The Temple: five hundred seats, 1915

DOWNTOWN · 1915

The Temple is the second of the two old houses, and the formal record gives it one line's more room than the Century: 500 seats, dated 1915, downtown, and like the Century a theater made from a remodeled, existing building rather than built for the purpose. It was the smaller of the two — five hundred seats against the Century's six hundred — and the younger by the nomination's dates, arriving in the middle of the First World War years, when Mishawaka's factories were filling and its population was climbing toward the twenty-two thousand the city counted in the Tivoli's year. A five-hundred-seat converted room in 1915 was a working neighborhood picture house of the standard Midwestern kind: films in the years before sound, at prices a factory wage carried, in a building that had been something else first.

No program, manager, fire, remodeling or closing for the Temple is established in the record reached, and the entry prints that thinness rather than dressing it. The name invites one confusion the file expressly refuses: the Temple of this entry is a Mishawaka picture house of 1915, not a fraternal temple documented elsewhere, and no Masonic or fraternal ownership is asserted for it on this record — the nomination, the only formal source reached that names it, calls it simply a theater. Its whole documented course, beyond the nomination's survey line, stands in the sources named for the Century — the standard inventory's house file, the directories, and the papers' entertainment columns — and its settling is left there, named as a gap in this section's note.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Tivoli Theater (1997) — the Temple at 500 seats, dated 1915, downtown, created from a remodeled existing building, with the Century among the community's oldest houses.