On your left, look for a seven-story Art Deco block with a marble-faced ground floor, pale limestone rising above it, and vertical bands of terra cotta trim framing the center windows.
This is the I and M Building, raised in nineteen twenty-nine for the Indiana and Michigan Electric Company at a cost of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or roughly four and a half million today. South Bend has only a handful of Art Deco buildings, and this is the purest downtown example of the style: crisp geometry, strong vertical lines, and just enough ornament to make modernity feel grand.
The contrast comes through clearly in the app, from the polished front to the brick sides. Austin and Shambleau designed it, and they knew exactly what they were doing. Ennis Austin had trained under designers connected with Tiffany Glass in New York. Norman Shambleau arrived in South Bend at seventeen, the son of a Canadian carriage-maker, and worked his way up from apprentice. Together, they became the most distinguished architectural firm in northern Indiana, and this was their showpiece.
But the clever part is what happened inside. This was not just an office building. The electric company used it as a sales pitch for the future. On the sixth floor, they installed an auditorium for presentations. On the seventh, they staged live kitchen demonstrations, inviting local residents to watch electric appliances perform their quiet little miracles. In the early age of household electricity, that must have felt wonderfully futuristic.
The building later rode through harder decades. It entered the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-five, then spent a brief and unsuccessful spell as a condominium project before returning to offices. Today, Schurz Communications runs broadband and cloud operations here, which feels fitting: a building created to advertise the technology of nineteen twenty-nine now manages the digital networks of the twenty-first century.
Even now, the old ambition still shows through the stone and bronze.
When you are ready, continue on toward the next tower on the route.
