The mill neighborhoods: housing at Ball Band and Dodge, at the strength the record carries

1896 – PRESENT

Mishawaka's two great works stood inside the town, and their workers walked to them: the Ball Band works on the river at the west end of downtown, and the Dodge Manufacturing plant on Union Street on the south side. The record reached contains no company-built housing for either works — no Ball Band cottages, no Dodge subdivision, no company town plat of the kind the Twin Branch brief imagined. What the record carries instead is the pattern of a walking city: the works' thousands housed in the grid around them — Ball Band's in the West End and the south-side streets, Dodge's in the south-side grid its Union Street plant anchors — and the one great exception proves the rule, because when Mishawaka finally did build workers' housing as a project, the builder was not a company but a union: United Rubber Workers Local 65, Ball Band's own local, joined the American Legion and VFW posts to build Normain Heights, in the next entry. The mill neighborhoods' documentary monument is therefore not a plat but a labor fact, and it stands in the Ball Band file whole.

The plants' ground had second lives as neighborhoods, and those are this section's facts. Around Dodge, the federal renewal drew the Dodge Park Project in 1960 — a clearance and redevelopment project east and south of the Dodge Manufacturing plant, in the city's other redlined district — read with the renewal geography in the renewal entry below. At Ball Band, the course is longer: the plant closed for good in 1997, the works were imploded on 17 June 2000, and the ground — downtown Mishawaka's largest single piece of ground, in the Ball Band file's phrase — passed from one employer to housing in twenty years. The Ball Band Memorial at 111 West Mishawaka Avenue overlooks the site. On and around the old grounds rose the Ironworks development: its first phase, The Mill at Ironworks Plaza, was completed in 2019 and filled to a waitlist; its second phase — a $67 million mixed-use community of 226 luxury apartments with commercial space and the city's first riverfront restaurant — broke ground with Mayor Dave Wood in attendance, on a 25-year tax increment financing district the city approved that July, with first tenants expected in the spring of 2025 and full completion anticipated that fall. Whether the anticipated completion was met is not in the record reached, and the present state of the phase is flagged for the next update window rather than asserted here.

Sources

1. Ball Band file of this record — Local 65 as co-builder of the veterans' housing; the plant's closure of 1997 and implosion of 17 June 2000; the Ball Band Memorial, 111 West Mishawaka Avenue; the plant footprint's passage to housing.
2. Hooligan Heights neighborhood history (hooliganheights.com), Urban Renewal overview — the Dodge Park Project of 1960, east and south of Dodge Manufacturing, a clearance project in the city's other redlined district.
3. RE Journals (rejournals.com) — Flaherty & Collins' second phase at Ironworks: the $67 million, 226 apartments, phase one completed 2019, the TIF approval, anticipated completion fall 2025.
4. Businesses file of this record — the Dodge works' Union Street ground and course.