Portage Manor beckons Developers. How could that affect its historic and green spaces?

SOUTH BEND — At the city’s northwest gateway, there is something calming about the 115-year-old Portage Manor — white pillars, a yawning stretch of red brick and a campus of mature woods — as harried motorists venture into the city.

Driving south on Portage Avenue, they’ve passed the bustling retail hub around the Meijer store, then the Indiana Toll Road and then strip malls and apartments. None of this existed when the county built Portage Manor in 1907 as the county infirmary with a poor farm and cemetery. Nor centuries back, when European explorers and Native Americans used to navigate these grounds between the St. Joseph and Kankakee rivers.

Now city and county officials contemplate another change in the landscape. At least two developers are talking with city officials about concepts to build on the former farm fields just north of the now-shuttered Portage Manor building.

Carl Baxmeyer, president of the St. Joseph County commissioners, said he’d heard of a possible Eddy Street Commons concept. The county owns the land, but it’s city officials who are talking with developers because the site falls within city boundaries. And Caleb Bauer, South Bend’s executive director of community investment, said such an “urban style development” would fit the area.

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With “good urban design,” he suggested, the site could accommodate more than 1,000 housing units, calling it “positive” for the area to meet housing needs.

“We’d be supportive of projects that add new housing," he said, "very specifically workforce housing,” which the city defines as rental housing for those who earn 80% to 120% of the area’s median income.

Meanwhile, the Historic Preservation Commission for South Bend and St. Joseph County wants to see Portage Manor remain standing — however it’s used — but, rather than rush toward local landmark status, Administrator Adam Toering said, they are carefully watching to see if county officials also show interest in protecting it.

Bauer said one developer has talked about possibly using the building for some kind of adaptive use, though he stopped short of being more specific.

Critics of the county’s decision to close Portage Manor have speculated that commissioners did it so they could sell the land — a claim that Baxmeyer has denied.

But Bauer emphasized that the city’s efforts are separate from the commissioners’ decision this year to close Portage Manor’s operations as the 144-bed county home for people with mental illness and disabilities.

Bauer is also quick to say that the city’s talks with developers are still preliminary for the building and land. When asked to describe what they’re envisioning, he said, “I wouldn’t want to speculate on what could or couldn’t go in there.”

The schemes await a deal with the county, who owns the land, to sell the property to developers. On Aug. 1, the day after Portage Manor closed and moved out its last residents, Commissioner Derek Dieter said that even appraisals for the land could be "months” away.

Commissioners say they’re first focused on taking stock of the building and what to do with it next. But, at their Aug. 15 meeting, commissioners voted to go ahead with a contract with Danch, Harner and Associates to survey the land — another critical step before development deals can begin. The goal: to see where the current parcel lines actually stand and to subdivide the land into new parcels.

Protecting historic Portage Manor

For now, the entire 181 acres between Portage and Riverside Drive and between the Toll Road and Boland Drive is broken into just two parcels. That encompasses a wide range of uses, from the city’s water treatment plant to the county home, the old farm fields, the county highway garage, the Chet Waggoner Little League fields, the county's poor farm cemetery and wooded areas where Dieter envisions a series of biking/hiking trails.

“From a land use perspective, having all of the multiple land uses on two parcels is not ideal,” Abby Wiles, the county's area planning director, said.

Still, Baxmeyer has said he wanted to ensure that the Portage Manor building would be in a separate parcel from the other land around it.

Bauer and the commissioners all say they’d prefer to see someone step forward to reuse the building. But, without a solid offer, its fate remains a big question. Dieter had once worked to support Portage Manor's daily operations but eventually voted to close it. Commissioners cited the home’s inadequate state revenue but also the structure’s need for repairs, even as historic preservation officials said it’s structurally sound.

Local historic landmark status would mandate that the building isn’t torn down and that it’s used and maintained. The Historic Preservation Commission has been discussing that since this spring, as the county moved toward closure. Local historic landmark status, Toering noted, wouldn’t have stopped the closure since the status affects only the physical structure.

It warrants historic status, Toering said, but the commission is sitting back to see where county officials’ interests are.

An effort toward local landmark status stalled many years ago, Toering said, because it tried to encompass the 100-plus acres, too.

In 2000, Portage Manor was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which is the federal government’s program to encourage preservation through tax credits and grants. Federal status protects only the building from demolition or other negative effects, Toering said, if federal dollars are used in such a project.

“We still have a lot of optimism that the building can be adaptively used,” Toering said. “I see old buildings all the time that are in much worse condition than this one.”

The county home's closure also pointed out an ongoing need for what it did — house adults with mental illness and disabilities — since dozens of its residents had to move to facilities outside of the county.

