The fights: the Tivoli, Prohibition, and the epidemic that closed the stages

WHAT GOT SAVED, WHAT GOT LOST, AND WHO DECIDED

The Tivoli is the theaters leg's house; its end is culture's fight, and the record of the end is unusually blunt. The theater opened on May 21, 1925, on North Main Street — 950 seats on the main floor and 450 above, under a silver dome, with a concert organ — and its glory days as a movie house and live venue ended in the 1960s. What followed is the fight's first fact: the city's grandest room spent its last working decades as the Cinema Art, an adult movie theater, the palace of the pageant age reduced to the one use no civic campaign would ever be mounted to defend. It closed in the early 1990s. Then the fight proper: efforts were made, in the commissioned history's words, "to save the building, restore its historic appearance, and return it to use as a performing arts center," and they failed against a named pair of causes — "the community's lack of interest for the project and political leaders' opposition." The redevelopment department demolished the Tivoli and two adjacent buildings in 2005; a drug store stands on the site; and the city's own history closes the account with a sentence no preservationist wrote for it: "Mishawakans were left to grieve the loss of an irreplaceable jewel from the city's past." The sentence matters to this section because of who is speaking. The grief is in the official record, entered by the city's commissioned historian — the culture registering its own verdict that in 2005 it had not cared enough, in time.

The Tivoli stood in a line of losses the heritage record carries whole — the Hotel Mishawaka razed in the 1960s, the Northwest Block demolished through the 1970s and early 1980s — and against one standing exception, 100 Center, saved by conversion in the same decades. Culture's share of that record is the pattern: Mishawaka saved the brewery and lost the theater, kept the industrial shell and let the ceremonial room go, and the difference tracks not the buildings' beauty but their uses — the brewery could hold shops; the theater could only hold an audience, and assembling one was the work nobody funded. Two earlier fights bound the entry. Prohibition was the culture war the state and nation fought through this city's signature industry: Indiana's anti-liquor law and the federal amendment stopped Kamm & Schellinger's beer in its tracks, and the brewery answered in May 1920 with a nonalcoholic cereal beverage called The Arrow — "It Always Hits the Spot" — and a line of soft drinks, the city's drink culture converted by statute to soda pop for thirteen years. And in the fall of 1918, the Spanish influenza closed the culture entire for a season: from mid-October to November 15 public gatherings were prohibited and churches and schools shut, in a city that counted more than three hundred cases and some twenty-five dead — the pageants and parades of the surrounding years read differently against the documented fact that the whole apparatus of assembly could be, and was, switched off by epidemic order.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Tivoli's 1925 opening at pointer size and its Cinema Art years, closing, failed rescue, the named causes, the 2005 demolition and drug store, and the "irreplaceable jewel" verdict, quoted; the renewal losses and the influenza closure of gatherings, churches and schools, October–November 1918; the brewery's Prohibition conversion and The Arrow, May 1920.
2. The theaters and heritage records of this history — the Tivoli's architecture and the renewal losses whole, carried there.