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  Why do I not recall talking to classmates about the acres of collapsing Studebaker factories we would pass on the way to school along Michigan Street? If I had grown up somewhere else and arrived to see this, I would have noticed little else. I don’t think it was taboo to speak of it. It was just unremarkable, since we’d grown up in its midst. We were used to it, it was part of the furniture.

  Yet somehow none of this made it feel like a bad place for a child to grow up. The collapsing structures had their place in the larger texture of our neighborhoods, which also included well-kept parks and decent houses with lawns and hedges and flowers. We didn’t think of the empty factories as the scenery of a post-industrial bust town in the 1980s. We didn’t think of them at all. They were just there, a visual set, accompanied by the soundtrack of life in South Bend: crickets in the summer, crows in the fall, and all year long the echoing horns of trains rumbling through in the night on their way to Chicagoland.

  AND IF THERE WAS RUIN in some corners of the city, there was majesty in others. There was the gleaming Golden Dome of the University of Notre Dame, the library with the mosaic mural of “Touchdown Jesus” overlooking the stadium, and the stadium itself, the “House that [Knute] Rockne Built,” which I vaguely understood to be a historic and hallowed place even before I understood what football was and what it meant around here. Its orange bricks, colored a little differently than most of the rest of campus, signaled something important. Fidgeting with my seat belt on days when Mom or Dad brought me along to campus, I could turn and gaze up at the mysterious structure, try to fathom the bizarre geometry of the underside of the concrete risers (“Dad, why is there an upside-down stairway?”), and sense that this place, neither civic nor religious, was somehow both.

  Growing up in any place with a lost golden age, you absorb its legacy in fragments, hearing once-great names—Oliver, Morris, Bendix, Studebaker—without being able to match them to anything living. You take them in at first without comprehension, like the names of saints. Only as you grow older, with more education and context, do you begin to picture how such giants of industry must have thrown their weight around their city, and what it might have been like as our factory precincts heaved with tens of thousands of workers at a time.

  A century ago, city boosters burst with pride as they celebrated and marketed South Bend. A 1901 book published by the South Bend Tribune begins:

  South Bend! No inland city on the American continent has attained greater renown or displayed more fully those sterling virtues of modern manhood and human progress, than this beautiful city located on the banks of the magnificent and picturesque St. Joseph River.

  A bit more factually, a 1919 Pictorial Souvenir of South Bend made a series of impressive assertions:

  It is, of course, generally known that Studebaker’s plant is the largest vehicle factory in the world and that the Oliver Plow Company is the largest plow factory in the world, but it is not generally realized how many more of the city’s establishments are among the largest of their kind.

  It goes on to document the fact that the Folding Paper Box Company had “the largest paper box factory in Indiana and one of the largest in the world,” and that the Birdsell Manufacturing Company housed the “largest makers of clover hullers in the world.” South Bend companies made brooms, cigars, spark arresters (whatever that is), gears, gloves, white ice, ice cream, mattresses, plows, stoves, rubber, shirts, tents, dowels, bicycles, and fishing tackle, among countless other products.

  And, famously, there were the pocket watches. The South Bend Watch Company made products so precise that at trade shows they would freeze a watch in a big block of ice where you could see it still ticking faithfully inside. An old advertisement has an image of the watch in the ice, but for me the most remarkable thing in the ad is something else that strikes you as you read its big letters:

  SOUTH BEND WATCH

  FROZEN IN ICE, KEEPS PERFECT TIME

  SOUTH BEND WATCH CO.

  SOUTH BEND, IND.

  How powerful the very name of our city must have been. All you had to do to sell watches—besides put one in a block of ice—was name them after our city. That was enough, by way of branding: the name “South Bend” was a byword for workmanship and precision.

  I’m proud to own a couple, one of them a 1909 model, which still keeps pretty good time if you wind it up. The company made over a million watches, but failed to realize how much was at stake when rivals began marketing the “trench watch,” a World War I innovation that put watches on leather straps on men’s wrists. The company lumbered along as though nothing had changed, producing some of the best-known pocket watches of the early wristwatch age. Their failure to innovate was fatal; the firm did not survive the Crash of 1929.

  The easy lesson to draw from this is that you must innovate to survive. But you could find a more nuanced moral of the story: that keeping up doesn’t always mean making something completely new. To survive, South Bend Watch wouldn’t have needed to start making radios or computers. They just needed to adapt a good thing they already had, and refine their business. If they, and Studebaker, and some other companies, had managed to do this, I might have grown up in a different South Bend.

  DOWN MICHIGAN STREET, just south of the Studebaker factory district, sits the United Auto Workers Local 5 hall, home to what was once America’s largest auto union local. Like many auto workers’ halls, it has a stage for speaking, with an American flag, a portrait of Walter Reuther on the wall, and a big UAW logo painted as a backdrop matching the smaller one affixed to the podium. But unlike any other local union hall I’ve seen, its concrete-block walls on either side are covered with murals depicting the union’s story, including Studebaker’s fall as seen from the perspective of the workers. One section shows workers making an uncertain departure from the factory grounds on the day that their jobs, and thousands of others, came to a sudden end.

