There’s a time of the year when the crows show up. It’s the time of the year when the sun hangs low in the southern sky, and it’s the time of the year when, if you drive west on Tutt Street in the hour before the sunset—as I do daily—the space-age yet sadly-pragmatic fiberglass exterior of the southern face of Studebaker Building 84, the company’s old main assembly plant; burns.

I haven’t seen another building burn like this before. Orange, bright orange and yellow. If I stand up halfway from the chair at my corner tanker desk in the studio I can catch a glimpse, and know it’s time to go home, time to make dinner, time to meet someone at the Oyster Bar and drink a Jameson again.

Once about ten years ago, I was sitting at the bar at LangLab when it was still in the yellow room, probably drinking a Pabst (or “Blue Ribbon” as my Papa Dave introduced me to them), when the bartender, one Shahir Rizk, asked, out of nowhere: “Have you written about the crows yet?” “No,” I said. And then about six months ago, Eddie, on Twitter: “…have you?” “This winter,” I said.

For those wondering what the fuss: each winter, an ungodly murder of crows descends on downtown South Bend and wanders around the nearby neighborhoods. They congregate on the railroad outside of the studio and ascend—thousands at a time—as a train rolls through, they make barren trees appear as if they’ve grown black, winter leaves—just the other night, I was driving home south on Lafayette, crossing LaSalle, and there they were: lining the roof of the Scottish Rite and the Civic Theatre and the Burger King, each tree in sight, and filling the sky… flying in circles—if you live here, you know it’s no exaggeration to say that an average evening in the shadow of this situation feels otherworldly and cinematic, like Alfred Hitchcock himself has come through to film the sequel, and you also know that, amid the already bleak landscape of a cloudy and rust-laden city in its coldest months, the feeling is: beautiful and compelling and—so dark.

They beckon a sense of dread and loss, and yet fill my eyes with wonder. Like a six-story, eight-hundred-thousand square-foot factory—designed by America’s leading industrial architect at the time—which produced the country’s first new model after the War and the world-famed fastest-in-the-world Avanti—left abandoned, silent. Covered in ivy my whole childhood. The paper said Ivy Tower, we did too. We were optimistic, we had ideas, all of it undone, the fiberglass exterior there to show for it, and it’s—burning bright, beautiful against the winter sky.

Halle moved here last fall, and so when I’m driving home west on Tutt Street, I have someone to share it with: “Look! Look at that...” I’ll say every day, asking her to pay attention to this monument to our city’s greatest loss, an icon of its enduring pain, while it puts on a show, and the crows fly overhead.

Before South Bend, I had only ever lived in places that were swelling, at or just beyond critical mass. Cities on either coast where the narrative was always growth, always more, always urgent, with people arriving in droves every day with an idea, a dream, or a promise of knowing the next best thing. Competition first, community second. Before South Bend, I had never lived anywhere where the prevailing movement drifted outward instead of inward. 

Most notably, it is the first place where I have felt the presence of absence. Entire blocks feel paused. Storefronts wait and buildings seem like they’re holding their breath. The residue of a larger past is everywhere, along with the quiet weight left after an industry recedes.  To the untrained eye, it can read as loss. But if you stay with it – as I only recently learned to – the feeling shifts, and the gaps begin to look like warm invitations. 

BABY BAR was our response.

Its chosen location was an old loading garage on Tutt Street, lodged into the far northwest corner of Vested Interest. Like so many places in this area, the building had lived a dozen industrial lives before I ever set foot in it. It began as a turn-of-the-century factory, then later became part of Ziker’s Cleaners, and eventually stood quiet for years before being brought back into use. The garage itself had once been a loading bay, then a stalled storage room crowded with old pianos, broken furniture, and years of dust. It was heavy with history, but it still left enough room to imagine.

In other cities, a space like that would already be resolved, with its use decided before you ever stepped inside. Here, it remained unfinished. The garage on Tutt Street was still open to possibility.

The idea was never to open a business, but to test what it feels like to make a place on purpose. To use a structure that had already held many things and ask it to hold one more, and to see how a small city responds when you invite it to something intimate, simple, and fleeting.

On the night of BABY BAR, people arrived right on time. Some had heard about it online or from friends. Others wandered in because they saw light coming from a space that is usually dark. They entered through a half-open garage door, unassuming enough that you might miss it. The only hints were a set of block letters hanging from a bracket twenty feet in the air, spelling B-A-B-Y, and the flicker of a disco ball slipping out from under the door. Eventually, it was the crowd gathered outside, laughing and smoking, that told you you were in the right place.

