A building that keeps reinventing itself

Fred W. Busse’s South Bend firm put up a new bread plant at 906 Portage Avenue and spent $90,000 doing it — a serious industrial investment, not a corner bakery. The South Bend Tribune called it the most modern plant expert bakery designers could devise, and one of the finest bread plants in the central west.

The site made sense. Portage Avenue was a streetcar corridor with traffic, transit, and a dense residential customer base within walking distance — a neighborhood commercial center with butcher shops, produce sellers, and florists on the same block.

The building was designed around daylight and cleanliness, part of a national wave of “sanitary and scientific” bakeries that replaced basement hand-bakeries and marketed hygiene as a product feature. That design decision — big windows, lots of light — is the one the next hundred years kept arguing with.

Busse’s independence lasted about three years.

Ward Baking Company — a national operation with roots going back to an Irish immigrant baker in 1849 Manhattan — moved into South Bend and competed hard, operating for a time through the South Bend Bread Company without announcing whose money was behind it. Prices were driven down through coupon promotions. Local bakers said publicly that they did not have the capital to fight back. The episode is remembered locally as the South Bend bread war.

Busse lost. By the mid-1920s the Portage plant was Ward’s.

That put this building inside a genuinely notable corporate lineage. Ward’s brands were Tip-Top and Bond; in 1924 the parent company reorganized as Continental Baking, which picked up Wonder Bread the following year and later launched Hostess — eventually the largest commercial bakery in the United States.

Ward spent roughly $500,000 modernizing the Portage plant. The new machinery could turn out about 4,000 loaves an hour, carrying a loaf from mixing bowl to wrapper with almost no human hands on it. A major new oven went in as part of the work.

On 16 October 1955, the bakery exploded.

Damage came to around $5,000 and soot coated a good portion of the building. Nobody was hurt. The open house scheduled to show off the new equipment was quietly canceled.

When the baking stopped, the building became a warehouse — and warehouses do not need daylight.

Every window opening was bricked in. A plant designed around light became a sealed brick box, and that single alteration defined how the building looked, and how the neighborhood felt about it, for the next forty years.

Its last occupant was Ford Distributing, a wholesale supplier of coffee makers, vending machines, tobacco, and convenience goods.

Ford Distributing clarification. The building is often referred to as the “Ford Distribution Center”. However, Ford Distributing was a local wholesaler and did not have assocaitions with the Ford Motor Company.

In March 2022, crews began taking the bricks back out of the window openings and putting glass where it had been in 1919. It is the single most visible thing that has happened to this building in eighty years, and it is the exact reversal of the alteration that defined it.

Phase 1 opened in December 2025 — roughly 20,000 of the building’s 56,000 square feet, now holding a coffee shop, a yarn shop, artists, wellness practitioners, 15 studio/maker spaces, and 20 private offices.