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The machinery's hardest test came the same winter as its first district. In January 2000, houses on the south side of Lincoln Way East stood slated for demolition — three of them, with three others on the block, for a CVS development. On 4 January 2000 the Historic Preservation Commission declared the houses historic and gave them an interim designation that would prevent any demolition for ninety days. The device is the emergency brake of Indiana preservation law: a temporary local protection, imposed first and argued afterward, that freezes a threatened place while the full designation process runs. Owners of three of the homes answered in St. Joseph Superior Court, suing the Commission; the Tribune reported that the suit, filed that winter, could halt any further designation process until a judge decided whether the interim designation was legal. The outcome of the suit is not in the record reached and is named as a gap; what the episode establishes at full strength is that by 2000 Mishawaka's Commission held, and used, the interim power — and that its use was contested in court the first time it saved houses from a signed demolition plan.
Two years later the fight moved to Indianapolis, and the Commission opposed its own side's reinforcements. In February 2002 the Commission voted to ask its staff to tell the area's state legislators of its opposition to a legislative amendment, sought by State Representative Craig Fry of Mishawaka, that would have designated a separate Lincoln Way East preservation commission to protect seven houses between Brook and Capital Avenues from demolition when Capital Avenue — Indiana 331 — was built. Fry told the Tribune he was trying to save seven houses; Mayor Robert Beutter called the amendment "meddling" in Mishawaka's affairs. The Commission's opposition, as the Tribune's account frames it, was jurisdictional: the city already had a preservation commission, and a state-created rival for one street was an end-run around it. The same meeting's minutes, as reported, show the Commission "talked again" about making part of West Mishawaka Avenue a historic district and about requesting more money from the city budget — and the Tribune's headline for the day was "Lots of talk, no action from historic panel." The preservation movement's condition in 2002 is in that headline and in the vote together: a body jealous of its authority, short of money, and slower than the demolitions it existed to prevent. Whether the seven Capital Avenue houses stand today is not established in the record reached; the Indiana 331 corridor's building is carried in this history's streets and businesses records, and the houses' fate is named as a gap in this section's note.