Inside, the space had been transformed. We built the bar from scratch with lighting, seating, a bit of signage, and a soundtrack. Together, those elements gave the room a sense of collective discovery. The scale set the mood: small, close, reckless, and romantic. Because of state liquor limitations, we only had beer and wine to work with, so we embraced the constraint. Spritzes, highballs, and simple mixed drinks built from vermouths and amari – evidence that you do not need a full back bar to make a night feel generous.

What I love most about projects like this is watching a room change identity in real time. An old storage garage becomes an empty room, then a bar, and finally an experience once people step inside. The guests complete the place. What surprised me was how quickly it became a small experiment in how South Bend gathers, and a chance to watch people move through a space that did not exist the day before and discover what made them want to stay.

And they did stay. In true Midwestern form, they brushed shoulders, talked to strangers, and lingered longer than they planned. They focused on the people in front of them, on the group they arrived with: were their drinks full, did they have water, were they comfortable. Conversations turned toward what it feels like to be here now, toward corners of the city they love and the ones they wish someone would care for. Inside that garage, the city felt both bigger and cozier, more tightly knit in the best possible way.

That evening, I felt the particular creative energy that lives in a place like South Bend. It is slower and more personal than the pace of other cities, shaped by people who stayed, people who returned, and people who arrived without needing to prove anything. This kind of work is made possible because there is space: physical space, of course – you can still find a waiting garage or storefront or entire building – but also mental and emotional room. The stakes are lower. The pressure to impress is softer, and there’s a belief that what once made South Bend vibrant still exists today, ready for new forms.

With this care also comes a heightened sense of noticing. This city notices small changes. When something appears where there has been nothing for a long time, people pay attention. They ask about it later. They tell their friends. The next time they pass that garage, they see it differently. A place with many memories now holds one more.

BABY BAR showed me that South Bend has the appetite for small experiments and careful hospitality. Our pop-up is just one example – one evening inside one old structure. But it reminds me why I like being here. South Bend gives you room to try things. Room to care about atmosphere and gather people without pretending it needs to become anything larger. Sometimes the most interesting work comes from places that are not bursting at the seams. Sometimes it comes from the quiet city with the open door.

For this transplant, South Bend filled a space in my heart I didn’t know was open. That night, the city became a warm room in early October—a drink in my hand, a neighbor not yet met. I understand now that the blank spaces here are not empty, but waiting.

The George Cutter Company of South Bend was once the largest municipal street-light manufacturer in the United States. Their lamps lined cities across the country with warm light and cast ornamental detail. Beauty in the public way.

Our cities comprise countless bits of ordinary infrastructure that once carried the imprint of craft and shared imagination. Today, it is not so. Simon Sarris said this well in his essay That which is unique, breaks:

Some years ago a nearby city built a plaza. It is wholly unremarkable: No one lingers there, no one brings food or a book. Children do not play there. If a public space is never used, why did we make it? The question returns an echo: If we are richer today, why are we not routinely surpassing the shared spaces we were able to create one hundred years ago?

What did a person photographing such a park imagine about the beauty of our parks, one hundred years hence? What do we imagine about the beauty of our public spaces one hundred years from today? Maybe the echo is closer: Do we engage in the act of imagining public spaces at all? Somebody had to once, for this park was not an accident.

Love and effort create magnificent places. Genius inhabits them. People go to them because they know such places and landscapes offer consolation of the soul, and the soul is not fooled by substitutes. We let those places turn our moods, we want them to, they do so easily. Today it is not always hard to find such places, but why is it difficult to make new ones?

But when we consider street-lights specifically, we notice that the loss may have less to do with a diminished desire for beauty than with an overwhelming desire for efficiency. Rust Belt Kid said this well on X:

Mass production has really done a toll on intricate metal work.

Used to be $5 bucks for standard, $10 for intricate

Now its $1 for cheap standard, $5 American standard, $20 bucks for intricate

A lot harder to justify

In choice A, both quotes came from your town

In choice B, one comes from China (takes 3 days), one comes from America (3 weeks) and the final option still comes from America but takes 3 months

And yet, whatever the reason, we deserve—nay, need—better.

When we talk about South Bend’s industrial heritage, it’s easy to gesture toward Studebaker, Bendix, and Oliver and miss the smaller concerns whose work traveled just as far. The George Cutter Company was one such concern.

