Hooligan Heights: the far-west peninsula, its plats, its renewal, and its name

1905 – PRESENT

No Mishawaka neighborhood has documented itself like this one: Hooligan Heights, in the city's southwest, is surrounded on three sides by South Bend — a peninsula of Mishawaka nearly detached from it. Its own historians, at hooliganheights.com, give its rough bounds as Ironwood Drive, Ewing Avenue or Dragoon Trail, Logan Street and the railroad tracks, some residents extending it north to the river; and they are explicit that it is not the West End: the Belgians to the east did not count the Heights as theirs. The ground entered the city in the Great Annexation (the 1904/1905 variance stands in the annexation entry above), and it was platted in pieces. At the east end, Milburn Place: the Milburn Place Land Company, organized in 1905, bought the Henry C. Morgan farm between Burdette and Carlton Streets, south of Second Street — Lincolnway — to Panama Street; lot advertisements appear from 1905–06, including the summer 1906 gimmick of a free lot raised by balloon, and the district's oldest homes, many built before 1910, stand in Milburn Place. Floral Park, between Dale and Berlin Avenues, was subdivided soon after Milburn Place and developed after the First World War, and it lent its name to the whole district — residents, the city and formal publications long called the entire area "Floral Park," bounded by Logan Street, Ernsberger Street (Ironwood Drive), Lincolnway West and Ewing Avenue. Lafayette Place, between Queensboro Avenue and Ironwood, the most western part of Mishawaka, was the last part of the west side annexed, well after the First World War. The smaller additions — Springbrook, Saint Joseph Park, Morgan Park, Middleboro — fill the plat record the neighborhood history names. Mail came in 1914, a mounted carrier working Lincolnway from Logan to Ernsberger; door-to-door delivery began in 1927.

The name came in the 1920s: "Hooligan Heights" was dubbed for the district's rough-and-tumble reputation. No tighter etymology stands in the record reached — not a person, not an event — and the gap is named here plainly: the settling sources would be the neighborhood history's own underlying newspaper file and the Tribune's 1920s run. The Depression course is documented at street level: housing went up self-built, without building codes, and the Tribune's 2006 account preserves Robert Kime, who bought on a dirt Dale Street in 1946. Then the federal map closed over the district: in the 1930s the Home Owners' Loan Corporation rated the neighborhood "D" — hazardous — the redlining that made loans for improvement nearly impossible; the city's commissioned history, following Ernst, dates the rating to 1937.

The renewal that followed is the largest remaking of any Mishawaka neighborhood: the LaSalle School Conservation District, initiated in 1958, was one of the first urban renewal programs in Indiana, and Mishawaka's ten-year renewal plan ranked among the state's largest — fifth in dollars, fourth in projects. The district's bounds — Panama and Ewing to the south, Logan Street east, the railroad tracks north, Ironwood Drive west — were the same bounds as the redlined district twenty-two years before. The project's cost ran over $1.5 million, about a third of it the city's; some $500,000 in federal capital was announced in July 1959, the first federal grant of $277,000 arrived in early June 1960, and in 1960 the rehabilitation director, Zano Vannoni, assessed 600 homes to determine which should be demolished and which retained. Ernst's figures give the result whole: of 869 dwellings in the renewal zone, 438 homes were refurbished, 117 land parcels were acquired, 88 homes were demolished, and 80 families were relocated. The neighborhood history's own figures stand beside them: demolition bids were taken 13 July 1960 for more than a hundred homes and commercial buildings, cleared lots were sold from 28 August 1961 at about $23 per front foot, FHA approved, the renewal office stood at 1702 Milburn Boulevard under Vannoni with John Sherbun as relocation specialist — and of $1 million in federal grants, only $5,900 was slated for relocation aid. The city paved six miles of streets and added sewers, sidewalks and curbs. Mary Gibbard Park — formerly South West Park, renamed and dedicated in 1954 for Mary Gibbard, LaSalle's principal of twenty-five years — received the city's first city-operated public pool, built in early 1961 and opened that July. In 1961 Mayor Joseph Canfield testified before a federal housing subcommittee that the district had been "aptly dubbed" Hooligan Heights for its deterioration and lack of facilities, and that the renewed district would be called the "LaSalle School area."

The modern course runs from that pool to its replacement. On Memorial Day weekend 1988 a crowd of 150 gathered at Mary Gibbard Park and four arrests were made — the neighborhood history carries the episode without varnish. In 2018 the city invested $1 million in the park: a splash pad replaced the sixty-year-old pool, and a bike park, pavilion and Wi-Fi were added; Milburn Boulevard keeps its twin lamps. The name remains contested ground in the present tense: the neighborhood history records residents divided between embracing "Hooligan Heights Forever!" and preferring the "Mary Gibbard Neighborhood" — a division this section prints as the neighborhood's own account of itself, unresolved.

Sources

1. Hooligan Heights neighborhood history (hooliganheights.com), read first-hand — Home, Beginnings, Urban Renewal overview and upgrades, Modern Era: the bounds and the three-sided surround; Milburn Place, Floral Park, Lafayette Place and the smaller additions; the mail course; the 1920s naming; the Depression course; the renewal figures, dates and office; the 1988 episode; the 2018 park investment; the present name division.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned) — the 1937 HOLC "D" rating (following Susanna Ernst); Vannoni's 600 assessed homes; Ernst's result figures (869 dwellings, 438 refurbished, 117 parcels, 88 demolished, 80 families relocated); six miles of streets paved; the pool of 1961.
3. South Bend Tribune (2006), as carried in the neighborhood history — Robert Kime and the dirt Dale Street of 1946.