There turned out to be a natural alternative: Saint Joseph Street. There were enough places already named after our area’s patron saint of nearly everything (a church, a hospital, a middle school, a high school, the river, and the county, to take a few) that I didn’t think he would mind. And with a major downtown streets initiative wrapping up, it would be one of the finest streetscapes in the city. It was prominent—right in the middle of downtown—and had major addresses on it, including the Century Center and the School Corporation. The committee members seemed to like it, though they had made the more modest recommendation of extending the existing road. I announced it, arranged for the street signs to be made, and made it official on Dr. King’s birthday in 2017.
Achieving this took us four years (or over twenty, depending how you start the clock). And now, along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, there has been no cause for regret. The street looks good, and so do the buses bearing Dr. King’s name that run along it. Land values are only rising there, and I’ve heard nothing about any impact on whether the area is “desirable.” Instead, it is a statement of our city’s belief in racial and social justice and a measure of pride in the diversity of our past and present. It stands among the other ways my administration has found to honor Dr. King, like adding it to the calendar of city holidays, and unveiling a statue of the moment in which he stood arm in arm with Notre Dame’s president, Father Ted Hesburgh, in Chicago in 1964, all part of a symbolic texture revealing what is important to our city. Alongside more direct expressions of the lessons of civil rights—like the lectures and exhibits at our Civil Rights Heritage Center, built under my predecessor from the remains of a once-segregated natatorium—it signals to us the value that a city can place on the struggle for justice. And it forces us to acknowledge that the struggle is still under way.
On issue after issue—safety, neighborhoods, growth, race relations, and traffic—I learned this lesson: symbols and ceremonies very much matter because they establish the tone for all of the work we come to do in the public square. And so, one May evening in 2015—some three years after wishing that we had a royal family to do things like this so I wouldn’t have to—I smiled with sincere pleasure with a glass of champagne in my hand. From a stage on the concrete island behind the Century Center, amid the rushing waters of the St. Joseph River, I addressed a crowd of thousands and led a toast to the city’s 150th birthday.
THE IDEA OF A MAJOR CELEBRATION in 2015 had begun during my campaign, four years earlier. Zoned out from too much call time one day, I was staring blankly at an image of the city seal on some document on my cluttered desk. The seal features a rising sun amid a field of puffy clouds, an American flag, and the word PEACE. I’d never really paid much attention to it, but now I wondered why the city fathers had chosen this imagery for our seal—nothing to do with corn, or machinery, or the river, or anything else native to our city. Then my eye fell on the bottom of the seal, where it read: 1865. I went to look up the precise date of the city’s incorporation, and found that the city was given its present legal form in May of that year—just six weeks after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.3
Now the seal made a lot more sense. The American flag was not some generic symbol of nationalism—it was the flag of a republic whose very existence had just been gravely threatened and freshly vindicated by the grievous and mortal test of the Civil War. The word “peace” was not a vague blessing or pleasantry then, it was the fond desire of a population traumatized by its opposite. What a hopeful act it would have been, to draw up paperwork and formalize the presence of a city in the aftermath of that dreadful conflict, deep in prairie land that was, in those days, still considered the West.
And then, instinctively, I did the math. Incorporated in 1865. That meant the city was 146 years old. It followed that the winner of the 2011 campaign would be in office to preside over the 150th anniversary of the city in 2015. Remembering this while on my journey toward recognizing the power of the ceremonial, I came to realize that a major celebration of this date would offer the perfect occasion for something badly needed: a chance to consolidate and celebrate the psychological gains of our present comeback, and to offer a decisive reply to the decades of gloom that had culminated in the stinging mention of our hometown in Newsweek’s “Dying Cities” article.
I asked my staff to organize a committee, and we began raising private funds to help mount a sweeping celebration of the city’s past, present, and future. Everyone was invited to celebrate in their own way, from a restaurant creating a special dish for the occasion to the library hosting a “scan-a-thon” for historic family photos. We decided the celebrations should last all year, but the events would hinge on the actual birthday of the city, which happened to fall on Memorial Day weekend. We would close major streets downtown, create a citywide festival with everything from a technology expo and food trucks to a three-on-three basketball tournament and zip lines installed over the river. It would all kick off with a party and fireworks show downtown.
Of course, if the city hadn’t actually been coming back, none of this would have worked. Like an anniversary party for an obviously failing marriage, it would have drawn half-hearted crowds and murmuring behind the scenes. Responses would have been tepid or even sarcastic. Thus, the celebration would function not just to assert, but also to test, my claim that the city was on a roll once again. For any of this to work, the contention that South Bend’s decline had ended would actually have to be true.
But by 2015 there was no denying the real comeback under way. When I had taken office in 2012, the aftereffects of the Great Recession had compounded our half-century-long economic slump and brought us to a miserable unemployment rate of 11.8 percent, three full points above the national average. Now unemployment was down to 5.6 percent, a mere half point from the U.S. rate. We had cleared or fixed most of the thousand vacant and abandoned houses at the center of our neighborhood redevelopment strategy. The number of restaurants opening in our once-quiet downtown had doubled, deals were under way to add two major hotels to the city center, and investment was up in our industrial areas. Safety was improving, and at last the national coverage of our city was more likely to be about innovation than post-industrial ruin. Whether by statistics or intuition, you could feel that South Bend was trending in the right direction.
And so the banners and fireworks of this birthday party for the city, just the type of civic ceremony I had once dreaded, embodied a kind of propulsive civic energy that was self-fulfilling. Though the effect was beyond quantification, we all sensed that evening an advance in the psyche of our city, which would unlock further investment and growth to come. As I raised the glass and said, “South Bend is back,” the roar of the crowd at once reflected, certified, and caused it to be so.
3 A historically minded reader may note that South Bend must have existed in some official form prior to this date. It is true that the community went through more than one early form of incorporation, reaching back as early as 1835, but 1865 seems to be the consensus “official” foundation date because it was then that South Bend incorporated as a “second-class city” under Indiana law, taking its present form. Of course, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians had a presence here long before any European-style municipal administration at all.
9
A Plan, and Not Quite Enough Time