George M. Cutter was born in Boston in 1853 and by 1881 was working under Alexander Graham Bell, sent abroad to help install the first telephone systems in Russia. A decade later he founded his own firm and began designing lighting hardware. After a fire destroyed his Chicago factory in 1904, he moved to South Bend, where he built a new plant at Notre Dame Avenue and Northside Boulevard. From there, the George Cutter Company became the largest municipal street-light manufacturer in the United States—known for their arc brackets, mast arms, and cast-iron standards that balanced engineering discipline with ornamental grace.

Their lamps stood in Chicago, New York, Seattle, and of course South Bend, each carrying the inscription George Cutter Company, South Bend, Ind. at its base.

Almost all of these fixtures are gone—the only remains I know of in South Bend are the replicas dotting the Michigan Street Bridge. Across nearly all of our ordinary infrastructure, beauty has become optional.

These photographs remind us of another way.

What can one say in the face of a single branch of ivy—bright-yellow—poking out from behind the bright-light-blue corrugated-sheet-metal facade of a factory? It’s surely brick behind. Walk a block or two to find another: brick yet uncovered, but coated in a rainbow of dying ivy leaves… another old factory. This is what we have: old factories, many made bright and colorful by different ideas of care and neglect. Are we to say “thank you” for the color?

Friends on quests
Sidewalk time
Go where artists go
Pave highways to citizenship
Extend reputational generosity
New thing, meet old place
Tell the long story
1am “You out?”

See also: How to Make a Small City Smaller

Boycott a business
Maintain grievances
Belittle ambition
“Well actually”
Call someone a local celebrity
Deny local citizenship
Incite vapid hype
Gossip

See also: How to Make a Small City Bigger

Over the last 75 years, South Bend has been at the center of two quintessential stories of change in the industrial Midwest: first, Studebaker in the 1960s, and later, South Bend Lathe in the 1970s.

They’re usually told as stories about workers, pensions, strikes, and shutdowns. But hidden in both, there’s a quieter, but equally important theme - ownership. And when you zoom out with that lens in mind, you can see the draft of a compelling story taking shape. Two acts of three already penned, one waiting to be written.

Act One: Studebaker

By the 1960s, Studebaker was no longer the family company it once was. As Andrew Beckman of the Studebaker Museum explained:

“The Studebaker family wasn’t involved in the company much after they went public in the early teens… outsiders came on to the Studebaker board, money interests. Lehman Brothers, other banking houses got on Studebaker’s board. The family essentially withdrew from the company at that time.”

That increasing distance, over decades, shaped what came next. On December 9, 1963, the Tribune ran the headline: AUTO OUTPUT TO END HERE. The ‘official’ announcement was scheduled the next day in New York, but word had already spread outside Gate 1 on Sample Street.

The losses were devastating: thousands of jobs and ultimately the pensions that workers were promised. UAW researchers warned:

“I am advised that the average age of the South Bend Studebaker workers is 54 and that it is unlikely that the pension fund will have sufficient monies to pay pensions to workers under 60 years of age.”

Studebaker became a national case study. As historian James Wooten later wrote, “Studebaker became a poster child for the cause of pension reform and… termination insurance moved squarely onto the policy agenda.”

Almost 10 years later, ERISA was passed, the company oft mentioned as inspiration.

Act Two: South Bend Lathe

In 1975, it was a different company, but a familiar problem. A once-local company, South Bend Lathe, was slated for liquidation by its owner, Amsted Industries, a Chicago conglomerate. The company was nearly 70 years old, world-famous in its industry, and employed almost 500 people.

This time, the signs were caught before it was too late. A federal-municipal partnership, local banks, and a newly-legislated employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) stitched together a unique buyout. Ironically, it was ERISA, the legislation inspired in part by Studebaker, that made it possible.

The experiment drew national attention. TIME magazine ran a story titled More Worker-Owners. The Wall Street Journal ran How and Why U.S. Helped 500 Workers Take Over a Machine-Tool Manufacturer. For a moment, it was the model for a new worker-centric capitalism.

But inside the plant, it felt different. Five years later, a Washington Post article titled, Workers at Employe-Owned Firm Find the Going Rough, would quote a machinist:

“I did what I did back then just to save our job. I didn’t know a damned thing about ESOP, other than that it would keep the plant going and the paychecks coming. I figured we could wait until later to work out the kinks in this ownership stuff.”

