The 100 Center Cinema: a cinema in the brewery

100 CENTER STREET · FROM 1968 · THE CLASSICS REOPENING OF 2002

The city's most improbable picture house stood in a brewery. The Kamm & Schellinger brewery at 100 Center Street — its complex carried whole in the businesses and malls records — ceased brewing about 1951, and in 1968 the complex was converted into 100 Center, an entertainment, retail, restaurant and residential development, and the conversion included a cinema: that is the National Register-derived account, and the malls record of this history prints beside it the South Bend Regional Chamber's account, which dates the complex's redevelopment to the 1970s into mixed uses. The two datings stand in the malls file as a printed pair; this section follows them, and dates the 100 Center Cinema's first era from the conversion the Register records — 1968 — with the Chamber's 1970s dating standing beside it, unaveraged. A movie house inside a converted nineteenth-century brewery was a novelty of the adaptive-reuse decade, a decade before such conversions had a name: Mishawaka saw its films, in those years, in a palace downtown gone seedy, a big box on McKinley, and a brewery on Center Street.

The cinema's second documented act is a reopening. On 15 February 2002 the South Bend Tribune reported, under Alesia I. Redding's byline, “100 Center Cinema reopens with classics” — the headline is the whole of the account reached, and it establishes its facts and no more: the cinema had closed at some point before February 2002, and it reopened that month on a classics program, the repertory formula by which small rooms of the multiplex age survived on the films the big screens would not book. The house's seats, screens, first closing date and final closing are not established in the record reached, and the gaps are named in this section's note; the settling source is the Tribune's own file, of which the 2002 item is the located instance. By the late 2010s the Chamber's account records the 100 Center complex as mostly vacant, and the complex's proposed $41.5 million transformation of July 2024 stands in the malls record as announced, not accomplished; no cinema stands in the record of the complex's present, and none is asserted here.

Sources:

1. National Register record for the Kamm and Schellinger Brewery (listed 11 October 1979), as compiled — the brewery's closing about 1951 and the 1968 conversion into an entertainment center including a cinema.
2. South Bend Tribune, 15 February 2002 (Alesia I. Redding), “100 Center Cinema reopens with classics,” as cited in the brewery's reference record — the reopening and its classics program.
3. The malls and businesses records of this history — the 100 Center complex whole, the 1968/1970s conversion-dating pair, the mostly-vacant late-2010s state, and the July 2024 proposal at announced strength.