The Grape Road fringe: the far north side becomes the city's second center

1979 – PRESENT

The fringe began with the mall and then acquired an office city: the commercial growth on Mishawaka's far north side began, in the commissioned history's sequence, with University Park Mall and University Center in 1979 and continued with Indian Ridge and Wilshire Plaza in the early 1980s — the mall course is the malls file's, whole. After the mall opened, Donald Cressy began planning Edison Lakes Corporate Park, a 700-acre development near the intersection of Day Road and North Main Street: upscale office buildings, smaller offices, a fashion mall and a hotel were hoped for; construction started in 1988, including Edison Lakes Parkway, running east from Main and north to Day Road. Cressy's great success was the National Steel Corporation's move of its corporate offices from Pittsburgh to Edison Lakes — the fourth-largest steel producer in the United States, a Fortune 200 company — announced in December 1991 and completed by the following fall, bringing 150 workers and their families to the Mishawaka area. A headquarters suburb planted on the city's farm fringe: Edison Lakes is the fringe's Normain Heights, a named place whose founding document is a development plan rather than a plat.

The roads made it a district. North Main Street was extended from Day Road to Indian Ridge Boulevard in 1992 and to Cleveland Road (State Road 23) in 1993; University Drive was extended from Grape Road to North Main in 1994; the Douglas Road Fire Station, east of North Main, was finished in 1993. Meijer opened its superstore at the northeast corner of Grape Road and Edison Lakes Parkway in 1994 — the company's first Indiana store, on the company's own statement, in the malls file — and a Wal-Mart Supercenter opened on Indian Ridge Boulevard in 1999. The residential subdivisions that filled the fringe behind the retail are named in the record reached only at its southern mirror — Autumn Trails and Rosewood, by the second Meijer — and the fringe's own plats, builders and phases stand as a named gap with the county plat books as their settling source: the fringe is documented in this record as a commercial and office geography with a residential course still to be dug, and it is printed at that strength.

Sources

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned) — the far north side sequence (1979; Indian Ridge and Wilshire Plaza, early 1980s); Edison Lakes Corporate Park (Donald Cressy; 700 acres; construction from 1988; the National Steel move, December 1991–fall 1992); the road extensions of 1992–1994; the Wal-Mart Supercenter of 1999.
2. Malls file of this record — University Park Mall's course; the Meijer store of 1994 as the company's first in Indiana.