After an initial few years of improved performance and profitability, the company struggled to find its footing and reorientate its traditional management-labor dynamic into that of a collectively-owned firm. In 1980, it reached a breaking point and workers went on strike against the company they owned. What had once been a poster child became, as one of the architects of the deal put it, “the bête noire of the ESOP movement.”

Act Three: [Unwritten]

Ownership determines who decides, who benefits, and who survives. I think it’s the most underused, under-leveraged, and under-appreciated tool of economic development today. It should sit alongside tax incentives, talent attraction, workforce development, and all the other strategies being deployed. I’m not just talking about employee ownership - I’m talking about ownership in general. It’s a tool that can take many forms, used in many ways, and deserves attention and innovation.

South Bend, and cities like it, have an opportunity to write the next act.

Studebaker showed the tool of ownership go ignored, except in retrospect.

South Bend Lathe showed the tool of ownership used, but reactive.

What happens when the tool of ownership is used to build resilience?

This essay was originally published on Small City Segment, Dustin Mix’ weekly newsletter exploring the past, present, and future of the markets, companies, and founders hidden in small cities. You can subscribe here.

“A family of considerable means living in the east is seeking a large house in which to spend the three best months of the summer in South Bend. South Bend has never became noted as a summer resort, but the possibilities seem to be rather large if the matter should be taken up and pushed. A young woman of this family visited friends in South Bend and became so infatuated with the city that her interest has been communicated to other members and now they seek a modern house furnished, which can be taken for three months. So far nothing of a satisfactory character has been discovered, but they have not given up hopes and propose to spend a portion of their summer in South Bend.”

Here are forty photographs from the days I spent in South Bend this summer.

I’m happy to introduce my new broadsheet, Dreaming in Butte.

I first pulled into Butte, Montana on a Monday in August and took a room at the Finlen Motor Inn. I was in town for a wedding, showing early with my camera and fifteen rolls of 35 mm film. I found it a place fluent in loss and in life, in stories of beauty, bricks, and work. I walked its streets for hours on end, and on the last night, I met a girl.

Dreaming in Butte is the photographic memo of that first trip: eight photographs, pieces of my street-side conversations, and borrowed words from filmmaker Wim Wenders and Butte’s unofficial poet laureate, Ed Lahey.

It’s available today on my shop.

Photographs made in Butte, Montana, August 2024 with a Voigtländer Bessa-R and Fujifilm X100V. Film processed by Taylor House in Hammond LA. Printed in Paris, April 2025.

Special thanks to Brian McGregor and Dave Cantwell.

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.

It’s a casual evening to gather, share new work, and spend time with people who care about places. Around 7 p.m., I’ll offer a few remarks about the work and where my photography practice is right now. The piece will be available here for the first time—before it goes up in the online shop.

We’ll have drinks and snacks, of course. If you’ve been to the building, you know the drill. And if it’s your first time, I can’t wait to welcome you.

The door is next to the brown truck.

My visits were brief (early flight this morning), but they woke me up.

Every few months, someone offers a new estimation—or judgment—on the prospects of South Bend’s artistic community. I’m not here to add another opinion, only to note the heartening fact: there are seemingly enough gallery spaces in the city to host simultaneous, well-attended openings for two bonafide, beloved painters. It felt less like a moment, and more like a rhythm.

Basking in the quiet vitality of a place pronounced dead.

p.s. LangLab is celebrating its 15-year anniversary on Friday, May 16. Maybe I’ll see you there. [details]

On December 7th at 3:19 p.m., I loaded my camera with a single roll of film, parked the truck on Lafayette Boulevard just south of Sample Street, and set off down and around Indiana Avenue’s one-sided string of storefronts who, sixty-four years ago tomorrow, welcomed home the newly-out-of-work world-famous-makers of the best-selling 1950 Champion and the full-classic ‘28 President and the world-land-speed-record-setting ‘63 Avanti “No. 9.” And who today peer across that vast-and-vacant factory-field on to the downtown of a small city still going, where I ended with the sunset and a train. Here are eleven photographs from the walk.

I’m happy to introduce my second book, Walking in Wheeling.

I first paid Wheeling, West Virginia, a visit on account of a friend who sent me a poem about the city, intending for a quiet week with a couple of books. And I paid another visit earlier this year with my dear friend Dustin. I found a beautiful city with a depth to its history and a complexity to its present, with some committed people betting on its future and drinking at The Bridge Tavern. I walked its streets for hours on end, camera in hand.

