The First Miles: Who Built Them, and Under What Body

The checklist's form asks for a consortium and a first linear park. Mishawaka's first trail miles were built by neither a consortium nor a friends group: the building body was the city itself, working the ground it had just taken back from industry. The sequence in the record: Uniroyal's bankruptcy in 1991 set the riverfront's future in motion; the city acquired the plant site in late 1997 and cleared the two-million-square-foot complex in the late 1990s; and on that cleared ground the city built parks — Beutter Park and Kamm Island first among them — and, in the South Bend Regional Chamber's December 2017 words, "in conjunction with those improvements, the Mishawaka Riverwalk was developed to connect each of those amenities." The design firm of record across the system's building is Lawson-Fisher Associates of South Bend, whose signature-projects portfolio carries the "Mishawaka Riverwalk System – Multiple Phases," and which served as lead design consultant on the Ironworks phases and project manager on the Ball Band Biergarten that opened on the walk's bank on 4 July 2020. The city's own financial record prices an early piece: the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for 2004 highlights the construction of Robert C. Beutter Park at $3,325,842. The banked phases article in the trails section carries the building's chronology from there — the south-bank walk and the three footbridges to Kamm Island largely complete by 2003, Beutter Park opened in 2004, the links and extensions of 2008, 2009, 2015 and 2022–23. The first-linear-park test resolves with the body: the Riverwalk's first miles were the city's first linear park on its riverbanks, made not by a trail consortium of the Fort Wayne form but by a redevelopment government converting its own factory riverfront — the distinction is the finding, and it governs everything after: this system was a municipal work from its first mile.