The Music Rooms as Music Rooms

The bars fragment tells its rooms as taverns; this entry takes the same rooms as what two of them also were — music rooms — and frames the class. The class has one great Mishawaka instance, and it was twice-lived. Martha's Midway Tavern at 810 West Fourth Street, whose whole course the bars section tells — the Antheunes family's house of 1924, the bootleg garage, the 1930 padlock, repeal — became a music room at repeal: in Martha's 1933 remodeling the dance hall was redone with wood floors and the atmosphere of an outdoor Belgian beer garden, and Martha booked live jump, swing and country-western music, bringing musicians in from all over, behind the Belgian lamps that stayed on the walls for the rest of the century. The room's first life as a music room was thus a dance hall's: neighborhood, Belgian, working-class, and booked by its keeper. Its second life began in 1989, when Martha's daughter Albertina Wassenhove — who has run the Midway since Martha's death in 1990 and books its talent herself — put the Swingin' Crawdads on its stage, the start of the blues-booking era that made the tavern a blues room of regional standing under the billing Home of the Blues, its walls carrying more than five thousand signatures and the Chicago Sun-Times carrying its fame in Dave Hoekstra's November 2010 profile. One room, two music lives, sixty years of bookings between them: that is the twice-lived room of the checklist's form, and its form's other named instances — the Vegetable Buddies blues room, the Seahorse Cabaret of a named owner's keeping — are the sister city's and Fort Wayne's, boundary-printed as the frame, not claimed here. Mishawaka's second room of the class stands at class size beside it: the Phoenix Bar & Grill, the room the annual march has ended at since the crawl's first documented years — the Tribune's Phoenix feature of 2 November 2026 records a good chunk of that year's five hundred marchers ending their night there — a room whose music is the crowd's own occasion, kept in the fragment's roster of the rooms that carried the century. The class closes at its documented size: two rooms in one small city where the music was the point, one of them for ninety years in one family's hands — and the Midway, operating in November 2026, is the county's proof that a music room can be a century institution without ever calling itself a venue.