CERTAIN DAYS OF THE WEEK, you can still get pierogies, cabbage-or cheese-filled, at Joe’s Tavern on the Near West Side, one of those neighborhood watering holes nestled between houses to one side and an industrial site across the street. But on your way there, you will pass by the hulking mass of the biggest factories we haven’t torn down yet. Deeper into the neighborhood you will see the vacant lots where cozy homes used to host the family gatherings that Bob and Gladys remember from their childhoods. You will sense the slow decline that followed that pivotal December day.
It’s our version of a story that played out, in some fashion, across the American Midwest. We’ve lost over thirty thousand people since the 1960s, the population falling to about a hundred thousand while our per capita personal income sank by 2010 to $18,805, half the national average. In parallel with a general out-migration from the region, to Chicago or beyond, a local realignment gradually emptied the urban core. By the time I was born, shops and residents had started to flow from the heart of the city. You no longer went to get your first Communion suit from Gilbert’s or Robertson’s downtown anymore, you went instead to J. C. Penney at the mall in nearby Mishawaka. You no longer headed for the Hungarian bakery, you went to a new location that Martin’s had strategically positioned on the road that leads out of downtown toward the mall and the new subdivisions. Swiftly and inexorably, the cornfields and wetlands that ringed the outer limits of our metro area were marked for development and transformed into suburban plazas of chain stores and office parks, great angular islands in a sea of parking lots.
Even my elementary school, square and carpeted wall-to-wall, was located in an office park. By the time I sat in its airy second-grade classroom in 1990, the big family name in town had nothing to do with manufacturing. Now it was real estate, and the Cressy family had become prominent after Don Cressy put a big shopping mall northeast of town, on the other side of Notre Dame and outside the South Bend city limits. University Park Mall was not that close to the university, nor was there a park nearby, but by the time I was growing up here it had become the epicenter of our social and commercial life. Its popularity led to more retail and residential subdivisions around it, a big-box frontier of development pressing northward one cornfield at a time, almost all the way to Michigan.
I liked our house in the city, but envied the high ceilings, generous rec rooms, and huge sloping lawns of the well-off people I knew from school who populated these newer subdivisions. We were doing fine, but to a professor’s kid, the doctors and lawyers seemed extravagantly wealthy. Most of them lived in Granger, a sprawling and unincorporated zone of spacious houses on winding streets with names like Clarendon Hills Drive and Hunting Ridge Trail that signaled affluence and a certain upper-middle-class taste. The most abundant animal species there is surely the Canadian goose, but you wouldn’t know it from the street names. Within a square mile or two you can find Fox Pointe Lane, Foxcross Drive, Foxdale Lane, Fox Chase Court, Red Fox Drive, Fox Trail, and so on, right on up to the state line.
South Bend proper was a different domain, filled with older East European West-Siders who kept pristine lawns in front of their small ranch houses, black families (unless they could afford the leap to Granger) mostly clustered in the Near Northwest and Far West Side, and the public servant class of cops and schoolteachers who would tend to avoid a neighborhood that didn’t have sidewalks. And there was the occasional professor who eschewed suburban life for the charm of a historic house, or couldn’t afford otherwise on a junior faculty salary, or just hadn’t come under the sway of the Realtors then nudging people out to the suburbs as they scoped out options while moving in from around Dartmouth or Palo Alto. That’s how my parents found the house on College Street that my mother spotted and swiftly purchased on a quick scouting trip from El Paso. As a child I had no idea that “West Side” would come to be considered “dangerous” by the denizens of Granger, and some in the city, too.
Later we moved to a brick house on Marquette Avenue, down the hill from St. Joseph High and therefore a convenient place for me to have friends over after school. It came back to me later that some parents hesitated to let their children come to our house, because it was “in the city.” (If there was a racial layer to that phrase, I was too young to catch it.) In fact it was a perfectly safe neighborhood, full of kids and dogs, with families who went back for decades keeping an eye out for each other.
The houses were close together, about thirty to a block, under a leafy layer of treetops that shaded us in the summer, painted the neighborhood in fall, and left creaking branches for the wind to howl through in wintertime. When it was too cold to do much outside, I passed after-school afternoons in a finished room in the basement with my friends, growing pudgy on store-brand cola and popcorn as we took in Star Trek reruns or Bulls games, or bled off excess energy wrestling until a parent would come down to see what the ruckus was.
Our neighborhood was called, a bit grandly, the “North Shore Triangle,” because it is bordered by the fast-flowing run of the St. Joseph River as it runs northwest at an angle, with the curving Angela Boulevard on the north and the busier, four-lane Michigan Street to the east. As the land inches down toward the river, the property values slope upward, forming a tidy triangular slice of the middle class about six blocks across. In the middle of that triangle is Nokomis Park, better known as Triangle Park, the general headquarters of my boyhood. The park didn’t have or need any playground equipment or water features, just trees, a metal trash barrel, and an irregularly placed streetlight in the middle. Its simplicity made it perfect for me and my friends Joe and Ben—an adaptable field suitable for baseball, football, and battle. If it felt like time for an adventure, we could cross Angela and venture along the old coal line toward Saint Mary’s College, veering off into the woods that led to a bluff over the river. You could get close to the water if you carefully maneuvered down the slope, but if you weren’t careful a patch of clay would take your leg all the way up to the knee. You could get your leg back, with help from friends pulling mightily, but your shoe would be gone forever.
IT’S STILL A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD, but it’s rare for a house to be worth what it cost to build. Today the most expensive houses in the neighborhood, big ones on the river, can run as much as $300,000. The cheapest, one-story houses with vinyl siding and attached garages can be had for around $60,000. Chasten and I now live on the same block as Mom and Dad, and the mortgage payment on our large old house facing the river comes to about four hundred and fifty bucks.
About two miles up the hill gleams the gold leaf of the Golden Dome. Those who have never visited may know little else about us than that we host the university, along with Saint Mary’s and Holy Cross College across the street. Yet Notre Dame rose to real prominence only after our industrial fame had collapsed, and campus and community lived mostly separate lives for most of our history.
Still, if South Bend was never exactly a college town, we have long been a football town. I can still remember the first time, not yet five, when I witnessed tailgate country. Most of the accoutrements of tailgating are useless to a small child, which is probably why I have no memory of beer cans or chicken wings. But I do clearly recall a cake in the shape of a football, a cacophony of radios and gadgets playing the Notre Dame fight song, and everyone dressed in blue, gold, and green. Tailgating made no sense to me then, but I understood what a party was, and this looked like the biggest birthday party I had ever seen. Bundled up in my winter coat and accompanying my parents on a game-day walk around campus, I asked them what the big party was for. Matter-of-factly and in unison, they answered: “The game.”