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Saint Casimir Parish
- Chapin Park - East Wayne Street - Edgewater Place -
- Howard Park - Lincolnway East - Muessel-Drewery Brewery -
- North Saint Joseph Street - River Bend - Riverside Drive -
- Saint Casimir Parish - Singer
Brothers Manufacturing Company -
- South Michigan Street - Taylor's Field - West North Shore Drive -
- West Washington -
The Saint
Casimir Parish National Register District, listed in 1996, is
bounded by West Sample Street, the Conrail Railroad tracks, and Arnold
Street.
The Saint Casimir Parish Historic District, surrounded by railroads and
present and former factories [mostly cleared for redevelopment except
the Oliver Chilled Plow Boiler House; now Rose Brick], lies in the heart
of South Bend's traditionally industrial southwest side. A working-class
residential neighborhood from its beginnings in the 1870s, the
neighborhood has only a few distinctive buildings other than its two
churches, but as a whole the area is remarkably intact and visually and
architecturally cohesive.
Most of the streets east of Harris (formerly Wilson within the district;
the name changed in the early twentieth century) are still paved with
brick; there are none west of Harris. Most of the western part of the
district, originally more low-lying and swampy in spots, was platted
later than the eastern part, the bulk in two segmnets: the Gorsuch
Addition around Pulaski and Kosciuszko in 1890, and in 1901, the Taylor
Addition adjacent to the west around Jackson and Brookfield. Smaller
additions was platted in the next few years. The area east of Harris --
or more correctly, east of the alley west of Harris -- had been
completely subdivided by 1896, about two-thirds of it in the 1870s. Some
of the buildings constructed around the turn of the century and later in
this part of the district replaced older dwellings from the 1870s and
80s, such as the tavern built in 1905 at 1201 Dunham.
The district is named for its parish church, Saint Casimir, at the
southwest corner of Webster and Dunham. The present church was
constructed in 1924-25 to replace the first, still extant, completed in
1899 as a combination church and school on the northwest corner of
Fisher and Webster. Altered somewhat (its towers were lopped off and
false gables [were] added), the Romanesque Revival building presently
houses a Head Start Program(1996) and space for community activities.
Immediately to the north, the present Saint Casimir Church was designed
by the Chicago architecture firm of Wortherman and Steinbach. The
imposing structure displays considerable Romanesque Revival influence
but features a soaring Italian Renaissance dome-topped campinile at its
northeast corner, bedecked wit hfour large statues of angels. The church
boasts a large rose window surrounded with glazed tile above its
round-arched entrance portal roofed with curved tile. The rectory, built
in 1901-1902, lies to the west at 1316 Dunham. Of birck and relatively
unadorned despite some obvious Queen Anne influence, the substantial
dwelling has a steeply pitched hipped roof and a wraparound procj on the
north and east...
About four blocks to the southwest at 1601 Sample Street is Saint Mary
of the Holy Roasary Polish National Church, whose construction began in
1915, about a year after the church was chartered. Exhibiting both
Romanesque and Gothic influences, the one-story brich church is
dominated by a two-and-a-half story square entrance tower topped by a
bellcast pyrimidal roof...
The Saint Casimir's Parish Historic District is significant under
Criterion A, as it is strongly associated with the three dominant
industries in South Bend: the once adjacent Oliver Chilled Plow Works to
the east, Studebaker only a few blocks beyond, and Singer, just to the
northwest across the railroad tracks. Its chief area of significance is
its ethnic heritage: the district embodies the development and growth --
and later, the decline -- of a Polish workingclass neighborhood and
parish. Even today [1996] it is visually representative of a typical
turn-of-the-century ethnic workingclass neighborhood. Here, too,
significant events in regional religious history took place in 1914, the
so-called Bloody Sunday riot at Saint Casimir's Church and the
near-simultaneous founding in the neighorhood of South Bend's first and
only Polish National Catholic Church, Saint Mary of the Holy Rosary.
-- Excerpts from the Saint Casimir Parish Historic
District National Register Nomination Form, 1996
By Glory-June Grieff, Consulting Historian |
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