The Centuries Between Tutt and Sample
Vested Interest’s 70,000 square feet of space is comprised of what was formerly two addresses: 240 E Tutt, and 251 E Sample. These are their histories as recounted by those who know them and as documented in the South Bend Tribune.
IN THE BEGINNING, Tutt and Sample streets were earthen roads with pipes running down their middles like wands, conjuring water to Sibley & Ware Machinists, Boyd & Hanson Planing Mill, and the South Bend Boiler Works. Amidst these older establishments Stephenson Bros. Mfg. Co set themselves the stone foundation of a small factory at 240 E Tutt in 1894, the yellow brick kilned of Notre Dame clay to enlarge their wooden shop. The factory had steam heat, gas lights, a brick floor in the coal boiler room, and at that time no night watchman.
Aside from the underwear company, which they bought and operated on the East Bank of the St. Joseph River, the brothers built wooden pumps as the South Bend Pump Co., adding doweling and other turnings for furniture ornamentation before abandoning pumps altogether and changing the company name. When the century ended their complex on Tutt had a foundry, lumber shed, horse barn, and coal storage, “one of the largest concerns of its kind in the country.” By 1907 that first brick building was matched with another. Both still stand today.
Not all its workers lasted so long intact. In 1894 a piece of emery pierced Homer Lamb’s eyeball. In 1901 Bert Marble fell and dislocated his shoulder. John Catherman surrendered a finger that year too, and in 1909 Bernie Harbough demanded a settlement of $5000 for four fingers he lost to a pinsaw. Charles Thomas had it worse. In 1905 a pipe burst and Thomas fell in it when trying to escape the roiling room. He crawled out but was blinded by the steam, fell down the hole again, and was cooked to death. The funeral was closed casket.
Coffee Break: In the early 1920, employees of Stephenson Manufacturing Co. pose outside the lumber plant then located on Tutt Street, west of Columbia Street, in South Bend. Right of center, holding his hat, is Jacob Frank Schlemmer of South Bend, who originally owned the picture.
POSTAL WORKERS MOVE CHRISTMAS MAIL: South Bend postal employes work over a pile of Christmas gifts slated for local delivery at the new parcel post annex at 240 E. Tutt St., where all incoming packages are now routed. Left to right, foreground, are Gene T. Guzicki, Dean M. Frick and Edward M. Kowalski. Robert A: Sobiech is in the right background.
Stephenson Mfg. Co. had a good run, surviving the depression and fears that the raised track and loss of spur would force the factory to relocate. But it still went under in 1955. The firm put ads in the paper and sold off every possible portable asset, saws, lathes, motors, grinding wheels, and scales. During the Christmas rush that year the post office leased part of the factory as an annex for parcel sorting. In the end Joe Ziker bought the buildings.
For a short while Tutt Street heard just one word, plastics, one in which there seemed to be a great future. Patrick Hoppes had designed cars at Studebaker but left to start the Plastyle Company, which made boats and burial vaults from fiberglass for long enough on Tutt to hire an “attractive receptionist and secretary with personality and fitness for new office” and to test the strength of his vaults by driving over them with a 10,340 lb truck. The next year, Plastyle moved to Michigan. “The area is satisfactory as a business site,” said Hoppes. “But we have been given the brush off by local undertakers and cemeteries. We are shipping grave vaults as fast as we can make them to such places as Detroit and Seattle. But in South Bend we are dead ducks.”
The JNeil Sales Corp. made plastics for a year or two, long enough to be burgled for $6772 worth of checks. The South Bend Tupperware Distributors tried it for a time too, before their departure marked the end of the age of plastic on Tutt. By 1972 the public car auctions and rental car services had come and gone too. And Ziker’s Cleaners finally made full use of what they had owned since 1955.
In the early 1920s Joe Ziker, a Russian immigrant, had a shop called “Square Deal” on Michigan Ave. “Square Deal” went bankrupt in ’28, but Joe emerged from the creditors’ meetings with a new company with a new name—his own. He called himself the “$1 Cleaner” and kept prices low, too low for the mafia interests attacking cut-rate cleaners from Chicago to South Bend. In January 1929 he received a letter scribbled in pencil: “It would be much better for your health if you would raise your price to $1.50.” He refused. Later, his son Morton would tell disbelieving family that he had been briefly kidnapped as child in the mob’s efforts to strongarm his dad.
In 1938 Ziker’s Cleaners moved to 251 E Sample, where Joe’s brother Harry had operated a small grocer’s for nearly 15 years in a storefront below an apartment. Ziker’s built an addition to the storefront with fire-and moth-proof vaults, and an entire floor devoted to fur storage and cleaning.
Ziker employees fared better than Stephenson’s. Only Miss Lorraine Joachim hurt her back and legs falling down the stairs at 10:50 on March 28, 1946, and Mrs. Dorothy Dudley caught her hand in a steam press in 1956. Through the 1950s and 60s Ziker’s expanded the compound, demolishing the original storefront in ‘59 and adding additions in ‘60, 63, and 65 for new equipment. Those additions even caught the eye of American Drycleaners Trade Magazine and earned Ziker’s a runner-up on best design.
In 1978 Joe Ziker died, leaving the business to his sons Robert and Morton. The same year, Morton’s son David graduated from college in Bloomington and returned to work for his father. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Ziker compound again expanded to accommodate its burgeoning uniform cleaning business. The growing mishmash of structures on the site made deliberate expansion difficult, with old buildings needing holes drilled, pipes slotted, and complicated retrofittings to function. And for their last big expansion, in the early ‘90s, those retrofittings just wouldn’t work.
ZIKER CLEANERS BUILDS ADDITION: Construction is under way on a 2,000-square-foot addition to the plant of Ziker Cleaners & Launderers, 251. E. Sample St., to house additional laundry and dry-cleaning equipment. Ziker officials said they plan to spend $40,000, including the cost of new equipment, and increase their present employment of 55 by at least 10.
Right to the west of 251 E Sample was a junkyard. “There were these two old Italian guys who ran it,” says David. “They were both in one small building with a single lightbulb.” The junkyard was a mess worthy of the name, strewn with garbage, cars, toilets, and full of rats. “The bathroom of one our buildings used to face the junkyard. There was a guy who would feed the rats through the window. They were the size of porcupines,” says David. Then David got a call from a woman with whom he’d attended high school. Her uncles had owned the junkyard and had died leaving her in charge of the estate. Did Ziker’s want to buy the land? “It was like manna from heaven,” says David. In ‘94, Ziker’s opened 17,000 square feet of rat-free automated washing where the junkyard had been.
In 2017, Ziker’s left the compound for a new headquarters where their processes could be integrated with the layout of the buildings, just about the same time as David and his wife moved to Arizona. From afar David ran the cleaners and the Sample Street complex with Rami Sadek as Vested Interest for five years. They leased space to coffee roasters, solar panel manufacturers, piano tuners, fitness instructors, charities, videographers, artists, and some people who did no one knew what. The old Stephenson Bros. factory floor hosted the lyric opera, and ballroom dancing, but it was hard to run two businesses from afar. So this year he sold it to Jacob Titus, a photographer and longtime tenant, and Dominick Simeri, proprietor of Main Street’s Madison Oyster Bar, because he knew they’d be just as devoted to Vested Interest as he was.
Titus and Simeri call Vested Interest “the building.” But in reality “the building” is seventeen structures hammered together in a tortured horseshoe with its heels on Carroll St. and its branches bracketing a cracked asphalt courtyard behind a fenced barbed-wire gate which is never closed anymore. In the courtyard is a long narrow picnic table, a sun umbrella, and a small patch of artificial turf. At the back of the shoe the old Stephenson machine shop still has its curved window arches, door lintels, and escape ladders spidering the inner wall. Like those lintels, each of the seventeen buildings bears the marks of its birthyear. The newer are cavernous, steel-beamed, sheet-metaled, and cinder-blocked. The older have wide wooden floorboards and big exposed purlins timbering the ceilings. Automatic fire doors are still there throughout, heavy steel on sloping tracks rigged to release when heat burns through the restraining fuses. Where the floors have heaved the gaps are covered by carpets. The second level of the oldest has only just been re-opened, plywood punched from its windows and its floors slowly scraped of one century’s sediment. Single empty-socketed wires hang from the rafters, and through the gaping windows to the north railcars rumble thunderingly past hourly in daylight and twice as often in dark.
On the facades facing Tutt splashes of street water have slowly peeled the red paint from the yellow marl being shown one brick at a time. Just above this revelation, between the windows of the first and second stories, the original STEPHENSON stenciling also peers through the pigment. From the street it seems like the faded nameplate on a ship whose rusting corroded hull has run aground, now watching the surf on the sand below, hoping yet for a relaunch on the approaching tide.