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The one local district designation the record reached carries whole is a park. The Petro Park Local Historic District — the Eberhart–Petro ground on the city's north side, named for the mayor who figures in this history's Government account — was designated through the full machinery, and the application file preserves every step with its date. The Historic Preservation Commission reviewed the proposal on 15 February 2000, with no public input recorded. The Board of Parks and Recreation approved it on 13 March 2000. The Commission approved it on 4 April 2000. The Common Council took it through first reading on 17 April, second reading on 1 May, and a public hearing on 15 May 2000 — and this section's cover sheet records the result in the same line as the hearing: "Approved and Designated as a Historic District: 5/15/2000."
The application was the Commission's own. The file names the applicant as the City of Mishawaka Historic Preservation Commission, Roger Dooley, chairperson, and its statement of goals is the closest thing to a preservation creed the Mishawaka record prints: "The preservation and conservation of the unique character of many of Mishawaka's residential, recreational and commercial areas is the principal goal of the commission," which holds that preserving the elements that make those areas attractive protects "the linkage or continuity of sites, building, structures, or objects to its historical context of the development of Mishawaka." The district's substance is the relief-era park itself: thirteen structures and features are inventoried in the application, among them the paired six-foot fieldstone entry monuments on Shanower Drive at Jefferson Boulevard, and the application's history argues the district as one of the seven recreational areas of the city that benefited from Roosevelt-era work relief. The designation file pairs the application with preservation standards for the district — the rules by which the designated ground would be kept. A park, designated for the work the unemployed built in it in the 1930s, protected by the standards of 2000: the Petro Park file is Mishawaka preservation's most complete surviving act, and it is printed here at the size the file supports.