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1976 — 1979
The act: The eighty-acre University Park Mall site at Grape and Cleveland Roads stood over a mile beyond the city limits. South Bend declined to annex it. Mayor Prickett agreed to take the site in and extend the city's utilities to it — the annexation the city's commissioned history calls Prickett's greatest legacy, and the act that made the Grape Road corridor Mishawaka's. The mall opened 14 March 1979, and the corridor it anchored remade the city's economy; the mall's own record stands whole in the malls record of this history.
The contrast is the controversy entry: Against 1905, when the farmers fought the city to the Supreme Court; against 1910, when River Park remonstrated and won; against 1961, when a hundred owners hired counsel and fought for seven years — no remonstrance against the mall annexation stands in the record reached. The largest prize in the city's annexation history arrived by agreement, because this time the ground's owners wanted in and the neighboring city had said no. The dispute the episode does document is between two cities, not between a city and its reached-for territory — and it was settled, in De Kever's telling, by one mayor's yes after the other's no.
Sources:
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — South Bend's refusal, Mayor Prickett's agreement and the utilities extension, as carried in the government record, Government.
- The malls record, Malls & Shopping — the mall's making, opening and course.