The nightclub test, and the adult-business record

1968 — 2002

The test, printed as it stands: South Bend's nightlife record carries big rooms — the Heartland, Club Fever, the dance-club era — and this section ran the same test on Mishawaka: no nightclub of that kind, no disco or dance club with a documented course of its own, stands in the record reached. The city's after-dark scale ran smaller and longer: the tavern, the dance hall (the Midway's, from 1933), the members' bar, the music room (the Phoenix's stage, from 2002), and the theaters' and halls' dances of their own sections. The largest entertainment conversion in the city's record — the Kamm & Schellinger brewery complex at 100 Center, remade from 1968 — is documented as shops, restaurants, artist studios and a cinema (the cinema is the Theaters section's); no nightclub or disco at 100 Center was found in the record reached, and none is printed. The negative is the finding: Mishawaka's nightlife is a tavern history, and the big-room chapter belongs to its sister city.

The adult record, from the court file: What Mishawaka did have, for twenty years, was an adult bookstore. Pleasureland Museum, Inc. v. Beutter, the Seventh Circuit's decision of 1 May 2002, records it in the court's own words: Ed and Shirlee Balanow operated Pleasureland Museum as a sexually oriented business in Mishawaka — adult materials sold and rented, and private viewing booths for adult films; it was not a bar, served no alcohol, and offered no live entertainment. In 1999 the common council enacted Ordinance No. 44-15, a licensing and regulatory scheme for sexually oriented businesses — Chapter 125 of the city code — governing location, signage, open booths, and live entertainment, which its §125.19 regulated while the court's footnote records the operative fact: "No business in Mishawaka currently offers adult-oriented live entertainment." The ordinance was challenged and upheld in its entirety in the district court; the Seventh Circuit affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded in part, sending the ordinance's ban on sexual devices back for the consideration it had not received. The South Bend Tribune, in 2004, carried the ordinance's afterlife: upheld in federal court and by the Seventh Circuit, it "is now a model for hundreds of communities across the country." The gentlemen's-club test therefore closes on the court's own sentence: in the whole adult-business record of this city — one bookstore, twenty years, one ordinance, one federal case — no gentlemen's club, and no adult live entertainment of any kind, ever stood in Mishawaka.

Sources:

1. Pleasureland Museum, Inc. v. Beutter, No. 00-3118 (7th Cir., 1 May 2002), read first-hand: the Balanows' twenty years of operation; the business's character (materials and viewing booths); Ordinance No. 44-15 (1999) and Chapter 125 (§125.02 definitions; §125.14 booths; §125.16 signage; §125.19 live entertainment; §125.21 fines; §125.22 devices); footnote 2, "No business in Mishawaka currently offers adult-oriented live entertainment"; the judgment affirmed in part, reversed in part and remanded in part, the §125.22 question remanded. District proceedings: No. 99 C 457 (N.D. Ind.), the ordinance upheld in its entirety below.
2. South Bend Tribune (2004, library record) — the Mishawaka ordinance "upheld in federal court, and by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals… now a model for hundreds of communities across the country." The nightclub test: the 100 Center conversion at documented strength (1976 designation study; Businesses and Malls sections); the South Bend bars section of this history — the big-room record (the Heartland, Club Fever) against which the test was run.