People were saddened Monday to see fire ravage what might have been South Bend’s first office building, the vacant Lafayette Building, built in 1901.
Firefighters responded to the five-story building at 115 S. Lafayette Boulevard, across from the County Building, around 8:20 Monday morning when someone called 911.
Probation officer Janel Weeks described what she saw as she arrived late for work.
“When I came around the corner I saw the smoke billowing out the building and wondered, where are the fire trucks? Weeks said. “By the time I parked down the street, then they were coming. We looked out the window, then there were flames. Just horrible flames.”
Weeks said she was sad because her office was in the Lafayette building when she first started with the probation department 29 years ago. Also taking the fire hard were city of South Bend staff who’ve worked to preserve the building and promote its redevelopment.
In 2018 and 2019 the city spent $750,000 replacing the roof, including its ornate glass atrium top.
”It’s a pretty heartbreaking day for me,” said Joe Molnar, the city’s assistant director of growth and opportunity. “The city had done a lot of stabilization work to make sure that it could stick around and unfortunately this is probably a major setback.”
It was unclear whether any of the building will be salvageable. Coincidentally, it was vacant partly because of another fire in its past.
During the 1930s the building housed the offices of married African American attorneys and civil rights advocates Elizabeth and J. Chester Allen.
In 2023 the redevelopment commission approved a plan by a developer to renovate it into apartments and ground-floor retail.
But the developer then discovered that a fire occurred in the basement in the 1930s. They said ensuring the foundation was strong enough to support the weight of the renovation made their project unaffordable.
Before Monday’s fire, Molnar said ongoing development downtown had recently prompted new interest.
“We have actually seen, in the last six months, a pick-up in people taking tours of the building,” Molnar said. “Had a phone call a few weeks ago with a local architect who had said he was having someone looking at it, so we thought we were really moving towards having another person try to take a crack at it, so that’s why it’s also kind of heartbreaking at the moment.”
