The Tivoli: the building

208 NORTH MAIN STREET · BUILT 1924–25 · ARCHITECT E. P. RUPERT OF CHICAGO

The palace stood at 208 North Main Street, at the northern edge of downtown, on a half-acre site with Main Street frontage, built in 1924–25 for the Mishawaka Theater Corporation — a company of fifteen men on the incorporation papers, formed a year before the opening, nearly all of them from Mishawaka or South Bend: the then-mayor, Duncan J. Campbell, among the backers; Oscar J. Lambiotte, the manager-to-be; Adolph Kamm, of the brewery family; and Henry and Mary Buckel, who owned the property and the residence on the site — the house was moved — and who were paid for their interest in 1,000 of the corporation's 10,000 shares of common stock. The general contractor, Reuben Levine of Chicago, was the one outsider among the fifteen. The architect was E. P. Rupert of Chicago, whose rendering of the facade the Mishawaka Enterprise published on opening day. The reported cost was $275,000.

The building was a mixed-use palace of the standard ambitious kind, and its plan is the nomination's: a two-story brick theater building whose street front carried the auditorium entrance and lobby, three retail storefronts at 210, 212 and 212½ North Main Street, and a series of office suites on the second floor — early tenants included the theater's own management offices, Western Union, the Singer Sewing Machine company and the United Cigar Stores Company. The storefronts were income the pictures did not have to earn; in the Depression years, 1931 and 1932, the city directories listed them vacant, and that vacancy is the building's hardest documented year in a single directory line.

The facade was the advertisement. Polychrome architectural terra cotta over brown brick: eagles, crests, egg-and-dart and rope moldings, garlands, rosettes, floral stylized capitals, paired pilasters; a massive central arched window with a circular art-glass element; chaser and stud lights outlining the marquee and the arched window; and five lighted lanterns atop evenly spaced piers along the roof line. The city and the National Register describe the style in their own words — Spanish Colonial Revival in the city's marker account and the controversies record of this history; Late 19th and 20th Century Revivals in the Register's own listing line — and the nomination's judgment is that such houses defy any one style and are better described as eclectic: designed not to fit in or to be ordinary, but to be the attraction on Main Street and to go on drawing attention. The form's theory, as the nomination states it, was commercial: if there was too much to see in only one visit, the patron would keep coming back.

Inside, the lobby was a two-story space with flanking staircases, decorative iron railings, richly ornamented moldings and a barrel-vaulted ceiling, from whose landing a patron could overlook the lobby's activity or look out through the great arched window toward Main Street. The auditorium's balcony was undulating, horseshoe in form; the house had an orchestra pit with its surrounding balustrade, stacked dressing rooms at stage left, wall and ceiling murals by the Chicago artist F. Myers, and a silvered dome carrying vari-colored lights and a central chandelier reported at $3,500 — the colors themselves used as signals, red for a newsreel, amber for intermission in the nomination's account of the lighting design. The music plant was a $22,500 Marr-Colton-Wonder pipe organ — the name as the nomination prints it — two Star grand pianos, and a ten-piece orchestra. The climate plant was claimed, in the opening coverage, to hold the interior at an even degree the year round, in an age when the theater was often the coolest room a working family could buy an hour in. And in the basement, beneath the lobby, the house kept a children's nursery, where mothers could leave their children while attending a show — a palace fitting that belongs to this section's fabric and not only to the family record: the Tivoli was designed, in 1925, for whole families, and it built a room for the smallest of them.

The size of the room is this section's standing printed conflict, and both figures are formal. The National Register nomination and its building description give the auditorium a seating capacity of 1,500 — in its own arrangement, 950 seats on the first floor and 450 in the balcony. The city's marker account and the city's commissioned history give 950 on the main floor and 450 in the balcony — 1,400 in all. The arithmetic of the parts is the same in both accounts; the totals differ by a hundred, and the file prints the nomination's 1,500 and the city's 1,400 side by side wherever the number matters, as here, and does not reconcile them. It was, on either count, the largest theater Mishawaka ever had, and the most decorative theater built in the city, in the nomination's words — the only link, while it stood, to the community's role in the golden age of motion-picture entertainment.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Tivoli Theater (1997) — the corporation and its fifteen backers; the Buckels' 1,000 shares; Rupert's design and the Enterprise rendering; the reported $275,000 cost; the storefronts and offices and their early tenants and 1931–32 vacancy; the terra cotta, lighting and lanterns; the lobby, dome, chandelier, murals, organ, pianos and orchestra; the nursery; the 1,500 capacity and its 950 + 450 arrangement; Spanish-eclectic design discussion.
2. City of Mishawaka, the Tivoli historical marker account (installed 21 May 2026) — Spanish Colonial Revival; 950 main-floor and 450 balcony seats, 1,400 in all.
3. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the 950 + 450 count, agreeing with the city's marker account.
4. National Register listing line for the Tivoli Theater (reference no. 98000304) — the style carried as Late 19th and 20th Century Revivals; built 1924–1925.