The Kamm and Schellinger Brewery: the 1853 stack and the 100 Center

1853–PRESENT · 100 CENTER STREET

The complex: The Register's Mishawaka brewery listing, at 100 Center Street on the river and the mill race, takes in three buildings, and the nomination describes a complex that grew around them for seventy years: the original Brewery Building, the Stable Building of about 1855, and the Boiler House of about 1870 — with an ice house, a warehouse of about 1870, brewery additions of about 1875, a four-story steel-frame and reinforced-concrete building of about 1910, and a warehouse of about 1920 completing the works the form describes. The brewery building itself is mill construction in Chicago common brick painted red, on a rubble stone foundation, four stories tall, its front topped by an elaborate metal cornice and pediment framing the date 1853, a colonnaded cupola over a twelve-foot roof vent; below grade runs a brick-vaulted charcoal room about twelve feet high, sixteen feet wide and forty feet long, and the nomination notes the vestiges of belt-drive wheels and shafts in the fabric. The stable is L-shaped brick, its high trussed second floor built for feed over the horse stalls, three ventilating cupolas on its roof, corbelled brick at its rakes. The boiler house is one high bay built for three boilers under a steel-trussed hip roof, a half-round window with a carved stone keystone in its gable — and to its south stands the complex's signature: a formed brick smokestack 262 feet tall, corbelled brick and projected belt courses up its whole height. The nomination finds Italianate influences in the segmental arched windows and bracketed cornice; the Register's database classifies the style as Early Commercial; both stand. The builder and architect of record is John Wagner.

The dates, printed as the record carries them: The nomination's significance text, quoting the 1901 county history, dates the brewery's establishment to 1850, by Wagner — "but a small and primitive plant" — while the pediment over the front door, the form's specific date and the Register's significant years stand on 1853 for the buildings, with 1855 and 1870 following. The businesses record of this history owns the firm's course whole: Adolph Kamm and Clemens Dick bought the brewery in 1870, Dick sold out in 1880 and Nicholas Schellinger came in, the firm incorporated in 1883 at $65,000 capital, output ran about 30,000 barrels at the quoted account's date, and brewing ceased — in 1951 on the nomination's account, against the Tribune's 1952, the conflict printed whole in the businesses record. What concerns this chapter is the fabric's afterlife. The complex stood unoccupied until 1970, the nomination's continuation records, "when it was acquired and developed into the 100 Center Complex… a very successful preservation-adaptive use project" — the businesses and theaters records phase it as an entertainment-center conversion from 1968 and the 100 Center redevelopment of the 1970s, 120,000 square feet of shops, restaurants and residences, a small twin cinema in a brick extension on the boiler house's west among them. The 1853 pediment and the 262-foot stack stand over the riverfront still: the brewery is the oldest industrial building in the city to survive at complex scale, and its conversion is the city's largest work of adaptive reuse.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Kamm and Schellinger Brewery (1979), prepared by T. Brooks Brademas, managing partner, 100 Center Partnership, read first-hand — the three listed buildings and the complex's growth, the fabric in full, the 1853 pediment, the charcoal room, the 262-foot stack, the Italianate finding, the Wagner building credit, the 1850 establishment quotation against the buildings' 1853, and the adaptive-reuse continuation.
2. National Register Information System — listing 11 October 1979, #79000042; style Early Commercial; significant years 1853, 1855, 1870.
3. The businesses record of this history — the firm's course, the Kamm and Schellinger succession, the 1951/1952 cessation conflict, the 100 Center phases and the complex's present course, pointed to and not re-dug here.