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Deep in the back pocket of South Bend's City Cemetery, behind rows of well-manicured stones that bear many of the same names as the streets that make up the downtown grid, there is a bridge that doesn't need to exist. It's an adorable feature of the historic cemetery; a useless bridge that connects nothing to nowhere, that safely moves travelers from one side of a grassy field to another. The ditch that ran below that bridge has been filled for a century-and-a-half. If humans weren't a sentimental people, the bridge would have been removed a long time ago. Over the course of 150 years, dozens like it already have been.
The trip from South Bend to Singapore might be a little different than you'd expect. It's a lot of highway, followed by a cruise through Saugatuck's coziest beach communities, a narrow road beneath a serene canopy of trees, and a short drive across a sand-swept parking lot. From there, it's not more than a handful of dune climbs and coastal hiking before you find yourself in the town of Singapore, Michigan.
When Joseph Bartlett came to South Bend in 1837, he already knew his name would be remembered beyond his own life. When the city's Bartlett Street was later named after him, it wouldn't be the first road to carry the Bartlett legacy, and it wouldn't be the most important one either. That's because Joseph Bartlett was a descendant of Josiah Bartlett, signer of the Declaration of Independence and first governor of New Hampshire. According to the canon of The West Wing, that also means that South Bend's Joseph Bartlett is related to fictional President Jed Bartlet, portrayed in that television show by Martin Sheen.
My eyes were blurry and fuzzy, courtesy of a four-hour binge session in the microfilm room, a byproduct of a bizarre obsession I'd developed for a Babe Ruth home run that never even made it into the record books. In fact, I'd just spent the final hour of that session poring through century-old issues of South Bend's Goniec Polski, a newspaper written in a language I don't read, in order to find a photograph that wasn't there.
My great-grandfather was very famously not a fan of the quality of the pavements on Sample Street in the 1970s. You can imagine his Chrysler bouncing over the pockmarked road through downtown South Bend and into the Westside, parking at the house my mom grew up, then emerging from the car to make the same joke every single time he arrived.
You've probably never been to Quarles Road. In fact, you've probably never heard of it, and it's even less likely that you know the guy it's named after. Quarles Road is the kind of road that you'd never get to unless you were trying to find it and also the kind of road you'd never have a reason to find. Running for less than a mile in the farthest flung fringes of Madison Township, Quarles Road connects Cedar to Beech, but is not the best way to get to either. It's unpaved and barely wide enough for two cars to navigate without swapping paint or bogging mud. There's another stretch of the same road that runs for a quarter-mile in Lakeville, and just to make things confusing - and apparently to acknowledge it - this second stretch also carries the second name Riddle Road.
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