The arcades: the fun-center form the record gives it

AN ANCHOR ENTRY · 1979 TO 2004

This entry is deliberately kept at anchor size, because that is the size the record gives the arcade in Mishawaka: the coin-op era's named, dated arcade — the mall arcade of University Park Mall's decades, with its own name and founding — is not established in the record reached, and the gap is printed below with its settling sources. What the record does document is the form that absorbed the arcade: the family entertainment center, in which games stood under the same roof as lanes, courses, and food, and whose Mishawaka arrivals are dated.

The form reached Main Street first by evolution. The Putt-Putt that opened in 1979 as a franchised miniature-golf course trades, in the present record, as Putt-Putt Fun Center — the name itself the evidence that the single-game ground grew the fun center's wider offer across its decades, its fiberglass menagerie growing with it. The form arrived whole in 2004, when Strikes and Spares opened in the former Spiece building at Grape and Douglas as an entertainment center by design and by the Tribune's own word for it — bowling presented from opening day as one attraction among the building's modern features rather than the whole of the business. The arcade's Mishawaka history, so far as the freely reachable record states it, is that absorption: the games arcade survives in the record as a department of the fun center and a feature of the bowling house — the present-day Parkway Lanes is described in its visitor record with an arcade at the center of the building, lanes to both sides — rather than as a named house of its own.

The gap, named: a Mishawaka arcade at naming strength — the University Park Mall arcade of the coin-op decades, or any standalone video arcade of the 1980s — awaits its settling sources: the mall's tenant directories and leasing records, the amusement listings of the city directories, and the Tribune's business columns. The mall's own record in this history carries its anchors and its course whole; the arcade, when the tenant record is read, will take its size from that reading and not before.

Sources:

1. Indiana Preservation (Indiana Landmarks), July/August 2026 — the Putt-Putt Fun Center name and the course's evolution, as carried in the miniature-golf entry.
2. South Bend Tribune, 2004 — the Strikes and Spares opening, "entertainment center" (ProQuest Tribune archive, catalogue record).
3. Parkway Lanes, visitor record — the arcade at the building's center in the present house, read November 2026; present-state evidence.
4. The malls record of this history — University Park Mall's anchors and course, carried whole there.