On your right stands a seven-story red brick block with wide terra-cotta storefront openings at the base and an ornate seventh-floor crown, marked by unusually old window frames high at the top.
This lodge opened in nineteen twenty-two, when South Bend’s Crusade Lodge Number Fourteen decided modesty would never do. Its members financed an enormous headquarters and proudly claimed the largest lodge building in the city, and indeed the largest Pythian building in the fraternity’s entire “supreme domain.” The local architects, N. Roy Shambleau and Walter W. Schneider, gave it a clever Chicago School design: think of a classical column stretched upright. The first floor forms the base, wrapped in terra cotta and big display windows. The middle five floors make a plain shaft. Then the seventh floor becomes the capital, the decorative top, dressed in rich terra-cotta trim.
For all that scale, the Knights themselves used only the sixth and seventh floors. They leased the lower floors to shops, offices, and, with delicious irony, the Federal Court and the District Prohibition Office. A private fraternal order ended up housing the law and the dry agents.
In the app, the full height and that handsome top floor become even clearer. Most exterior windows have been replaced over the years, but the seventh floor still keeps its original nineteen twenty-two frames, where the Knights once held their secret meetings.
Then the debt caught up with them. In nineteen thirty-five, Lincoln National Life Insurance Company foreclosed on a one hundred twenty thousand dollar bond, well over two and a half million dollars today, and the fraternity lost its grand monument.
It is a splendid building, but also a sober lesson in ambition. When you are ready, carry on to the next stop.