  Old-timers on the West Side can tell you what it was like on that gray December day in 1963, just weeks after the Kennedy assassination, when news got out that the company was about to shut down. Jack Colwell, who covers me to this day in his South Bend Tribune columns, was the bearer of doom in a story he broke as a cub reporter, under the headline: “AUTO OUTPUT TO END HERE.”

  Jack, who also teaches at Notre Dame and writes a weekly column on politics, is gentle and disarming, never breaking his smile as he toggles his gaze, now looking down at his notepad full of orderly script, now back up at you through his glasses as he listens intently. Like Mark Peterson, another experienced local reporter, he has a way of looking at you as if you are about to say something very interesting and important, which of course makes you want to oblige, rather than stick to your talking points.

  Maybe that’s how Jack got the scoop, a day before Studebaker planned to make the announcement from a safe remove in New York City. It was probably the biggest local story ever, but South Bend was not ready to hear it. Jack wrote later that some workers “were hostile toward carriers delivering that paper, that news, at shift end to Gate 1 on Sample Street,” with one repeatedly yelling, “It’s not official yet!”

  Social science research hadn’t yet confirmed that sudden job loss can be the psychological equivalent of losing a loved one, but everyone must have sensed the depth of harm this news would bring as thousands of jobs were wiped out in a matter of days. Some were defiant about the city’s future, like Paul Gilbert, the clothing store owner, who told a gathering of civic leaders: “This is not Studebaker, Indiana. This is South Bend, Indiana.” But there was no escaping the fact that we had become a company town without its company.

  The decline was not instantaneous, but 1963 was like a fulcrum. There was Before, and there was After.

  It is difficult for someone born twenty years later to truly picture Before, but you can see it in the bustle of our downtown on the old postcards. You can sense it in the grandeur of the big stone houses—castles, almost—that the local titans of industry built to live in.
In old photos, you can sense that the South Bend Tribune was justified in describing the Oliver Hotel as “the best and most magnificent in Indiana” when it opened in 1899, complete with frescoes in the lobby and steam baths downstairs.

  Nor were South Bend’s charms just for the wealthy. Bob Urbanski was the son of a butcher in a big Polish family, like so many others on the West Side. He was clearly bright, yet he had been struggling to follow lessons in class, and his seventh-grade teacher realized it had something to do with his eyesight. “He moved me to the front of the class and asked some questions and met my father one day after school and talked to him,” Bob remembered. It turned out Bob needed glasses. So his father took him to the eye doctor downtown, where he was examined and got his first prescription. He remembers emerging and seeing the splendor of the downtown for the first time: “And I walked outside and I looked to the north down Michigan Street and I was just awed. The lights weren’t just a blur. It was like someone took a camera lens and . . . they were crisp, you could see the sign for Osco’s and Spiro’s and Milady Shop and Robertson’s and Wyman’s Department Store, all this stuff that was down there.”

  What young Bob saw was a dense cluster of clothing, furniture, and department stores that transacted the arrival of the modern American middle class. The avenue was packed, and on Mondays and Thursdays the shops would stay open into evening. As in the department store scene of A Christmas Story, it was a special occasion for kids to accompany their parents downtown to shop, “typically before Easter, or a new suit for a Communion, that sort of thing.” Then they would return home to a West Side bustling with families moving among neighborhood groceries, churches, and taverns, as the aroma of half a dozen Eastern European countries’ cuisines wafted into the city air.

  At Christmas, fish head soup would be served, and, of course, there would be pierogies. Bob’s grandma would make a hundred of them at a time, rolling the dough on a table, putting the cheese on them, folding them by hand. The kids would eat them right out of the boiling pot. “But my grandpa would take it, slit the thing, put butter in each one, then pour cream over it.”

  That was reserved for special occasions. But when bread could be truly fresh it could be a treat any day, so much that some days Bob’s father literally couldn’t wait to get the bread home from the Hungarian bakery. He would bring a quarter stick of butter from home with him when he went to pick up the boys from school downtown. If they saw the butter in the front seat, they knew they were going to the bakery, just in time for the hot bread to come out of the oven at three o’clock. “We’d go over there and get a loaf of it, and it wasn’t sliced, we’d get to the car and tear it, and he had his pocketknife and he’d chop up butter and put it on if you wanted it.” The day he died, Bob’s father was making a pot of czernina, a Polish duck blood soup, stirring in the potato dumplings.

  Children were raised not just by parents, but by neighborhoods. Gladys Muhammad, about the same age as Bob, remembers the LaSalle Park neighborhood: “You could go anywhere, next door anywhere, and eat, they’d just invite you in and eat, and if you did anything wrong, the neighbors would tell on you. . . . So everybody was real disciplined.” Gladys went to Washington High School, which was racially integrated—but the neighborhoods were not. Red-lining hemmed in African-Americans like her to the LaSalle Park area colloquially known as “the Lake,” after the pond at the bottom of the sledding hill there. Walking to school, Gladys would have to cross the railroad tracks, sometimes clambering through an open boxcar to get there. African-American residents couldn’t live south of the tracks, though they were more than welcome to work, as her father did, alongside the Polish and Hungarian and Irish men on the line at Studebaker.

  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.