Watch Celebration for a King, a new documentary featuring symphonic music from composers of African descent and gospel music from local churches, presented by Dr. Marvin Curtis and the South Bend Symphony Orchestra.
Read MoreThis Sunday, Marvin Curtis and the South Bend Symphony Orchestra will present a new television special called Celebration for a King. The film is the company’s second released on Juneteenth, following last year’s A Juneteenth Celebration.
Read MoreSeventy-five years after professional baseball's integration, few are familiar with the pivotal moment in this story that played out here at South Bend’s Oliver Hotel. Eddie Jurkovic tells the story.
Read MoreSouth Bend lost 50,000 people in 50 years and lived to tell the story. Today, we’re a city of 100,000 people, including many who chose to stay and new immigrants who moved here. How?
Read MorePopulation decline is the root cause of many problems facing South Bend today. It’s about time we understand the real cost of this fabled decline.
Read MoreToday, tens of thousands of people work in South Bend and enjoy her amenities, but deliberately live just outside the city limits. Why? In the early nineties, the city and her suburbs fought a war over this question.
Read MoreIn October of 1985, the South Bend Tribune editorial board published a glorious tribute to autumn in the American Midwest. We submit it to you today, the first day of autumn, as encouragement during this otherwise troubling year.
Read MoreEveryone has their own story about why South Bend’s population declined, the most common being a lack of jobs. But the problem is not that South Bend lacks good-paying jobs—the problem is that its residents do not hold them.
Read MoreIf you lived in South Bend during the 90s, it was easy to think that the city’s collapse had come and gone decades ago. But this was not true. In the year 2000, the worst was yet to come.
Read MoreWe’re told that South Bend was doomed to decline when Studebaker closed its doors—but is that the whole story? Not at all.
Read MoreOver a 50 year period, South Bend lost a quarter of its population while the country’s population rose by over 40%. How? Every neighborhood in the city lost people.
Read MoreIntroducing an article and podcast series by Joe Molnar that will explore the process of how South Bend, which had grown for nearly its entire 120-year existence up to 1960, began a half century of decline.
Read MoreA list of stories curated by Belt Magazine editor Ryan Schnurr on the long history of racism and police violence in the Midwest—and what to do about it.
Read MoreOn July 25, 1945, the South Bend Tribune broke the news of a new freight terminal to be built on former Oliver Corporation land, citing it as the “first hint of an industrial building boom in South Bend.” The terminal still stands today—empty.
Read MoreLast week my dad purchased a weather-worn 1952 Studebaker 2R-series truck with a plan to rebuild it from the ground up. This is the first in a series of posts documenting the process.
Read MoreWilson Brothers Shirt Factory is a 133-year old, half-demolished complex on Sample Street in South Bend. We reflect on life surrounded by crumbling infrastructure and share photographs of the factory as it stands today.
Read MoreToday, The United States of Anxiety podcast released a new episode titled, “A Secret Meeting in South Bend,” in which host Kai Wright and reporter Jenny Casas tell the story of Better Homes of South Bend and discuss what it says about inequity in black homeownership now.
Read MoreOn the first weekend of May, thirteen friends traveled to Culver, Indiana to spend three days in the Clemens Vonnegut Jr. House, a 130-year-old summer cottage that has become emblematic of a community’s fight for its soul.
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