The Grape Road screens I: the mall three and the General Cinema six

UNIVERSITY PARK MALL AND 6424 GRAPE ROAD · 1979 — SPRING 2016

When University Park Mall opened on 14 March 1979, a three-screen General Cinema played inside it — three small auditoriums off the mall's corridors, listed in the South Bend Tribune's opening-day directory among the Chick-fil-A, the Hot Sam and the Orange Julius, in the malls record's account. The in-mall three-screen was the era's standard furniture: the cinema as one more inline tenant, no marquee to the street, its audience assembled by the mall itself. It played for twenty-one years. In March 2000 the original three-screen theater inside the mall closed, on the expiration of its lease and under competition from the larger theaters that had opened through the 1990s, and by 2001 its space had been re-divided among several other stores — a PacSun among them — in the mall record compiled from the Tribune's coverage. No trace of a theater stands in the mall's present directory, and none is claimed.

General Cinema had already outgrown its own room once. Four years after the mall opened — in 1986, in the malls record's account of the corridor's growth — the city council had approved zoning for the University Center development across Grape Road from the mall, and General Cinema, which operated the three-screen inside, built another complex with six screens outside the mall: the house at 6424 Grape Road, behind the corridor's big boxes, that a generation of Mishawaka moviegoers knew as the discount house. It passed in time to Cinemark, which operated it as the Cinemark Movies 6 — a second-run, lower-price house, six screens, remembered in the visitor record as the cheap alternative to the Movies 14 and, in its last years, in terms this section prints as the visitors' own: run down, a bargain at the price. It closed in early spring 2016, and by 2018 the visitor record reports the building leveled, the lot vacant. The six-screen's arc is the multiplex age in miniature: built by a national chain as the corridor's growth bet in 1986, demoted to the discount tier when a fourteen-screen house opened minutes away, and demolished within two years of its closing, its ground worth more than its screens.

Sources:

1. The malls record of this history, compiled from the South Bend Tribune's dated coverage — the mall's opening of 14 March 1979 with a three-screen General Cinema inside; the 1986 six-screen General Cinema outside the mall, on the University Center zoning; the in-mall theater's closing of March 2000 on lease expiration and competition, and the re-division of its space by 2001, a PacSun among the successors.
2. Cinema Treasures, the standard theatre inventory — the University Mall West house carried among the theaters Cinemark previously operated, at three screens, closed; the Cinemark Movies 6 among Cinemark's previously operated closed houses, at six screens.
3. Tripadvisor's visitor record for the Cinemark Movies 6, 6424 Grape Road — the house as the second-run discount theater; “theater closed in early spring of 2016” (review of 25 April 2016); the building leveled and the lot vacant by April 2018; visitor characterizations printed as the visitors' own.