Every early house, with its capacity — and the Grape Road house identified

1909–2018

No picture house ever stood in Granger proper — that test is now run and printed — and the houses that served this ground stand in Mishawaka and South Bend, each with its seats counted. Mishawaka's early roll, from the Tivoli's National Register nomination, the fullest theatre census this county owns: the Century, 600 seats, opened 1909 in a remodeled existing building; the Temple, 500 seats, opened 1915, likewise remodeled; and the Tivoli, 208 North Main Street, built 1924–25, 1,500 seats, the city's largest house and its only purpose-built palace — opening night May 21, 1925, drew two showings to crowds of 2,500 to 3,000. South Bend's downtown roll runs larger: the Blackstone (from 1949 the State), 2,200 seats, 1921; the Palace (today's Morris), 2,700 seats, opened October 1922; the Colfax, 2,000 seats by its Register nomination (2,100 in the History Museum's count — the conflict is printed, not harmonized), 1928. Against that roll, the rented house of Religion's founding story can now be named. Granger Community Church's cinema was General Cinema Corporation's six-screen complex at 6424 Grape Road, Mishawaka — the house General Cinema, operator of University Park Mall's three-screen theater, built outside the mall in 1986. The identification is documentary, not conjectural: the mall record dates the six-screen building to 1986, the year of the church's founding; the church's own telling seats the theater "in the midst of construction" on the Grape Road corridor, beside the Service Merchandise store whose site is today's Best Buy — and the six-screen house stands in that same Best Buy center, behind the Olive Garden, in its review record; and the "GCC" poster misreading only works against a General Cinema house. The house's course after the church left it: it passed to Cinemark and traded for years as the Cinemark Movies 6, the corridor's second-run house at $1.50 a ticket; it closed in early spring 2016; and by April 2018 it had been leveled, its lot vacant. For one auditorium's Sunday mornings across its first winter, the corridor's second multiplex was also Granger's first church — the only cinema course this ground has ever owned, and it is now a vacant lot on Grape Road.

From the Tivoli Theater National Register nomination (the Century, Temple, and Tivoli capacities and dates; opening night, May 21, 1925); the Colfax nomination and The History Museum for the South Bend counts; the University Park Mall record (General Cinema's six screens outside the mall, 1986); Michiana Life, June 2016 (the church's own account: the theater under construction, the Service Merchandise landmark, the poster); the Cinemark Movies 6 record, 6424 Grape Road (Cinemark's purchase from General Cinema; closure, early spring 2016; demolished by April 2018).