Groundbreaking for the $90 million second phase of the Eddy Street Commons development, a collaboration between the University and Kite Realty, took place in December. By March, three blocks of the street were closed for 20 months to allow the project to proceed in earnest.
Extending south of the existing Eddy Street Commons from Napoleon Boulevard to Indiana 23, the new development will include 8,500 square feet of restaurant space, more than 400 apartments, 22 single-family homes, 17 “flex” units that can be either residential or commercial, a new building for Notre Dame’s Robinson Community Learning Center and a grocery store. Apartments for graduate students are expected to open in mid-2019, with the full project to be completed the following year.
What to do with all this raw data? That’s a question South Bend city officials ask themselves as they sift through a wealth of public information with limited resources, hoping to maximize its use.
One answer: Invite Notre Dame students to help with the analysis and identify ways to make government more efficient. A partnership with the University’s new online master’s degree program in data science will allow the city to make more effective use of its data in addressing issues from pothole repair to property inspection.
Santiago Garces ’11, ’12M.S., South Bend’s chief innovation officer, said one potential result of the students’ work in housing and code enforcement would be to “create a model that predicts what properties are at risk, and target proactive interventions.”
In 2015, Notre Dame and South Bend joined the MetroLab Network, a national initiative of cities and universities working together to solve urban problems. The data analysis project represents the next step in the local collaboration.
“This partnership gives our students a unique opportunity to work on real-world data and real-world challenges while also contributing to the University’s commitment to enhancing the South Bend area,” says Roger Woodard, director of the online master’s program. “It also opens up great internship opportunities that afford students that critical industry experience.”
A Notre Dame Folk Choir rendition of “Rosa Mystica” appears in a climactic scene of the Oscar-nominated 2017 film Lady Bird.
The a cappella choral piece, based on a medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary, was composed by the Trappist monk, Father Chrysogonus Waddell, OCSO. Waddell’s interpretation “hearkens to chant and polyphonic melodies from the canon of Catholic sacred music,” folk choir director J.J. Wright ’14MSM, ’17DMA says.
The recording in the film, which follows the title character through her senior year at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California, comes from the folk choir’s 1996 album Prophets of Joy.