Walking in Wheeling is a photographic record of that first encounter and the return trip, alongside writing by Dustin, me, and a handful of characters from the city’s past.

The book is available today on my shop—and RSVP is open for a special preview show at the studio at 7:30 PM on Wednesday, November 20th.

Thanks to Kath Keur for producing and designing the book, Dustin Mix for curating the historical writings, Samuel Piccolo for sending me a poem, and Doug Carl for the welcome.

Up Halsted forty-five degree turn on Lincoln you’re going to Rose’s because Eater said so and Esme is closed and Every Day It’s Good To Be Here, Walking. This must be the one… The Biograph in lights! How far is it? It must have a sign, a nice one, worthy perhaps We Hope of one maybe two of the remaining twelve shots on this roll of ~film~.

Place called Lillie’s has a sign:

LILLIE’s IS OPEN.

You would know by the music and the people and the POSITIVE ENERGY and PROPERLY LOW lights visible from this far, across the street at the mortgage office, of course.

Old Style sign, bottom half lit top half dark. If that’s not the place…

“ON TAP”

Let me in on a technicality: an image of an expired passport to compensate for the taped together broken in half drivers license. Dewar’s neat. No ice? Right. $7. Let me get some cash… credit cards! “We will mail a PIN number to your address on file in 7-10 business days.” No Dewars, no photograph of the back bar, camera in hand we’re out, fast. And down. That’s life. That’s what all the people say. YOU’RE RIDING HIGH IN APRIL, shot down in May.

Keep the failed transaction receipts for the record of things not working out just so perfectly all of the time for Jacob Titus. And for the record: things worked out from 8 AM until 11 PM across a state line “You’re Doing Okay,” Bud.

Good morning from Room 109 Bed 3, Hello sir, the red truck will vacate spot 4 early. Are you sure? Yes. Over Fullerton forty-five degree turn on Lincoln you’re going to l-u-l-a for the omelette and… Old Style sign, you know the place:

“ON TAP”

Lucky eyes. Open. Seeing signs. Making a record.

or, “He got the shot.”

P.S. I’m working on my second book. Join the waitlist here.

P.S. I’m working on my second book. Join the waitlist here.

P.S. I’m working on my second book. Join the waitlist here.

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.

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.

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.

To celebrate our purchase of Vested Interest, we're hosting an "Open Building" party on Thursday, November 2nd from 6-9 pm. RSVP today.

If you live in South Bend, you may know the building from events such as the Birdsell Project in 2018, the South Bend Burger Society in 2019, and the South Bend Lyric Opera in 2021, or as a home to artists and entrepreneurs, including A Roaster Called Revenant, Sew Loved, CHUCK, Stronghold Gym, Keur Design Studio, and more.

I moved in during the summer of 2017 after Rami Mikhail-Sadek walked over one day at LangLab and said, “I’ve got a building you need to check out.” I quickly fell in love with the place.

Vested Interest is a collection of seventeen adjoining buildings on Sample and Tutt Streets on the southeast edge of downtown South Bend. The Sample Street buildings were built by the Ziker family of Ziker Cleaners starting in 1917—and the Tutt Street buildings by the Stephenson family of Stephenson Underwear Mills as an engine room and shop for their pump manufacturing business, starting in 1886.

By 1956, the Zikers owned the entire property—and in early 2017, after a century on the property, Ziker Cleaners moved to a new facility in Mishawaka. David Ziker struggled to find a new buyer for the aging complex, so he began to imagine the building as a community for small businesses—I soon moved in to help out.

In the six years since 30+ artists and entrepreneurs have found a home here. But as David continued to operate the Cleaners and spend time with his grandchildren, he asked if I would purchase the building to carry the plan forward. I agreed, with the help of a friend and now partner.

My partner in the project, Dominick, is the owner-operator of Madison Oyster Bar downtown. We were introduced by Jason Adam Miller in 2019, gaining a friendship by collaborating on projects for the bar, including the South Bend for Pete mural. Those who know Dom will not be surprised to hear that his loyalty, business sense, and enthusiasm make him a good partner for such an effort.

The city is dotted with beautifully aging buildings that, if cared for, will continue to be home to generations of artists and entrepreneurs. So our plan is simple: care for the building—and invite good people to work alongside us. If you fit the bill, please inquire on our website.

And to celebrate, we’re hosting an “open building” party on Thursday, November 2nd from 6-9 pm. Consider joining us—RSVP today.