New Life for the Tribune Printing Press Building
South Bend City Church plans to purchase and renovate the old Tribune printing press building at Lafayette and Lasalle. You probably know the building. It’s the blue triangle rooftop, whose constellation marks the northern edge of downtown. The building was constructed in 1994 – heralded, at the time, as ambitious and innovative. Its 182-foot-long and 53-foot-high press could crank out 70,000 copies in an hour. Within a decade of opening, however, the internet made the press’ abilities less relevant as readers increasingly consumed content online, and newspapers around the country began consolidating print operations to facilities based in larger cities – in our case, Grand Rapids. Like so many other spaces in our city, the building was vacated in 2017 and since then has sat—quiet and empty.
Now, it might get a new, if unconventional, chance at life. There is no shortage of legitimate questions for a church that’s considering the purchase of a printing press, much less one right downtown. I find myself unequivocally for the project, though, for reasons I’m still working to understand. At first, I figured this was largely driven by my participation in the congregation. That’s certainly a factor, but only somewhat related to the main one. Ever since I heard about the project, a tangle of emotions has been sitting on my mind, and it’s a feeling that I’ve felt before.
At 1:30 pm on January 15, 2016, I met up with a small group to begin a tour of the former Studebaker assembly plant. Our purpose was documentary: photographing the complex before its coming renovation and recording audio stories with a former plant electrician. I bought my first camera specifically for the occasion—a $300 hobby expense that felt superfluous and even foolish at the time.
We began at Union Station, walked under the viaduct on Lafayette, and wove our way from the basement to the rooftops of Buildings 84, 112, and 113, the whole time hearing stories of the buildings’ illustrious past, capturing photographs of its bleak present, and imagining its future.
I remember a lot from that day (the photographs help). More than the images though, I remember the sheer weight and complexity of my emotions as soon as the tour ended. I got in my truck and drove to Chicory Cafe. I sat alone, feeling a lot of things. Some sadness. Anxiety and enthusiasm, for sure. Doubt. Awe. I still have trouble finding the words. It’s strange the first time something means a lot, and walking through the inside of an empty building isn’t something you’d expect to have you crying in a coffee shop.
I was raised to think other things meant more. I was raised an evangelical in the American midwest and consider that a blessing for several reasons, not least being a conviction that our life holds some sort of cosmic significance and an inexplicable sense of the divine. Missing, though, in our expression of faith was a love for the physical matter of this world. At best, it was a peripheral, temporary concern, and at worst, a threatening sidetrack to faith. In the early, energetic days of my budding love for documentary photography around the city, I was often explicitly asked: “where is Jesus in this?”
I still hear that question at times, in my head and aloud, but increasingly my experiences have brought me to an answer that does not reject the tradition I grew up in, so much as expand its scope. I’m coming to realize that the transcendent faith of my youth must be matched by an immanent faith—a belief that the divine is here, in and among the things of our world.
I feel that to really participate in this tradition of my youth is to believe that matter matters. It deserves our energies for construction, preservation, and renewal. The bricks are not simply bricks. They hold some memory of our collective experience, of these humans that are all made in the image of the divine. These places and these people stir up a tangle of feelings in me that some might call sacramental, a way to experience the life the divine hopes for us by examining what we hope and build for ourselves.
There are a thousand hidden blessings amid a thousand more noticed curses in a city like South Bend. We’re daily confronted with a complex physical world of vacant lots, ornate theaters, abandoned factories and renovated factories, which seem to carry generations of hopes and fears and loss after loss. Maybe the concrete keeps the score.
These spaces are shaped by our past, and cannot help but shape our future. If we are serious at all about a community that is focused on more than mere survival, we should care about these places, these things, in the hope that they can help make us new without losing ourselves in the process. This is the promise of transcendent faith, that we can be made new. I’m continually surprised to find that a factory floor or a fresh perspective on the city can help us begin that process today.
So my life has become a string of love affairs with the raw materials of the world and the infrastructure we fashion out of them. I think I’d go so far as to call it a vocation. A church considering the purchase of a downtown printing press is unconventional, but our buildings deserve reverence, especially one that was constructed for such a noble task as printing the local newspaper. Churches don’t hold a monopoly on reverence, but I’m willing to bet on a congregation of people who see the city—its storefronts, parks and waterways, stories, trauma and dreams—as deeply relevant to their spiritual practice.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to keep my strange faith alongside readers of this blog, whose attention and intention for the city I cherish.
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To learn more about The Tribune Project, visit southbendcitychurch.com, or watch this short film that shares the story and vision:
