Town & Country: the McKinley corridor's first center

822 WEST McKINLEY AVENUE AT HICKORY ROAD · CASTO AND SKILKEN · BUILT 1960

The corridor began on McKinley, not on Grape: a generation before the mall, the Columbus, Ohio developers who would later build South Bend's Scottsdale Mall — the Don M. Casto Organization and the Joseph Skilken Corporation — rehearsed in Mishawaka. Their Town & Country Shopping Center rose at McKinley Avenue and Hickory Road, at 822 West McKinley; the center's property record gives its year built as 1960, and the developers had sold it to another company before they announced Scottsdale in 1966. The center's exact opening date was not reached in the record used here — the contemporary opening coverage stands in the Tribune's business files — and no opening roster is asserted. What is documented is the form: an open-air center on the east-west highway through a growing city, built for shoppers arriving by car, across McKinley Avenue from the ground Bethel University occupies.

The center endured, which the later corridor's dead boxes mostly did not. Its present measures are printed at their sources because they differ: the owner's 2025 leasing flyer gives Town & Country 382,139 square feet and calls it nearly fully leased, shadow-anchored by a Kroger supermarket, with Chuck E. Cheese, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, United Art & Education, Dollar Tree, Harbor Freight Tools, Arby's, Rent-A-Center, Mishawaka Furniture, Popeyes, and Firestone on its roll, 1,581 feet of frontage on Miracle Lane, and traffic past McKinley and Hickory in excess of 31,000 vehicles a day; a pad-site flyer from the same hand describes the center more loosely as a 350,000-plus-square-foot power center. The flyer also carries the corridor's recent account: under new ownership and repositioning since about 2024, and — as the owner's claim, printed as such — more than $50 million of investment along the McKinley corridor since 2022. The McKinley corridor's first center is thus also one of its present ones: the strip of 1960 outlasted the enclosed mall built to supersede its kind.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune record as carried in the Scottsdale Mall account — Casto and Skilken developed the Town and Country Shopping Center in Mishawaka and sold it before beginning Scottsdale's development.
2. LoopNet property record and leasing flyers for 822 West McKinley Avenue (2025) — year built 1960; 382,139 square feet; the tenant roll; 1,581 feet of Miracle Lane frontage; traffic in excess of 31,000 vehicles a day; the pad flyer's 350,000-plus-square-foot description; the corridor-investment figure, printed as the owner's claim.
3. Settling source: the South Bend Tribune's business record of 1960–61, with the Mishawaka Enterprise.