Town & Country: the big single screen of the McKinley corridor

TOWN & COUNTRY CENTER, McKINLEY AVENUE · OPENED 1970 · DEMOLISHED

Mishawaka's second palace age had one room, and it stood where the trade had moved. The Town & Country Theatre opened in 1970 in the Town & Country shopping center on the McKinley Avenue corridor — the first center of the city's eastward retail movement, carried whole in the malls record — as a large single-screen house of the last single-screen kind: about 1,078 seats in the recollection of a man who worked there from its opening year, carried in the standard inventory; a very large screen for its day, never exposed when patrons entered but revealed by an automated motorized masking and grand-drape curtain system at the film's start; 35mm magnetic-track stereo projection, though never a 70mm installation; and a design of glass, chrome and contemporary carpeting that a contemporary hand in the inventory calls a fine example of late-1960s single-screen theater architecture. Its operator was ABC Theatres — the American Broadcasting Company's theater arm — whose economies entered the house's own lore: ABC, the same account records, popped the house's corn a week in advance at a central point, bagged it, and reheated it in a warmer at the stand. The detail is printed as its teller gave it, a first-hand employee recollection in the theatre-history record, and it stands in this section as the texture of chain operation at the end of the single-screen era — the palace economy of 1925 inverted, the picture local and everything else shipped in.

The single screen did not stay single. The standard inventory carries the Town & Country among demolished houses at three screens, later operated by Plitt Theatres — the Chicago chain that took over ABC's Midwestern houses — and the inventory's later recollection is unkind and is printed as its author's: basic single-level boxes after the multiplexing, thin walls through which patrons could sometimes hear two or three soundtracks at once, a foyer of little more than a refreshment stand — “not one of the great movie palaces of yore.” The building no longer exists: the same account places it on ground since cleared, between the center's fast-food outlots and its supermarket, its entrance facing the parking lot and its back to the street. The dates of the twinning, of the closing and of the demolition are not established in the record reached, and the gap is named: the settling sources are the South Bend Tribune's theater advertising and the center's leasing record across the 1970s–1990s, and the house file in the standard inventory read against them. What stands is the arc, complete at its ends: for the generation between the Tivoli's darkening and Grape Road's rise, the Town & Country was Mishawaka's first-run room — the big screen of the corridor, a thousand seats under one roof, in a shopping center's parking lot.

Sources:

1. Cinema Treasures, the standard theatre inventory, Town & Country Theatre, Mishawaka — the house carried at three screens, demolished, later operated by Plitt Theatres; the contributed comments of a 1970 opening-year employee (about 1,078 seats; the large screen and motorized masking and grand drape; 35mm magnetic stereo, no 70mm; glass, chrome and contemporary carpeting; ABC's advance-popped corn) and of a later visitor (the multiplexed boxes, the audible soundtracks, the building gone, its site placed between the fast-food outlots and the supermarket) — employee and visitor recollection printed as such.
2. The malls record of this history — the Town & Country center and the McKinley corridor's retail movement whole.