Kate's Garden and Lincoln Park

THE WEST END OF THE WALK

The Riverwalk's west bookend is a garden named for a neighbor, beside the park that holds the princess's stone: Kate's Garden, at 1122 Lincolnway West beside Lincoln Park, is named for Catherine "Kate" Kosanovich, a longtime Mishawaka community leader — the naming carried by the Riverwalk's own contractor, Larson-Danielson, which built the walk's extension past it. The garden's documented course is short: it stands in place by 2009, when the final phase of the west Riverwalk connected Lincoln Park and Kate's Garden, and it closes the walk's west end today with its gazebo and perennial plantings. One machine-written relocation guide claims the garden was "created in 1933" and honors "a longtime city controller," with a Harold Langland sculpture in it; no other source reached corroborates any part of that account, it contradicts the documented Kosanovich naming, and it is printed here as an uncorroborated claim and nothing more. Lincoln Park, the garden's elder neighbor, carries the riverfront's other marker: the boulder and bronze plaque the Daughters of the American Revolution set in 1932 for Princess Mishawaka at her "supposed grave site" — the princess is fiction, as the Story of Mishawaka section and Culture records establish, and the stone is a monument to the legend, which is its own documented kind of fact.

Sources:

1. Larson-Danielson Construction, Riverwalk extension account (October 2023) — Kate's Garden named for Catherine "Kate" Kosanovich; the garden at the walk's west end.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the 2009 west Riverwalk phase connecting Lincoln Park and Kate's Garden; the 1932 DAR marker in Lincoln Park.
3. Apartments.com relocation guide — the uncorroborated 1933/"city controller" account, printed as a claim only.