Decline and remaking: the slide, the closings, the replacement anchors, the riverfront

1960 — 2026 · THE LATE BEATS, DISCRETE

The downtown slide and the mall decades: The commercial center of gravity moved north in stages, and each stage is dated. Groundbreaking for Town & Country Shopping Center, at McKinley Avenue and Hickory Road, came in May 1960; it opened in the spring of 1961, accelerating the north side's growth, in the commissioned history's account, while hastening downtown's decline. Downtown answered with clearance: the mid-1960s civic-center plan cleared ground for a post office and library; the Hotel Mishawaka, the 1909 landmark at Third and Main, was demolished in May 1968 and the post office built on its block, opening June 1969, with the new library beside it that July; the architect's 33-story Centerpoint Tower proposed for the cleared block was never built. Then the reach north became the city's own act: the University Park Mall site, eighty acres at Grape and Cleveland more than a mile beyond the limits, was annexed under Mayor Prickett after South Bend declined it, the mall opened in 1979, and the far-north corridor — University Center, Indian Ridge, Wilshire Plaza in the early 1980s, Edison Lakes Corporate Park from 1988, a Meijer superstore in 1994 and a Wal-Mart Supercenter in 1999 — grew up behind it. The mall was so completely the city's grand room that the sesquicentennial costume ball of 1983, with 1,700 people, was held inside it.

The anchor closings: The works left in the order they had come. Wheelabrator's equipment business went in pieces — shot-making to Bedford, Virginia, in 1983, the foundry to Walterboro, South Carolina, in 1984, the close decision in the mid-1980s and consolidation at LaGrange, Georgia, in 1991. Ball Band's leaving took thirty years: Uniroyal announced the transfer of the footwear divisions — forty-two percent of the workforce — on 22 March 1968, the lines gone by 1969 in a phase-out whose conduct produced the Chrapliwy sex-discrimination case; the plant worked on in fuel cells, insulation and adhesives, and closed for good in 1997; five of its buildings were imploded on 17 June 2000 before an estimated 6,000 watchers. The Dodge foundry ground closed about 1999, reopened as RMG, and closed again in July 2006 with some 180 workers. The civilian Hummer chapter closed with the H2's suspension in January 2009, with about 200 workers laid off on one contemporary account, 250 on another, both printed in the industrial record.

The replacement anchors: What replaced the anchors came in three kinds. Retail replaced retail: the Grape Road corridor's superstores on the annexed ground. Offices replaced works at the fringe: Edison Lakes' great catch was the National Steel Corporation's move of its corporate offices from Pittsburgh, announced December 1991 and completed by the following fall — a Fortune 200 headquarters and 150 families planted on farm ground at the city's edge. And the public anchors were rebuilt downtown: a city hall in the purchased Liberty Mutual building of 2022, and the 100 Center — Wagner's brewery ground — in a $41.5 million redevelopment announced with a $5.64 million READI grant on 19 December 2024, in its approvals course in 2026.

The riverfront and park remaking: The remaking's center is the ground where the city's largest works stood. The Ball Band site — forty-three acres, fifty-eight buildings gone — became Robert C. Beutter Riverfront Park, established in 2005 and named for the mayor who presided over both the closing and the acquisition: seven acres of park holding the river race, an eight-hundred-foot perennial garden, Jan R. Martin's River Shards of 2004, and in time the Ironworks Plaza, its ice rink and event ground completed with James Brenner's five luminous sculptures on 17 June 2023 — twenty-three years to the day after the implosion on the same ground. Just south, The Mill at Ironworks Plaza put housing on the plant's own footprint: the first phase, $45 million and 232 apartments, broke ground 28 September 2017 and filled to a waitlist, and a second, $67 million phase of 226 apartments — carried at $60 million in a development review, both figures printed — stood in occupancy by 2026. The workers are remembered on the ground their works vacated: the Ball Band Memorial at 111 West Mishawaka Avenue overlooks the site, and a giant painted sneaker bearing the red ball stands at the riverfront. No Legacy Fund stands in this record under that or any like name: the remaking was financed piecemeal — tax-increment districts, a state READI grant, private development — and the Story of Mishawaka section prints the instruments it can name rather than a fund it cannot.

Sources:

1. The neighborhoods fragment of this build, from De Kever — Town & Country (groundbreaking May 1960, opened spring 1961) and downtown's decline; the civic-center clearances, the Hotel Mishawaka's demolition (May 1968), the post office (June 1969) and library (July 1969), the unbuilt Centerpoint Tower; the Edison Lakes course and National Steel's 1991–92 headquarters move.
2. The ball-band, businesses and events fragments of this build — the 22 March 1968 footwear announcement and the Chrapliwy case; the 1997 closing and the 17 June 2000 implosion; Beutter Park established 2005 (IU South Bend Archives) and its contents; The Mill's phases (South Bend Regional Chamber; the Tribune, December 2023); Wheelabrator's departures and the RMG closing of July 2006; the H2 suspension's two layoff figures as printed in the industrial record.
3. The arts and current-today fragments of this build — River Shards (2004), Ironworks Plaza's completion (17 June 2023), and the 100 Center redevelopment as it stands in 2026.