Downtown first: the store street and the brewery block

LINCOLNWAY EAST · 100 CENTER FROM 1853 · THE PRE-CORRIDOR GEOGRAPHY

Before there were centers there was a street: Mishawaka's first shopping geography was its downtown, the store blocks along Lincoln Way East in the shadow of the Ball Band works, where a factory city's wages were spent a short walk from the plant gates. The full roster of that street at its peak — the department and variety stores, the clothiers and jewelers who stood on Lincoln Way in the downtown's best years — has not been pulled first-hand for this entry: the sources reached name the ground and its monuments rather than its merchants, and the roster is therefore stated here as a gap, not reconstructed from memory.

What the record does fix is downtown's surviving commercial monument. The Kamm and Schellinger Brewery stood at 100 Center Street: the brewery was built in 1853 and closed in 1951, and the complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 11 October 1979 — the same year, by a symmetry the record does not remark, that University Park Mall opened at the city's north edge. The brewery buildings were converted into the 100 Center complex of shops, restaurants, and residences, some 120,000 square feet in the riverfront blocks. The conversion's own date is one the record gives two ways, and both are printed: the National Register-derived account dates an entertainment center with a cinema on the ground from 1968, while the South Bend Regional Chamber's project account dates the complex's redevelopment to the 1970s, into mixed retail, residential, commercial, and office use. By the late 2010s the Chamber's account records the complex as mostly vacant. In July 2024 a developer proposed a transformation of 100 Center priced at $41.5 million; the proposal stands in the record as announced, and nothing in the record reached reports it accomplished.

The mechanism that emptied downtown is documented in the entries that follow, and its Mishawaka side can be stated plainly here: the trade did not vanish, it moved — first east along McKinley Avenue in the 1960s, then north to Grape Road in 1979 and after — and downtown's stores, built for a walking factory city, had no ground to answer ground given to cars. Downtown South Bend's parallel emptying is that city's own record and is told there; the shared cause, the mall on Mishawaka ground, is this section's subject.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places record for the Kamm and Schellinger Brewery, 100 Center Street (built 1853; closed 1951; listed 11 October 1979), and the Register-derived account of the 100 Center conversion — an entertainment center with a cinema from 1968.
2. South Bend Regional Chamber of Commerce, project account of 100 Center — redevelopment in the 1970s into mixed retail, residential, commercial, and office use; about 120,000 square feet; mostly vacant by the late 2010s.
3. WNDU, 25 July 2024 — the $41.5 million transformation proposed for 100 Center, reported as a proposal.
4. Settling sources: the Mishawaka-Penn Public Library's local-history collection; the City of Mishawaka's history timeline; the South Bend Tribune and Mishawaka Enterprise business record.