The Grape Road corridor whole: centers, big boxes, succession

1991–2026 · UNIVERSITY CENTER · MEIJER'S FIRST INDIANA STORE · THE STRIP AT FULL LENGTH

Grape Road filled in around the mall: in July 1991 the Mishawaka Common Council approved the rezoning for University Center, directly across Grape Road from the mall, and the center was trading by the autumn of 1993, when the Tribune recorded a restaurant preparing to open there by the end of September, two doors from Macri's Deli at 6502 Grape Road. That address carries the corridor's succession in miniature: a decade later it was a Best Buy — the electronics store has operated at University Center since 2003, in a building the leasing record gives at 50,000 square feet. In 1994 the corridor took the region's grocery future: Meijer's first store in Indiana opened on Grape Road in Mishawaka, on the company's own statement of the fact — the supercenter form arriving on the strip six years before it ringed the rest of the region. Farther along Grape, Wilshire Plaza worked through the standard big-box succession: its former Sam's Club box held a Burlington Coat Factory by 2000 — the Tribune marked the Burlington opening as a rejuvenation of the center's north side — with Hobby Lobby and Media Play anchoring the plaza's other end. Media Play is gone with its chain; the boxes remain, refilled.

The corridor's older strips aged in public. A Tribune retail column of 2000 noticed Grape Road Plaza, "an old strip center near Princess City Plaza," standing bare after Dazzlers and CD Exchange left it — the first generation of Grape Road storefronts already cycling out while the corridor was still young. The strip also fed the region in its own idiom: the Hacienda restaurant chain's own history dates its Grape Road house to 1983, four years after the mall, in the first wave of the corridor's restaurants. At the corridor's south end, across from the Grape and Day Plaza — a Cressy center of some 30,000 square feet at 4110–4150 Grape Road — stands the Whole Foods Market at 4230 Grape Road, a store the company styles "South Bend" at a Mishawaka address, the boundary confusion printed in the grocer's own name for it. The store's opening year was not reached in the sources used here; the company's own releases fix only the bound that a South Bend-area store stood among its three Indiana locations by August 2015. The opening year is named as a gap below, with its settling source.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, 16 July 1991 — the Mishawaka Common Council's approval of University Center's rezoning; Tribune record of 1993 — the restaurant opening at University Center by the end of September 1993, two doors from Macri's Deli, 6502 Grape Road.
2. Boulder Group and Crexi leasing material — Best Buy at 6502 Grape Road, operating since 2003, 50,000 square feet.
3. Meijer, statement carried by Progressive Grocer, 6 April 2023 — the company's first Indiana store opened in 1994 on Grape Road in Mishawaka.
4. South Bend Tribune retail columns of 2000 — Burlington Coat Factory opening in the former Sam's Club at Wilshire Plaza, with Hobby Lobby and Media Play at the center's other end; Grape Road Plaza standing bare near Princess City Plaza after Dazzlers and CD Exchange.
5. Hacienda Mexican Restaurants, the company's own history — the Grape Road Hacienda established 1983.
6. Cressy leasing material — Grape & Day Plaza, 4110–4150 Grape Road, about 30,000 square feet; Whole Foods Market store record — 4230 Grape Road, Mishawaka, styled "South Bend" by the company; Whole Foods Market press release, August 2015 — a South Bend location among the company's three Indiana stores by that date.
7. Settling sources: the South Bend Tribune's business record and the company's store-opening releases.