The Century: six hundred seats in a remodeled building

DOWNTOWN · THE NOMINATION'S DATE 1909 · THE CITY HISTORY'S USE 1908

The Century is the first Mishawaka picture house the formal record describes, and it describes it briefly: a theater of 600 seats, dated 1909, one of the two oldest theaters in the community, and — with the Temple — a house “created from remodeled, existing buildings,” in the Tivoli nomination's words. It was not built as a theater; it was made into one, in a downtown block that already stood, and its 600 seats were the capacity of a conversion, not of a design. The nomination's survey sets the type plainly: in the Mishawaka of the 1910s and early 1920s nearly every house had seating for 1,000 or less, most were built in the 1910s or earlier, and the Century and the Temple were the oldest and the smallest of them.

Against that spare formal account stands the one performance the Century is documented to have held at national size. On 28 October 1908, in the commissioned history's account carried in the culture record, Vice President Charles Fairbanks — Indiana's own vice president, campaigning a week before the 1908 election — addressed a convocation of Republican enthusiasts inside the Century Theater for over an hour, after speaking to five thousand people in the street outside it. The date is the conflict, and it is printed whole: if the Century opened in 1909, the room Fairbanks filled in October 1908 cannot have been it, and the history's name for the room is wrong or early; if the history's date and room are right, the nomination's 1909 is the year of a remodeling, a renaming, or a formal listing rather than of a first opening — a reading the nomination itself makes possible, since it classes the Century among houses made from buildings that already existed, whose theater use could predate any single documented date. The file does not choose. What is not in conflict is the use: by the end of the 1900s Mishawaka had a downtown room, of some six hundred seats, in which a sitting vice president could be put before a crowd indoors — and the room's name in the city's own telling was the Century.

The Century's later course — its conversion to sound, its closing, the fate of its building — is not established in the record reached, and the gap is named rather than filled. The settling sources are the house file in the standard theatre inventory, the city directories' amusement listings across the 1910s–1940s, and the Enterprise's and South Bend News-Times' entertainment columns, where a downtown house's last years ran as advertising matter week by week.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Tivoli Theater (1997) — the Century at 600 seats, dated 1909, among the oldest houses in the community, created from a remodeled existing building; the survey of Mishawaka houses at 1,000 seats or less.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, as carried in Culture — the Fairbanks convocation inside the Century Theater, 28 October 1908.