Portage Manor is structured so that it has a lot of individual bedrooms, though they use shared bathrooms down the hall. Could the space, walls and plumbing be reconfigured into, say, apartments or condominiums?

“Yes,” Toering replied, “but it will come with some cost.”

Building trails, keeping green space

Local landmark status would protect only the building, not the land around it. Still, could development in the old farm fields spoil Portage Manor’s historic nature?

“I think that can be done sympathetically,” Toering said. “I think it can be done cooperatively.”

For now, Bauer said, developers are primarily considering the farm fields, though a couple of tree lines might be affected.

In the wooded areas of the county-owned land, though, Dieter is dreaming of dirt biking and hiking trails, a wheelchair-accessible walking trail under a tree canopy and a bike park. He also envisions a Challenger Little League park for kids with disabilities near the current Chet Waggoner Little League fields.

It evolved out of a cleanup he led in 2021 that removed well more than 400 bags of trash, accumulated over the years, after an explosion at a homeless camp near a small wooded ravine just south of the Portage Manor building.

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Under his direction, the county hired a trail-building company to develop a map of trail ideas. He foresees them as parks owned and maintained under the commissioners, and he still plans to secure private, outside funding to build the projects.

The history of the area isn’t lost on Dieter, who’s talked about interpretive signs and who sees the opportunity to link to the city’s adjacent Pinhook Park via the Boland Trail and Riverside Trail. Pinhook’s U-shaped lagoon was once a bend in the St. Joseph River.

Why developer Magnus Capital Partners is interested

For developers, Portage Manor’s location makes it attractive because it’s close to the Meijer retail hub with “easy access to basic needs,” Bauer said.

But he also said: “There’s not a lot of greenfield sites in South Bend. This is one of the largest areas that’s not been developed.”

One of the developers interested in the site is Magnus Capital Partners, based in Grand Rapids.

Among developments in five states, Magnus aims to meet communities’ trends toward urbanization and to fill needs for “workforce housing.” It hails its complexes in Grand Rapids, HōM Flats, which it describes as “socially responsible housing” as it offers on-site programs like yoga, career coaching and financial literacy and painting classes.

“We always have an interest when there’s economic development in cities like South Bend where there’s growth,” CEO Vishal Arora told The Tribune, pointing out General Motors’ and Samsung’s deal to build a $3.5 billion electric vehicle battery plant just east of New Carlisle. “We think South Bend and St. Joseph County are very well poised for growth.”

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News of the battery plant deal was announced in mid-June, about the same time that commissioners decided to order Portage Manor’s closure. They gave the shortest time frame the state allowed, 45 days, to find new homes for the remaining residents, as Baxmeyer said he didn’t want to prolong what had already been a stressful time for the residents.

Around that time, Arora tuned in remotely to county meetings where Portage Manor’s fate was being discussed. But he told The Tribune that he didn’t know anything about the structure itself. Nor did he have a vested interest in the building, he said.

But, in 2021, when Magnus had previously explored building an apartment complex at the same site, it appeared that the county was offering it the opportunity to buy the whole campus, including right of first refusal for the building. Dieter quickly balked at the deal when county Economic Development Director Bill Schalliol brought it to commissioners, caught off guard and alarmed that it could mean a shutdown of the home. Magnus halted its plans within two weeks.

Just recently, Magnus officials told The Tribune: “Magnus Capital Partners remains interested in bringing multifamily housing to the South Bend area. We continue to evaluate all options that would allow us to viably bring housing to the area.”

But Arora added: "Magnus does not currently have any development plans for consideration or underlying agreements that would convey it authority to do so."

Adding traffic to Portage Avenue and Riverside Drive

Added development would draw more traffic onto Portage Avenue, which already sees a steady flow of vehicles that are going from the retail hub and the Cleveland Road/U.S. 31 bypass toward downtown South Bend and back.

Bauer said the city’s streets generally are able to absorb the extra flow from new development. He feels Portage could accommodate it, but added there may need to be street improvements. He also suggested that “it would be beneficial” to build a road connection from the new developments to Riverside Drive, just south of Cleveland.

As homes, roads and stores pop up in what used to be countryside, it becomes more challenging to see or feel the history of this landscape. Reminders linger just south of Portage Manor, where Riverview and Highland cemeteries flank Portage Avenue and serve as burial grounds for early city leaders.

And, when contractors were building the Boland Trail in 2018, they unearthed a skull from an embankment near but apart from the poor farm’s Portage Cemetery, where more than 1,200 are buried. Experts deemed the skull to be more than a century old, though they couldn’t determine its ethnic origin. It’s likely that others are buried in the area, given the centuries of human traffic.

“A lot of history,” Toering said, "is cross-roading there.”

South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits can be reached at 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Portage Manor historic green spaces could gain housing landmark status