The Kmart plaza: McKinley Commons and the discount era

416 WEST McKINLEY AVENUE · KMART 1966–2017 · REDEVELOPED IN PIECES

The second area Kmart opened in Mishawaka in 1966: the first had opened on South Michigan Street in South Bend in 1964, and the McKinley Avenue store followed two years later with parking for a thousand cars — Mishawaka police turned out to direct the traffic at its grand opening. The plaza that grew around it at 416 West McKinley held, across its life, the Kmart, a Martin's Super Market, and a CVS. The Martin's was one of the McKinley stores the supermarket chain had acquired as Thrifty Marts in the 1980s, and its closing belongs to the Grape Road story as much as to McKinley's: Martin's shut its 424 West McKinley store on 1 October 2006, the same week its new store opened at Heritage Square on Gumwood Road, at the corridor's far end. The supermarket followed the shoppers north, twenty-six years after the mall did.

Kmart's end is printed with its disagreement whole. The contemporary account, the Tribune of 24 August 2017, dates the last day exactly: on 3 September 2017 the McKinley Avenue Kmart — by then the last Kmart in the region — would close its doors for the last time. The Tribune's retrospective of August 2023 dates the same closing to 2018. Both statements stand in the paper's own record; the contemporary date is the one filed closest to the event, and the file prints both rather than choose silently. After the closing the plaza languished for years, in the Tribune's word, and was then redeveloped in pieces: Big Lots, Starbucks, Smoothie King, John's Auto Spa, and Oak St. Health took ground in the complex, renamed McKinley Commons, and in mid-September 2023 a Home Outlet store — a division of E. C. Barton — opened in about 25,000 square feet of the old Kmart box. The city assisted with the zoning and variances that let the developer add outlots and cut parking, and improved the sidewalks and landscaping along the plaza's Grape Road side: the old highway plaza's second life was underwritten, in part, by the corridor that had ended its first.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, 24 August 2017 — the second area Kmart opened on McKinley Avenue in 1966; parking for 1,000 vehicles; police directed grand-opening traffic; the last day set for 3 September 2017; the first area Kmart on South Michigan Street, 1964.
2. South Bend Tribune, 25 August 2023 — the Home Outlet opening at 416 West McKinley; McKinley Commons' new tenants; the former Martin's, Kmart, and CVS spaces broken up; the city's zoning, variance, and streetscape assistance; the Kmart closing dated there to 2018, printed in the entry against the contemporary 2017 date.
3. South Bend Tribune, October 2006 record — Martin's closed its 424 West McKinley Avenue store on 1 October 2006, the week the Heritage Square store opened; the McKinley stores acquired as Thrifty Marts in the 1980s.