The migration: from Lincoln Way to McKinley Avenue and Grape Road

1949 — 1984 · the corridor's older roots

The downtown and Lincoln Way ground: The trade's first geography was the horse trade's: Main Street and the streets off it, where the 1902 blacksmiths stood, where Nye-Fulton's Lincoln-Mercury store would stand at 201 South Main in 1963, and where the companion-make points clustered in the 1950s. Its second geography was Lincoln Way, the Lincoln Highway's road through the city: the Hinkle Ford branch at 215–217 West in 1921, Gates at 202–04 East by 1949, and then the west end filling in — Dillon and Miller successively at 2102 West, Stewart's Kaiser-Frazer garage at 2720 West, D. L. Miller's lot at 2703 West. By the 1956 canvass Lincoln Way West was an auto row in fact, a generation before anyone called the pattern by that name.

The McKinley turn: The third geography begins in 1950, when Brook Motor Sales opened its Studebaker store at 916 East McKinley Avenue — a highway address, on the road east out of the city, with room for a lot. Gates's move to 666 West McKinley between 1956 and 1963 made the avenue the trade's center of gravity: two of the city's three surviving franchise houses on one avenue, the third — Jordan — holding the Jefferson Boulevard corner it had held since 1949. When the Grape Road corridor rose in the mall era it did not invent the pattern; it extended it north. The documented hinge is 1984, when the Gurley Leep group partnered with the city of Mishawaka to invest in the Grape Road corridor — a dealer group and a city building an auto row together, on the record, as a matter of policy. The row that stands on Grape Road and McKinley today is the third form of a geography the directories watch being drawn since 1921.

Sources:

1. Polk's South Bend and Mishawaka directories, 1921, 1949, 1956 and 1963 (read first-hand) — the addresses of the successive canvasses assembled above: the Hinkle branch and the 1921 garages; the 1949 Lincoln Way listings east and west; Brook Motor Sales at 916 E. McKinley Ave. from the 1956 canvass; the 1963 listings (Gates at 666 W. McKinley Ave., Nye-Fulton at 201 S. Main, Jordan at 609 E. Jefferson Blvd.).
2. Studebaker Drivers Club dealer register — Brook Motor Sales at 916 E. McKinley from 1950.
3. Gurley Leep Automotive, the house's own account, and the South Bend Tribune, 30 April 2026 — the group's partnership with the city of Mishawaka in the Grape Road corridor from 1984; the group's Mishawaka headquarters on Grape Road.