SOUTH BEND — After Jacob Titus returned to South Bend, it was the city’s imposing old industrial buildings that pulled him toward the reality of his inner desire for a life in a shimmering elsewhere.
Titus, born in Akron, Ohio, had left South Bend after graduating from Riley High School in 2011, the city fading in his rearview mirror as he headed south to Bloomington to attend college. Indiana University.
He didn’t want to come back. In January of the same year, South Bend came to News week like a dying American city. Newly an adult, with dreams that didn’t involve dying anytime soon, Titus readily accepted this tale and left town.
But this year, the 31-year-old became part owner of a 70,000-square-foot complex made up of 17 buildings called Interest vesteda coworking space at 251 E. Sample St. allowing artists and entrepreneurs to pursue their work alongside creative companions.
His road back began with a phone call from his parents four years later, when Titus was months away from earning his bachelor’s degree in public and nonprofit management. Could he be the director of The Beacon community center?
For approximately 18 months he led the project a new life in an old bowling alley near the South Bend Regional Airport. It was the kind of job he said he wanted. Still, he might be glum, stuck in his vision of living alongside “at least a million warm bodies,” he says.
His short commute to work always took him past the old Drewrys Brewery complex, which this year saw the start of a cleaning of 14,000 tonnes of demolition debris which may be stained with asbestos. But at the time, the Elwood Avenue building, vacant since 1972, was largely intact. Towering over Muessel Grove Park, its red brick exterior and 150-foot-tall concrete chimney seemed deeply strange to Titus. One day he had to park his car and take photos with his phone.
Titus soon left his job to become a freelance photographer in town, a vocation to which – after running out of money within a few months – he has since added videography, graphic design, blogging and podcasting and the 70,000-foot property squares of century-old land. ancient industrial relics.
The 17 adjoining buildings, the oldest of which was built nearly 139 years ago, are nestled in a triangle bordered by Sample and Main streets and the railroad tracks that run along the southern edge of downtown. Those along Sample Street were built from 1917 by the Ziker familywhose generations ran their dry cleaning business there, Ziker Cleaners, before moving its headquarters to Mishawaka in 2016. The brick buildings along Tutt Street, paralleling Sample to the north, were built in the late 1800s by the family that ran Stephenson Underwear Mills.
With a new outlook on old, dilapidated spaces, Titus moved into a studio there in 2017 at the suggestion of a friend who runs LangLab – another former warehouse on the Southeast Side that has been transformed into an event venue, bar and café. This year, Titus purchased Vested Interest for $175,000 from David Ziker with his business partner Dominick Simeri, 33. owner of Madison Oyster Bar in the heart of downtown.
“Before I was here, I was sort of able to access this connection to the past by photographing old spaces and writing about history,” Titus told the Tribune during a recent visit to the maze of U-shaped buildings. “But it’s hard to replace just actually being in the space, working there, and feeling like by doing what I’m doing, I’m helping to maintain at least a small part of our physical connection with the past.”
The couple’s main goal is to rent studio and light industrial space to other local artists and business owners. Vested Interest’s 20 tenants already include a printmaker, a roaster, several filmmakers, a fitness instructor who operates a full gym and, soon, a barber. De Nolf Hair Salon is moving to Vested Interest this month, Titus said.
They also plan to hold events and receptions there in a warehouse with high ceilings and warm lighting, with a black piano in one corner and large windows letting in sunlight.
“We felt with this type of building that people needed to have a vested interest in the project beyond just it being a space they rent,” Titus said. “For this to work, there needs to be some sense of community buy-in.”
He feels the same way about South Bend. Titus is now part of a wave of small developers buying up dilapidated but notable historic buildings and, despite an obscure profit motive, imagining what brighter futures these spaces might host.
This “progressive development” network of small business owners is pronounced enough to have prompted the city to offer this fall half-million dollar loans for renovation of vacant commercial buildings.
“Buildings that remain empty,” Titus said, “simply become buildings that need to be demolished.”
Titus says that the big brick monster that houses his studio on Tutt Street has become a sort of muse. But what sharpens his creative intentions is a lingering question that becomes less bothersome as he gets older: Should I stay in South Bend??
The question is like a prayer recited by every ambitious and creative young person in the city he knows, he said.
This is the subject of a story he posted on his blog, West.SB, early last year. He remembers hearing someone in a restaurant say bitterly that there was “zero chance” he would apply for a job in town.
“What possibilities do we miss,” Titus writes, “by living physically here and living mentally in the future, elsewhere?”
And yet he admits that, in the past, he has been almost dogmatic in his belief that South Bend was his creative haven. Consider the time he was quoted in a Documentary 2020 about the city, saying, “I’ll be in South Bend for the rest of my life.” » Consider the West Side map tattooed on his right forearm, which he once reproduced as a 20-foot-tall rope sculpture in an installation at a local art show, accompanied by photos he took and a sentimental description.
He no longer “flails” behind the wheel as he travels through the city that raised him, he said. But even after the most real commitment he makes, whose legacy dates back to South Bend’s industrial heyday, he jumps to grandiose conclusions.
“Will I be here forever?” » said Titus. ” I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t say that.
“And yet, at the same time, I think the purchase of this building is an indication that my personal commitment to this place has never been greater.”
Email South Bend Tribune city reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on X: @jordantsmith09
