors, a Silicon Valley–based firm backed by Chinese investors.
We come to where the East Race is reunited with the main course of the St. Joseph River. Here, the river is a rebellious churn of swirls and eddies, in a hurry to get somewhere. Trotting up a flight of concrete stairs, we pick up the East Bank Trail, which incorporates a former railway and will take us all the way up to the edge of the Notre Dame campus. The asphalt is smooth and wide, and the daylight is now peeking through between leaves under a canopy of trees that arches over us, as if the city were nowhere near. From my office on the fourteenth floor, most of the city looks like a forest, and in the summertime you would never guess that whole neighborhoods sit below the dark green carpet of treetops.
We cross over U.S. 933, the north-south spine of the city, on a footbridge adapted from its original use as a railroad. I used to hate that bridge. Walking under it every day to get to school, I remember dreading the approach. Cars rushed by with nothing to buffer the sidewalk, which was then barely above street level, and the concrete support of the bridge held up an ugly green iron mass, while an inch-high ridge of pigeon droppings marked the beginning and the end of the passage under. A few years ago, a local artist decided the bridge could be a lot more. With city support, he recruited volunteers—over nine hundred of them, from local grade school kids to me and my mother—to paint the concrete and the bridge itself in a sort of giant paint-by-numbers project.
At the bottom of the hill we turn left at Stink Corner. It smells fine now, but for years I knew it as Stink Corner because of the sewer outfall there. Fixing the sewer so that it doesn’t overflow into the river as often is the goal of a twenty-year, near-billion-dollar project I have inherited known as the Long-Term Control Plan. Judging by the fresh air at this corner, the project has been helpful.
Our house comes into view, hard to miss with the white, blue, and yellow of the South Bend flag hanging over the reconstructed porch. The Michigan Street Bridge that I crossed alone in my Jeep an hour earlier is now full of rush-hour traffic. Crossing the street and back up the hill toward the East Bank Trail again, we are mostly silent on mile eight, falling into the runner’s trance. I become aware of feeling a little cold and a little hungry. The trail leads us downhill, back toward downtown. We return to the East Race, on the other side now, and come to Seitz Park.
As we cross back over the Jefferson Bridge, I glance at the contagion of potholes and make a mental note to check whether it’s still on the list for repaving this year. Across MLK, we look to the right through the windows of the Chicory Café, where lawyers are fetching coffee and a couple graduate students are settling in for a long morning. A couple years ago the owner knocked out a wall and doubled the size of the café, partly because of revenue from selling beer after we used a state law to allow any business within a thousand feet of the river to get a deeply discounted three-way liquor license, helping the number of restaurants downtown double. One beer at a time, downtown has come back to life.
We kick it up for the last couple blocks, a sprint to mark the end of the run. Everything hurts, and I lose my breath for a beat, but now the hardest part of the day is over, at least physically. I suddenly realize how cold it is, covered in sweat on the street corner. Joe peels off to go home, while Tim and I walk up the stairs of the parking garage to get to the gym. I shower and shave in the locker room, and make small talk with the others, mostly downtown professionals and retirees my parents’ age. One of them asks how much longer it will take to get those potholes on Jefferson taken care of, and as I stand there with a razor in my hand and a towel around my waist, I share my official views on the progress of the road-funding bill in Indianapolis while fighting the urge to insist on a rule that I believe should be understood implicitly: anyone not wearing pants should not have to talk about work.
Soon I’m in my mayor’s uniform; dress slacks and a tie, or a suit if I’m doing something formal later. No breakfast meeting today, so I can head to the South Bend Chocolate Café and take my customary booth in the back. I shovel in scrambled eggs and ham, fruit on the side, washed down with coffee while I check the Tribune for surprises, examine the emails on my phone, and thumb through Twitter. Fed, hydrated, and caffeinated, I am ready to get to work. On the way out, I pass by the triceratops skull in the back room—the eccentric owner of the Chocolate Café is also a dinosaur enthusiast with a sort of ad hoc museum on the premises of the shop—and head back out into the cold air and toward the County-City Building.
THE COUNTY-CITY BUILDING IS NOT a beautiful structure. It is fourteen stories of steel and glass, with mostly tile floor and drab walls that proclaim its 1960s origins, yet it has its a certain appeal. I pass the concrete pylons toward the glass doors, walk up to the metal detector, empty my pockets, and lay my briefcase on the belt of the X-ray machine. Under Indiana law, the only reason you can be prevented from bringing a gun into the building—or even into my office—is because the building is connected by tunnel to a courthouse complex.
Curtis is working security today. In his brown county police uniform, sitting in his usual spot beside the X-ray and glancing at the monitor, he reaches out for our customary handshake.
“What do you know, Curtis?”
“Not much,” he replies.
False modesty. He’s retired from the city police, and seems to know half the city. His annual August birthday party brings hundreds of people to the yard of his ranch house on the West Side’s curving Lombardy Street a stone’s throw from Washington High School. Every year he stays up the night before, slow-cooking his celebrated ribs.