An Elegy for South Bend

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Devon, PA.  Some years ago, early in my graduate student days in South Bend, I was invited to begin an opinion column in the campus newspaper, The Observer.  The invitation came from one Peter Wicks, who had been publishing his regular An Englishman Abroad in that same paper for the previous couple years.  Initially taking up the invitation, I conceived a regular column called American without a Passport, and scribbled an introductory one, provisionally titled “South Bend Redux”; I sent it off to the paper’s editors, but the file was lost and I forgot all about it.

Three or so years later, while a Sorin Fellow at Notre Dame, I briefly did write a regular column for The Observer, called The Treasonous Clerk, which was intended to offer some glimpse of Catholic intellectual life to undergraduates who witness that strange phenomenon rarely enough on their campus.  And, of course, after a hiatus, I restarted the Clerk as a regular feature on ISI’s First Principles  journal.

A recent visit to my adopted hometown put me in mind of that long lost “dummy” column.  I think a city home once to Studebaker and now, perversely, to Humvee; a city best known in consequence of its proximity to Notre Dame, and yet which has existed for generations in odd Klan-initiated tension with her; a city so at the heart of our country that it now suffers at the heart of our depression; a city, finally, whose humble grandeur has dwindled each year precisely as a result of the United States’ flight to wealth and comfort, and who will suffer more now that that flight has been revealed as deceptive like a ponzi scheme, and insubstantial like the idea of “credit”-such a city deserves an elegy, if not a eulogy.  Perhaps the reader will excuse the much delayed appearance of the one edition of American without a Passport as my small effort at such a work:

 

When I tell my few friends and many colleagues that I like South Bend, they usually assume I am joking.  When I say as much to the many people I know who actually grew up here, they grimace and find some expletive way to express that they do not concur.  But I wish to submit here and now to that infallible jury of truth, the reading public, that South Bend is a nice place to live.

Rather, I would argue that South Bend is just like every other city in the United States, only more so.  Perhaps that makes it not-so-nice, but it remains no less typical for all that.

For example, South Bend has been in a state of economic contraction for much of the last quarter century.  The steel industry became extinct here about two years ago.  That makes South Bend an exemplary American city.  After all, now that the Bush administration has removed the tariff on steel under pressure from the E.U. (violating the policy of, among others, the Reagan Administration), very few remnants of that industry will survive in the U.S. as a whole.  We are destined to become a service economy where the working class consists no longer of blue-collar laborers in manufacturing and farmers in agriculture, but of uniformed masses in the various service industries.  They will tend deep-fat-fryers, make change, and experience the freedom and satisfaction that the job security of fast food franchises alone can provide.  South Bend is simply ahead of its time.

Before proceeding, I should caveat this last paragraph.  First, farmers could never be properly included among the working class because they often owned property, including the means of making their own living.  Only in an age where substantial and productive labor is thought to be inessential, an impediment to worldly “success,” could the life of agriculture be looked on as restrictive and humbling after the fashion of a worker in a factory.

Second, most such farmers are long gone from the U.S. anyway.  Especially in the Midwest – surprisingly enough – where massive corporate farms have taken over from the family farm at a greater rate than elsewhere in the country.

Third, my intention here is not to insult fast food employees.  Rather, laborers in the manufacturing industry, such as steel, may have been effectively “wage slaves,” to use an old and applicable Bellocian term, but one could at least raise a family and own a house on those wages.  In South Bend, there is ample nostalgia for the days of Studebaker, because job security and the dignity of a fair wage seemed possible then.  Many of the grand old houses that line the main avenues of South Bend were built off the wages of auto labor.

But fast food employees can look forward to neither the reasonable security nor the minimal dignity of manufacturing work.  What the Burger King and MacDonalds corporations can look forward to, on the other hand, is a surging stream of heads-of-households to flood their omnipresent constellation of restaurants, seeking for work in the absence of any alternative.  Just because the manufacturing industry has gone south and, now, east, doesn’t mean the working class will disappear or gleefully join the already disintegrating American electronics industry in the bullpens of phone support . . . those jobs, of course, are emigrating too.

All this said, I offer a few less depressing reasons to love South Bend.

Most persons will have noticed by now that the downtown area is filled with excellent, if often derelict, architecture.  Less obvious to the eye, the development of suburban sprawl or sprawl in general, in this area, is a comparatively recent phenomenon.  South Bend’s population is fairly centralized.  If the mayor could find a bull dozer big enough and drive it over to Mishawaka to take out the University Place Mall, he might inspire a sudden and wise relocation of some of those businesses into the downtown area.

This last fantasy probably won’t happen of course.  Neither the bull dozer nor the relocation.  The development of Granger and other ostensible suburbs just off the toll road north-east of the city has perhaps foreclosed on any remarkable urban revitalization in South Bend proper.  But let me offer both a warning and an inducement.

First the warning.  Let it be known that Mishawaka’s borders contain one of the largest concentrations of rental units and apartment complexes in the Midwest – the largest of any city or town in Indiana.  The lack of any large, growth industry, of course, prevents many long-time local residents from purchasing their own home.  Many are constrained to rent, just as they are without option but to work in the service industry.

