The opening and the anchor course, 1979–1980

SEARS 1 MARCH 1979 · THE MALL 14 MARCH 1979 · FOUR ANCHORS BY FEBRUARY 1980

Sears opened first, alone: on 1 March 1979 the Sears store at the mall's end opened for business ahead of the center it anchored — 196,000 square feet with a seventeen-bay auto center, the largest single store the mall would ever hold. University Park Mall itself opened on 14 March 1979 with a ribbon-cutting: about seventy of its hundred inline stores were open on the first day, the center stood about ninety-five percent leased, and a three-screen General Cinema played inside it. The remaining anchors arrived across the following year, and the order is the record's: L. S. Ayres on 6 May 1979 — 120,000 square feet, the Indianapolis chain's thirteenth store; JCPenney on 2 January 1980, at 144,000 square feet; and Hudson's on 7 February 1980, at 122,000 square feet, the Detroit chain's first store in Indiana. Four department stores, three of them new to the region or new to the state, on ground that had been Mishawaka farmland within the decade: the anchor course of 1979–80 is the corridor's founding fact, and every later change in this section is a change to it.

The mall's size is printed at its dates, as the record gives it: planned at 964,051 square feet in 1976; carried at 922,000 square feet in older directory copy and at 919,000 in Simon's 2017 portfolio; and measured at 918,559 square feet in the current directory figure. The numbers converge rather than conflict — a planned size, then the built center as its owners have counted it since.

Sources:

1. The University Park Mall record as compiled from the South Bend Tribune's dated coverage — Sears's opening of 1 March 1979 (196,000 square feet, seventeen-bay auto center); the mall's opening of 14 March 1979 (about seventy of one hundred inline stores open, about ninety-five percent leased, the three-screen General Cinema); L. S. Ayres, 6 May 1979 (120,000 square feet, the chain's thirteenth store); JCPenney, 2 January 1980 (144,000 square feet); Hudson's, 7 February 1980 (122,000 square feet, the chain's first Indiana store).
2. Simon Property Group property portfolio (2017) — 919,000 square feet; retail directory figures — 922,000 square feet in older copy, 918,559 square feet current.