Eight Years on Tutt Street

Upstairs at Vested Interest, South Bend ~ 2025

This month marks eight years of me showing up at Vested Interest every day to work in “the studio.” In that time the words the studio have described three different rooms and a countless number of set‑ups, all somewhere inside this building—or, as a friend once put it, “seventeen structures hammered together in a tortured horseshoe.”

I love places, perhaps this one most of all. I once said, with a proper level of melodrama, that “my life has become a string of love affairs with the raw materials of the world and the infrastructure we fashion out of them.” On an average day, that love looks like the plain behavior of pulling the truck up, unlocking the door, making coffee, and getting to work. But every once in a while the routine cracks open and I become aware of my affection for and attention toward this place—amid what’s become mundane, I feel the love again.

One summer evening two years ago I was sitting on the curb on Tutt Street when the scene went symphonic. I started naming it out loud: long grass growing in the vacant lot by the tracks; a train rolling through; the sun shining straight down the street, washing the big tree, the old garage, the telephone poles, and our faces in sideways light and casting long shadows behind it all. The south-facing windows of Studebaker’s old assembly plant blazing through the gaps where other buildings once stood. The old church and the new church. Downtown in the distance. Ivy along the top of the fence. Birds perched on the wires.

When I stopped, a friend said, “I wish I’d recorded that.”

“I’ll say it again someday,” I said. “I wait all year for this scene. Only in summer evenings does the sun come around the north face of the building and shine down the street like this.”

And as the words came out, I surprised myself. These years of being here—working at my desk, sitting on the roof and curb, walking laps on the block—had quietly taught me the sun’s path well enough to know when it would fill the street.

Which is why I felt such a jolt a couple of months ago. We had just installed new windows in the empty room upstairs, but in my mind it was still just an old dark space. One evening I walked upstairs planning to lean out a window and photograph the aforementioned summer scene on Tutt Street, only to find the sunset slashing through the room, across the floor, and up the brick wall.

So I jumped down the stairs, grabbed my new 6×9 camera, a tripod, and ran back up to capture this photograph.

By most standards, this city, street, and address are unremarkable and too far off the beaten path to be worthwhile. But I’m eight years in and still in awe.