Look to your right at the pale terra-cotta skyscraper, rising in a sheer stepped vertical column topped with small stone gargoyles jutting from its upper corners. This is the Tower Building, the stunted crowning achievement of local architects Ennis Austin and Roy Shambleau.
They designed this as South Bend's only example of Skyscraper Gothic architecture, a style that uses exaggerated vertical lines and arches to draw the eye upward and make the building look even taller. At twelve stories, it was the first structure to hit the city maximum height limit. The original blueprint called for a soaring, symmetric twin-tower complex. It was a monumental roll of the dice, an ambitious bet on continuous urban prosperity.
As it turns out... the timing was remarkably bad.
The contractors finished this eastern half exactly one week before the 1929 stock market crash. The financial ruin of the Great Depression instantly evaporated the funds for the rest of the project, meaning the proposed western twin was abandoned forever. If you pull up the tour app, take a look at the historical image on your screen. You can see the plain brick wall on the west side, a stark contrast to the elegant marble facade on the east, waiting for a twin that would never arrive.
Look back up at those stone gargoyles perched on the chamfered, or angled, corners of the tenth floor. In Gothic tradition, gargoyles are placed as guardians to ward off evil spirits. Clearly, they were looking the wrong way in October of 1929. Though, to be fair to the stone monsters, they did successfully perform their actual engineering function of pushing rainwater away from the facade.
Despite its amputated footprint, the Tower Building reigned as the tallest structure in South Bend for over forty years. It even hosted a lineage of peregrine falcons, where a female falcon named Maltese notoriously abandoned her mate for a younger bird from Detroit, leaving her former partner to roost alone on the unfinished west wall.
It is a true monument to survival, moving from a half finished victim of an economic collapse to a stalwart tower that simply dug its heels in and stood the test of time.
Let us move on to our next stop, the Morris Performing Arts Center, which is about a six minute walk from here.
