The long wait: thirty years without a new hotel

Mishawaka · 1968–1995

After 1968 the city tried for three decades to land a hotel, and the record of the trying is De Kever's. The commissioned history states the arc in his words: "For years, city officials had tried in vain to attract national hotel and motel chains to the Princess City." The hopes are dated in the record. In 1988 Donald Cressy's plan for Edison Lakes, the 700-acre corporate park on the north side, counted "a hotel" among the uses hoped for the ground. Downtown, after the old City Hall at First and Church was demolished, "the redevelopment department attempted unsuccessfully to get a private developer to build a hotel or office building on the site" — the new police station opened there in 1995 instead. The riverfront courtship ran longest and failed longest: "City officials had spent decades trying to attract an upscale hotel to the riverfront but to no avail." What ended the wait was not any of the courted sites but the Grape Road corridor's retail gravity: "Those efforts finally paid off in 1995 when five hotels opened on the north side of town: Varsity Clubs of America, Holiday Inn Express, Courtyard by Marriott, Fairfield Inn, and Hampton Inn. Soon, numerous hotels were being built along University Drive, North Main Street, and Day Road." The five names are the chain era's founding record for Mishawaka, printed at the strength of the city's own commissioned history; the individual courses of the 1995 Holiday Inn Express and Hampton Inn — their sites, their fates, whether either is the house of its name that stands today — are not established in the record reached, and the Hampton Inn & Suites standing at Heritage Square is a documented house of 2014, not shown to be the 1995 one.

Sources:

1. De Kever, The History of Mishawaka (commissioned) — the quoted passages whole: the years of trying, the downtown site, the 1995 five, the corridors of building after; read whole. De Kever (2021), via the History Press — the riverfront sentence.
2. This build's Neighborhoods fragment — the Edison Lakes plan of 1988 and the hotel among its hoped-for uses.