The swimming life: river water, a wading pool, and two city pools

THE FAMILY COURSE OF THE POOLS · SHARED WITH THE PARKS RECORD

The line between this entry and the parks record is stated once, here: the parks leg owns the pools as park plant — their building, their grounds, their place in the park system. This entry owns the swimming life lived in them: the seasons, the children, the closings as they were experienced. The two records share the founding facts, and where this build's own two passes disagree on those facts, the disagreement is printed whole below rather than silently harmonized.

Before any pool, the river was the swimming water: the parks record carries a river-swimming era on the St. Joseph, and notes honestly that its end is not documented — the era faded rather than closed. The first built water for small children was the Battell Park wading pool, a circular WPA work of the late 1930s, companion to the park's 1936–37 rock garden; the parks record notes it survived to the 1995 National Register documentation, one of the few wading pools of its kind not removed after the polio scares emptied such pools across the country. The wading pool is the characteristic children's water of the prewar city: ankle-deep, public, and free.

Then the conflict, printed whole. The neighborhoods record of this history dates Mishawaka's first city-operated public pool to Mary Gibbard Park, at 1024 Somerset Avenue: built early in 1961 and opened in July 1961. The parks record states, of the Merrifield Complex, that "municipal swimming proper begins 1968." What the outside record fixes is the pair's later coexistence: Tribune briefs of 2001–02 speak plainly of "the two Mishawaka city pools, Merrifield and Mary Gibbard," name a pool director, Kevin Carter, at Mary Gibbard, and note that pool's seasonal closing in August 2001. Mary Gibbard's own end as a pool came in 2018, when a million-dollar park investment replaced the old pool — described in the record, with a rounding the arithmetic does not quite carry, as the sixty-year-old pool: 1961 to 2018 is fifty-seven years — with a splash pad, a bike park, and a pavilion. The founding-order question (which pool was the city's first) is settled in Mary Gibbard's favor by the neighborhoods record's dated account unless the Merrifield claim is read as a claim about scale rather than priority; the build prints both and flags the conform for assembly.

Merrifield is the swimming life's center regardless of the ordering. The complex opened in 1968 — Mayor Margaret Prickett's administration; an Olympic-size pool, a diving tower, and the ice rink of the skating entry — built, in the parks record's framing, against the drift of a city whose young people said there was nothing to do here. Two generations of Mishawaka summers ran through its water. Its best-documented recent season is 2022: that June, a juvenile fight closed the pool briefly, and it reopened on a season-pass-only basis under Parks Superintendent Phil Blasko, as the Tribune reported on 21 June 2022 — the swimming life's ordinary troubles (crowds, rules, who may come in) recorded at the same municipal scale as its founding. The system's present form, as a closing line: six splash pads across the parks by the 2022 activity guide, the Central Park spray pad of 2015 among them, and the Mary Gibbard ground given over to splash pad and bike park — the wading pool's descendants, ankle-deep and free again, on the far side of the pool century.

Sources:

1. The parks and neighborhoods records of this history — the river-swimming era and its undocumented end; the Battell wading pool (WPA, late 1930s; surviving to the 1995 National Register record); the Mary Gibbard pool (built early 1961, opened July 1961; the 2018 million-dollar replacement); the Merrifield Complex (1968, Mayor Margaret Prickett); the six splash pads and the Central Park spray pad (2015) of the 2022 activity guide.
2. South Bend Tribune, 2001–02 briefs — "the two Mishawaka city pools, Merrifield and Mary Gibbard"; pool director Kevin Carter; Mary Gibbard's August 2001 seasonal closing.
3. South Bend Tribune, 21 June 2022 — the Merrifield pool's brief closure after a juvenile fight and its season-pass-only reopening under Superintendent Phil Blasko.