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1925 – 2007 · the documented murals, each at its record's size
The Tivoli's murals (1925): Mishawaka's grandest mural commission was painted for a movie palace. The Tivoli Theater of 1924–25 — whose building, backers and course stand whole in Theaters — carried wall and ceiling murals by the Chicago artist F. Myers, named in the theater's National Register nomination, beneath a silvered dome with vari-colored lights and a $3,500 chandelier. The murals' fate is the nomination's melancholy inventory, carried in Theaters and stated here as the works' fate: in the house's later lives the auditorium's walls and ceiling were painted black over all the original murals, and what survived beneath the paint survived with the house only until the building's demolition in 2005. The murals are the ledger's largest loss: the city's one documented commission from a named metropolitan muralist, destroyed by coats of paint decades before the wreckers arrived.
The fire mural (1954): The mural Mishawaka kept is a sign painter's. Lyman Unruh was a Mishawaka firefighter who also had a sign business; in 1954 he painted, for the old Station 3, a mural twenty feet by eight: Santa Claus on an old-fashioned fire truck, with landmarks of old Mishawaka in the background — the former Uniroyal and Ball Band buildings among them, and the spire of St. Joseph Catholic Church. Unruh himself restored the painting in 1969. The mural moved with the department — to the central fire station, and in 1991 to the Union Street station, where firefighters have set it out as their holiday greeting to passers-by, as they have since 1954. In the summer of 2007 the painter's son, Mike Unruh, spent the season repainting it — a fire-department heirloom in its third generation of care, and the city's longest-lived mural, made not by an imported artist but by a firefighter with a sign brush.
The children's museum mural: In Gallery Hall of the Hannah Lindahl Children's Museum, a large mural by Judith Goodrick Heying traced the local history from the Ice Age through the early 1800s, to the Potawatomi valley — a compressed history of the children's own ground, built to be touched. The museum's founding, work and undated closing stand in Museums; the mural is carried there and at anchor here as a documented work. Where the Heying mural rests tonight, the record reached does not say — Museums names the question and its settling sources, and this section carries the gap at the same strength.
Sources:
- Myers of Chicago; the black paint over the murals in the house's later years; the interior's survival beneath it to the 1991 closing.
- South Bend Tribune (December 2, 2007), "Son restores his father's mural" — Lyman Unruh's 1954 mural for Station 3, its size and subjects, his 1969 restoration, its moves of 1991 and its holiday display, and Mike Unruh's 2007 repainting, as preserved in the Cavemen-class alumni record.
- This build's Museums section — Judith Goodrick Heying's Gallery Hall mural at the Hannah Lindahl Children's Museum, and the open question of its present resting place.