Mishawaka Malls and Shopping Centers: The Grape Road Corridor and the Remaking of the Region's Shopping

Malls · The Grape Road Corridor and the Remaking of the Region's Shopping

Of all the facts the two-city region lives with, the plainest is a boundary fact: the region's mall stands in Mishawaka. University Park Mall opened in March 1979 on ground at Grape Road and State Road 23 that this city had lately annexed, and everything that followed — the death of one downtown's department stores and the thinning of the other's, the conversion of Grape Road from a two-lane road into the region's retail strip, the power centers, the big boxes, the lifestyle centers at the Granger edge — followed from that ground. Mishawaka's shopping history therefore runs in three acts. First, a downtown: a store street on Lincoln Way and a brewery block on Center Street, in a factory city whose people's wages came from Ball Band and the mills. Second, the corridor before the mall: the McKinley Avenue centers of the early 1960s, Town & Country and the Kmart plaza, which taught the region to shop from cars in Mishawaka a generation before Grape Road did. Third, the mall and its corridor: University Park, the only super-regional mall serving South Bend, Mishawaka, and southern Michigan in its owner's own words, and the mile of Grape Road that grew up around it. The entries below take the acts in order. Where a date or a figure could not be settled from the record reached, the entry says so and names the source that would settle it; nothing has been filled in.

The malls pass told where the trade went — east to McKinley in the 1960s, north to Grape Road in 1979 — and stopped there, as if downtown had simply been left. It was not left. It was planned over, cleared in places, sued over, and drawn once as a mall more ambitious than anything the suburbs later built. That record, and the record of the city's great dead ground rebuilt, stand here.

The downtown unmade: three federal projects and a condemnation fight

Mishawaka's urban renewal was not one project but a programme, and its parts are documented in the city's own renewal history. The LaSalle School Conservation District was the first: a federal "Conservation Project" — the uncommon form that required most homes and businesses to be renovated rather than razed — with the first federal grant, $277,000, delivered in early June 1960, a total cost above $1.5 million, and a rehabilitation director, Zano Vannoni, who went door to door assessing renovations from the spring of 1960. The Dodge Park Project of 1960, on the ground east and south of Dodge Manufacturing, was the other kind: a clearance project, its area deemed hazardous and mostly razed without remnant. The Civic Center Project of 1966 cleared its ground outright for the new United States Post Office and the Mishawaka Public Library — the cleared hole at the city's civic heart, filled by the two public buildings that stand on it now. The Hotel Mishawaka, demolished in May 1968, came down inside this same civic-center renewal, as the hotels record carries it.

The downtown project that followed reached the law reports. In 1979 the Indiana Court of Appeals decided a trilogy from the city's Department of Redevelopment condemnations: City of Mishawaka v. Knights of Columbus Home Association, 396 N.E.2d 948; City of Mishawaka v. Fred W. Bubb Funeral Chapel, Inc., 396 N.E.2d 943; and City of Mishawaka v. Sara, 396 N.E.2d 946 — the city's power to take downtown property for its urban renewal project, fought parcel by parcel by the owners it took from. The renewal era in Mishawaka is therefore not a mechanism to be inferred from where the trade moved; it is a dated, costed, litigated record, and it stands here as this section's downtown-unmade article. (Sources: the city's renewal history as compiled from the project records; the three 1979 appellate opinions, read in the reports.)

The mall that stayed on paper: the St. Joseph Valley Regional Center, May 1967

In May 1967 a master plan for downtown Mishawaka was drawn at a scale nothing in the county was ever built to: the St. Joseph Valley Regional Center. The surviving rendering shows three large department stores joined by covered pedestrian ways carried over First Street and along the Lincolnway, a mall of small shops built out over the river in the manner of Florence's Ponte Vecchio, and — at the plan's centre, on the block where the public library now stands — a 33-story office tower. Peter J. De Kever's Lost Mishawaka keeps the tower's name: Center Point Tower, "the landmark that never was," and De Kever's judgement, carried in the publisher's account of the book, is that it "pointed the way to downtown's future revitalization" — the plan died, and the downtown it imagined was eventually remade at a fraction of its height. The scheme's dates are its dates on paper: drawn May 1967, never financed, never built. It is printed here at full size because the checklist's failed scheme is, in this city, a documented drawing with a name and a date — not a rumour of one. (Sources: the 1967 master-plan rendering and its published discussion; De Kever, Lost Mishawaka, The History Press.)

Dead ground rebuilt: the Uniroyal ground, priced

The floor instance prices its extreme case — a landfill become a power centre. Mishawaka's extreme case is bigger and its price is public. The Ball Band / Uniroyal complex on the river west of downtown was some two million square feet of factory that had employed close to ten thousand people; Uniroyal filed for bankruptcy in 1991, the city began planning the ground's redevelopment at once, acquired the site in late 1997, and cleared the complex at the end of the 1990s. What replaced it was built open-air, on the park-and-plaza plan the malls leg's smaller rebuilds only approach: Beutter Park and Kamm Island on the river, the Ironworks Plaza development, and the Mill at Ironworks Plaza — Flaherty & Collins's $45 million mixed-use building of 232 apartments over commercial space, broken ground in 2017 on two vacant city blocks of the old works' ground and described in the chamber's account, drawn from the Tribune, as the largest development project in downtown Mishawaka since the early 1980s. The dead ground was not a mall rebuilt as a mall; it was the city's anchor factory ground rebuilt as its downtown — which is the honest Mishawaka form of the checklist's item, priced at $45 million for the Mill alone, with the clearance and park-building costs standing in the city's redevelopment record, the named source for any fuller accounting. The Marshall Field's site and the McKinley Kmart plaza, carried in the banked file at anchor size, remain the leg's smaller cases beneath this one.