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1930s — PRESENT
Downtown's largest park stands on a factory's ground, and the factory's removal was itself a public work: The ground at 295 East Mishawaka Avenue, where the north mill race once ran, was built over in 1908–09 by the Rubber Regenerating Company — a plant 700 feet long by 275, the largest rubber regenerating factory in the world — sold to U.S. Rubber in 1912 and closed in 1930. The city's commissioned history records what happened next in one sentence: the Works Progress Administration cleared the plant's remnants "so the site could be redeveloped into Central Park." The park that resulted — some seventeen acres on the visitor record, a figure carried at that strength — took its modern shape around the downtown dam at its north end, the overflow dam whose fish ladder, built in 1991, is carried in the fishery entry above. Its institutional edge came late: in 2013 the Center for Hospice Care opened a two-story building at the park's east end, and in 2019 the twelve-bed Ernestine M. Raclin House opened east of it, its patient rooms looking out on the river and the dam.
In 2015 the park received — in De Kever's words — "the biggest transformation since the park's creation": the Riverwalk was extended the park's entire length, past the Hospice campus to Cedar Street, and the park was rebuilt around it with a spray pad, playground and climbing equipment, a walking path, five picnic pavilions and a comfort station, the new buildings and the Mishawaka Avenue gateway faced in fieldstone chosen to recall the park's WPA origins. It worked as intended: the park, the history records, "immediately became the city's most popular park." Its present furniture — splash pad, bandstand and stage with Thursday concerts, rope tower, pickleball and tennis courts — is the 2015 park in daily use, the industrial bank of the north race become the city's front room on the river.
Sources:
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the Rubber Regenerating plant and its dates on this ground; the WPA clearance for Central Park; the 2015 transformation in full and the park's standing after it.
- Center for Hospice Care — the 2013 building at the park's east end and the Ernestine M. Raclin House of 2019, its rooms on the river and the Central Park Dam.
- City of Mishawaka parks pages and visitor record, November 2026 — the park's present amenities and address.