The renewal city: the districts beyond Hooligan Heights

1958 – 1969

Hooligan Heights was the first and largest target, not the only one: the Hooligan Heights neighborhood history's overview of the city's renewal geography names the full set. Besides the LaSalle School Conservation District stood the Dodge Park Project of 1960, a clearance and redevelopment project east and south of the Dodge Manufacturing plant in the city's other redlined district; renewal touched parts of Twin Branch and the St. Joseph Hospital area; a north-side swath from Logan Street to Byrkit Avenue south of McKinley Avenue was treated; and the central business district was cleared in part to make way for the post office and the public library. At the program's widest, the neighborhood history puts some 1,500 acres under scrutiny and as many as 2,000 residential units demolished citywide — figures printed here at the neighborhood history's strength, the largest numbers in the record reached, against the LaSalle district's documented 88 demolitions.

The downtown course is the commissioned history's. By the mid-1960s the city had a plan for a "civic center" — a new post office and public library on cleared ground. The Hotel Mishawaka, the 1909 landmark at Third and Main, was demolished in May 1968, and the post office was built on its site, occupying the whole block bounded by Third, Main, Fourth and Church Streets; it opened in June 1969. The property to the north was cleared, and the Mishawaka Public Library opened at the corner of Lincolnway East and Church Street in July 1969. The old post office across the intersection was retained. On the cleared library block, the architect Paul Jernegan proposed a 33-story, 408-foot Centerpoint Tower — the tallest building the city has ever been offered on paper, and one of the renewal era's unbuilt monuments: the project never came to fruition. Two blocks east, the Mix Mansion, once the home of Dodge Manufacturing's president Melville Mix, was razed in 1968 for the apartment building of the next entry. Renewal's Mishawaka, read as geography, is therefore two maps at once: the southwest district conserved and the downtown cleared — the same federal instrument doing opposite work four miles apart in one small city.

Sources

1. Hooligan Heights neighborhood history (hooliganheights.com), Urban Renewal overview — the Dodge Park Project, the Twin Branch and hospital areas, the north-side swath, the CBD clearance, the 1,500 acres and 2,000 units.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned) — the civic center plan; the Hotel Mishawaka demolition of May 1968; the post office of June 1969 and the library of July 1969; the Centerpoint Tower proposal; the Mix Mansion razing of 1968.