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Malls & Shopping Centers
Businesses carried Granger's own centres whole, but two checklist lines were never run: the downtown that was unmade in the cities its residents used, and dead retail ground rebuilt. Both are run here — the first in downtown South Bend, where the renewal, the cleared hole and the mall that stayed on paper are all documented in the city's own redevelopment record; the second on South Bend's south side and on Mishawaka's McKinley Avenue, where the closed Martin's ground named in this run's brief has since been rebuilt and trades again.
The downtown unmade: renewal, the hole, and the mall that stayed on paper
1968–1980 · DOWNTOWN SOUTH BEND, AT BOUNDARY SIZE
Granger never had a downtown to unmake — Businesses opens with that documented absence — so the unmaking is carried where it happened, in the downtown its residents shopped, at boundary size with the line stated. South Bend's Central Downtown Urban Renewal Project, Indiana R-66, was already a public plan by March 1968, when the downtown council unveiled the model: a remodelled core with a shopping mall, an eleven-acre cultural center, and two new parking garages, on a project the federal government was to fund at two-thirds of a cost put at some 21 million dollars in the school-paper account of the unveiling. The clearance was real even where the mall was not. The History Museum's lost-landmarks record states it plainly: as part of downtown renewal, in 1973 the South Bend Redevelopment Commission cleared buildings such as the Philadelphia Restaurant and the Sally Swiss Cafeteria on the east side of Michigan Street between Washington and Colfax; “the plan proposed a giant retail-mall-office complex for the space, but it remained empty for several years” — filled only by a Bicentennial fireworks display in 1976 and by excess snow from the blizzard of 1978 — “local residents started calling it ‘the hole’ until First Source Bank built their spectacular First Source Bank Center in 1980.”
The mall scheme itself stayed on paper, and the paper survives. The Redevelopment Commission's special meeting of August 12, 1977, was called for one purpose: the legal report on “the proposal of the Century Center Mall” — an investor group's plan, requiring an amendment to the Urban Renewal Plan for Area C, encompassing “the Block containing the ‘hole’,” the block west of it, the Odd Fellows Building block and the Sherland Building block, with acquisition of everything in the two-block area bounded by Washington, Main, Jefferson and St. Joseph streets except the Sherland Building and the existing parking garage, demolition and site clearance to follow, and an elevated mini-mall across to the Civic Center. No Century Center Mall was ever built; Century Center itself rose as the civic and convention center, and the hole's ground went to the bank tower of 1980. The parallel outdoor scheme fared no better in the end: five blocks of Michigan Street, bypassed by the rebuilt US 31, were closed to vehicles and opened about 1975 as the River Bend Plaza pedestrian mall, torn out in the early 1990s when Michigan Street was restored to traffic. For Granger itself, the unbuilt-mall test was run separately — the Tribune planning file and the open web swept for an unbuilt enclosed or corridor mall scheme on the CDP's own ground — and it is a tested negative: the corridor schemes the record holds (Gumwood Village, the SR 23 and Adams office-retail proposal) were smaller centres argued over and reshaped, not a mall that stayed on paper, and no Granger mall scheme stands in the record reached.
Sources: The History Museum (historymuseumsb.org), Local Lost Landmarks, “The Hole” (clearance 1973, the proposed complex, the 1980 bank center); City of South Bend, Redevelopment Commission minutes, special meeting August 12, 1977, and regular meeting August 3, 1973 (the Century Center Mall proposal, Resolution 540, and the R-66 plan, via docs.southbendin.gov); the Old Hickory (South Bend Jackson), March 8, 1968 (the 1968 mall-and-cultural-center model and its funding frame); Jim Grey's River Bend Plaza retrospective from Center for History photographs (the c. 1975 pedestrian mall and its early-1990s removal).
Dead ground rebuilt: the demolished mall, the power centre beside it, and the McKinley Avenue plaza
1973–2026 · SOUTH BEND'S SOUTH SIDE AND MISHAWAKA'S McKINLEY AVENUE, AT BOUNDARY SIZE
On Granger's own ground the dead-centre test stays as Businesses left it: Heritage Square foreclosed in January 2011 and trades on in its original open-air form — dead debt, not dead ground. The rebuilt dead ground stands across the line, in two forms, and both are carried here at boundary size. The extreme form first in its verified shape: Scottsdale Mall, South Bend's enclosed mall at 1240 East Ireland Road — anchors L. S. Ayres, Ayr-Way (later Target) and Montgomery Ward, more than 100 stores at its height — declined through the late 1980s and 1990s, was bought in 2002–03 by a Kite Realty / Kimco Realty partnership joined by Schottenstein, and was demolished through 2003–04 and rebuilt open-air as Erskine Village, a power centre of some 510,000 square feet on 65 acres with private investment exceeding 75 million dollars by the City of South Bend's 2011 accounting, its anchors Target, Kohl's and TJ Maxx as of the current leasing record. Dates print in their small conflict, whole: the mall histories give Scottsdale's opening as August 1, 1973, and its redevelopment opening as 2004; the city's own 2011 release dates Erskine Village's opening to 2005. Beside it stands the district's second power centre, Erskine Commons, anchored by a Walmart Supercenter and Lowe's at Ireland Road and South Michigan Street. The checklist's parenthetical — “the landfill that became a power centre” — was tested against this ground and does not verify: no source reached, in the city redevelopment record, the Tribune redevelopment file or the leasing record, places a landfill under Erskine Commons or anywhere in the Erskine district. The landfill clause prints as a tested negative for this ground, not as a fact about it; if it belongs to a sister city's build, it stays there.
The second form is the ground this run's brief named: the closed McKinley Avenue Martin's site. Martin's closed its store at 424 West McKinley Avenue in Mishawaka on October 1, 2006 — the departure folded inside Heritage Square's opening, as Businesses carries it — and the plaza it left, McKinley Commons at 420 West McKinley Avenue (88,294 square feet on 9.33 acres at Grape Road), languished for years with its Kmart, which closed in 2018 as the region's last. The rebuild is documented in the Tribune's August 25, 2023, account: the anchor space broken into smaller pieces, the lot repaved, sidewalks and landscaping improved by the city, new tenancy in Smoothie King, John's Auto Spa, Big Lots, Starbucks and Oak Street Health, and Barton's Home Outlet opening in mid-September 2023 in about 25,000 square feet of the former Kmart — “the turnaround of a once busy shopping plaza that had been languishing for several years,” with the former Martin's space among those subdivided and re-tenanted. Dead supermarket ground, rebuilt piecemeal rather than demolished whole: the corridor's second rebuilding pattern, printed at the boundary line where it happened, in Mishawaka.
Sources: Erskine Village / Scottsdale Mall histories and the CBRE leasing flyer (anchors, demolition 2003–04, the 1973 opening); City of South Bend news release, July 12, 2011 (the Erskine Village TIF: 65 acres, more than 510,000 square feet created since its opening in 2005, private investment exceeding $75 million); the Erskine Commons leasing flyer (560 West Ireland Road; Walmart Supercenter and Lowe's as anchors); South Bend Tribune, August 25, 2023 (the McKinley Commons turnaround, the former Martin's / Kmart / CVS space subdivided, the Home Outlet opening); Bradley Company, McKinley Commons flyer (420 West McKinley Avenue; 88,294 sq ft; 9.33 acres).