On Monday, the historic Lafayette Building in downtown South Bend burned. It sits across the street from PBS Michiana–WNIT, and my first thoughts were practical: the staff, the station, and the neighborhood. We sent everyone home as it became clear we might lose utilities and concerns about air quality grew.
But once the immediate concerns passed, my heart broke for the building itself. The Lafayette Building is why my family exists.
From 1947 until 1972, the northeast corner office on the first floor was home to Diamond & Miller, my granddaddy’s law practice. In the late 1940s, the welfare office occupied the fourth floor. It was there that attorney Robert L. Miller, the Miller of Diamond & Miller, fell in love with social worker Dorothy June Humphreys. They were my grandparents. (He asked her parents for her hand in marriage on Diamond & Miller letterhead, with the address of the Lafayette Building across the top. He told them that they had “a friendship no less beautiful than the dawn itself, no less solid than the cement of love and understanding.” The ring he proposed to her with is the same ring my husband later used to propose to me.)
My grandmother died a few years later. She was 29. I have always known her mostly through fragments—what my grandfather kept, what survived in family memory. There are gaps that will never be filled. What I do know is that she had red hair, was wickedly smart, and earned a master’s degree at a time when most women did not. I do not know what brought her to South Bend after life in Bloomington, Indianapolis, and New York. But she worked on the 4th floor of that building, and I thought of her every time I passed it.
My grandfather lived to be 99, and by the end of his life, he was one of the people I was closest to. What I know about him could fill multiple books. And still, when I passed that building, I always thought of the Diamond & Miller sign that used to hang in the window, and the letter he wrote in hopes of marrying my grandmother, with 115 South Lafayette Street across the top.
For as long as I can remember, the Lafayette Building has been part of my family story. A Miller worked in that building for 25 years, and for the next 50 years another Miller—my mother, my father, or me—has worked within roughly a block of it.
I have no real claim to the Lafayette Building. I never lived there or worked there, and I honestly don’t remember if I was ever even inside it. But it has always felt important to me, and I realized just how attached I felt to it when I learned it was burning. Somehow a building I barely knew became a part of my understanding of where I came from.
The Lafayette Building was many things to many people over the years. Thousands of people passed through its doors for work, appointments, paperwork, and the little tasks that make up everyday life. Most of them were not thinking about legacy or history while they were there. It was just where things happened that needed to happen. But at one point, it contained a moment that was not distinguishable from any other ordinary day, and yet became the starting point of a family line. It is a moment that only becomes visible in retrospect.
There are buildings like that for other people too—places that most of the world would never associate with anything significant, but which, for a small number of people, are where everything that followed began.
I don’t know what will happen to the Lafayette Building now. But I’m grateful for the role that building played in South Bend’s story, and for the role it played in mine.
Without it, quite literally, my family would not be here.