Significantly, however, many of these complexes cater to white collar, or at least wealthier, residents.  They do not come cheap to rent.  Many cost considerably more than would a mortgage on a large home in most of South Bend.  But young professionals, native and imported, get one good look at that cramped, congested ramp-to-perdition called Grape Road.  They see the shopping complexes erected haphazardly with no sense of design, or intimation of affection, or desire for longevity, and know that their tenure here must not last long.  Many of these apartment complexes, then, cater to the young and hopeful who look forward to a prosperous future far-the-hell-away from here.  A more centralized business district in downtown South Bend would surely keep the best of them around.  It might even offset the curse South Bend, like so many desperate town, brought upon itself by building a convention center called “The Century Center.”  One may be reasonably sure that, when a building or monument tries to remind us of the future rather than the past, it is the former which has become most doubtful.

More pleasantly: as I walk by St. Patrick’s Church; as I pass the toppling immanence of the old Studebaker mansion; as I stare at the Civil War memorial and City Hall on my way to watch Payton Manning at BW-3s; or as I stare from the river-walk on that mysteriously tenacious fallen tree in the middle of the St. Joseph, defying by inertia even the vulgar orange scrap-metal sculpture towering above it that bespeaks its own obsolescence, I know there are aspects of South Bend that were created for, and are deserving of, permanence and admiration.  It is my honor to live among them.

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James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty. Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, and The American Conservative. He has published five books, including most recently, a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). Raised in the Great Lakes State, baptised in the parish of St. Thomas Aquinas, seasoned by summers on Lake Wawasee (Indiana), and educated under the Golden Dome, Wilson is scion of a family of Hoosiers dating back to the early nineteenth century, and an offspring of Southside Chicago Poles whose tavern kept the city wet through the Depression (and prohibition) years.  He now lives under the same sentence of reluctant exile as many another native son of the Midwest, but has dug himself in for good on the margins of the Main Line in Pennsylvania with his beautiful wife, dangerous daughter, and saintly sons. For information on Wilson's scholarship and a selection of his published work, click here. See books written and recommended by James Matthew Wilson.

8 COMMENTS

  1. Thank. You.

    Oh, how I miss that peculiarly lovable city. And Wicks is a good man.

    It is mildly reassuring to see New Urbanist-y development coming to Notre Dame Ave., the old “Professors Row,” again, and I’m even slightly hopeful about all of the “college town” development occuring to the southeast of campus, although what I’ve heard — that is, that it won’t be all too local in flavor, and that the mixed-use won’t be as intense (or open to students?) as had been planned. Nonetheless, I do have the slightest bit of hope, although the closing of the Mishawaka Brewing Company certain can portend only bad things — at least more bad before good. At least Fiddler’s remains — and LaSalle Grille. The Morris draws some good performances, too: I’ve seen some Dvorak there, as well as Morrissey, in all his 2000s glory.

    I’ll be the first one to take bulldozing training if someone approves the destruction of UP Mall and Grape Road. I’m none too fond of Meijer, either, and only tolerant of Martin’s, for lack of other options. (My “neighborhood” Martin’s my dupa!)

  2. As an incoming grad student at ND, this piece managed to evoke an entirely premature nostalgia for a place at I haven’t even lived in yet. So, jumping off of Nathan’s comment, are there particular districts in SB that offer signs of urban renewal (anti-Mishawakas, perhaps)?

  3. Davey, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve spent more than a day in South Bend at a time, or have really explored the city. That said, my recollection is that there’s little real renewal going on other than in the areas I mentioned along Notre Dame Avenue (immediately south of campus) and to the east of ND Ave/Southeast of campus, where the “college town” development is occurring. What sort of housing you’ll find that’s worthwhile about there is hard to say — most of the new homes are single-family, and I’m not sure how much new rental property, in house or apartment form, is available. Most students who live off-campus, in houses, go south of campus, but usually a bit farther from campus, and, thus, sometimes a bit sketchier. Prof. Wilson has been in the city more recently than I, so perhaps he can offer more insight.

    By the bye, what will you be studying at my beloved alma mater?

  4. I should have allowed myself to muse further. In downtown South Bend, especially in a couple buildings that used to be the guest and servants’ quarters of the Studebaker mansion, there is a wonderful ghetto of graduate students. The last paragraph of my piece actually catalogs what I routinely saw as I walked from my apartment through the downtown (usually to watch football or baseball at BW-3s). It is not just self-flattery when I say that the best students in Notre Dame’s graduate school all either lived in that small area, or frequented it, and since I was just there last week, I can suggest that this is still the case.

    It was in such easy walking distance to the heart of downtown, that I used to stroll on to Fiddlers, or the Oyster Bar, whenever I finished studying; the latter, of course, primarily to shoot. There are some dangerous parts to that town, and I imagine things could get worse, but I nonetheless recommend settling in the downtown area — at least if someone can guide you directly to the good parts.

  5. Thanks for the advice, Nathan. As a native Chicagoan, I have to confess that I always used “South Bend” as a byword for, well… you know. No need to belabor the point. But I’m very prepared to have my prejudice shaken off.

    And to answer your question: I’ll be entering the MTS program (theology) this fall.

  6. Oh, for the days of Scott St when we could all yodel from our minarets to each other. How could we leave those glorious mainstays, Elthan and Mello Place, for the drudgeries of big city living? Hear, hear, James!

  7. Oh , yes, the buildings tell me they miss you all too, the other james H. is stil in # 3, and Drew is still across the street in # 3. The buildings have new blood and some wonderful mix of course the very best people in South Bend still live at Elthan Place and Mello Place . Miss you all!

  8. Joans red coach after all these years have left Elthan Place in the spring to another home in Washington (they loved it). A Brewpup is emerging in downtown South Bend IN, and yes it is the works of an Elthan Place Resident who likes to make things happen for the community.Should read about it in South Bend Tribune Dec 9th,2012.

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