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1911 - present
Downtown first: Read in sequence, the addresses in this section are the trade's map of the region. It starts downtown, where the factory was: Lafayette Boulevard in the 1910s and 1920s, Hinkle's Ford showroom at 225 North Lafayette with the Medow store across the street and Nichols Buick down the block, Yeager and Freeman-Spicer to the south, the whole row a short walk from the Studebaker gates it existed to serve. Western Avenue joins it at the row's south end, Gates Chevrolet at 333 Western in the late 1960s records and Gates Chevy World in the old Sears building from 1979. For the trade's first half century, a South Bend resident bought his car within sight of the plant that may have built it.
Jefferson and McKinley: The twin city's boulevards took the second age. Jordan's Ford store has stood at 609 East Jefferson Boulevard in Mishawaka since the late 1940s, with its Toyota store at 920, a franchise pair on one street for three quarters of a century. McKinley Avenue carried Gates Chevrolet at 666 West McKinley by 1969, and the McKinley strip eastward became, from about 1979 for more than twenty-five years, the cruising ground a generation of Michiana teenagers knew simply as the Strip: the auto row turned social institution, documented in the Tribune's columns from 1981 to 2005 in complaints, crackdowns and returns, because the cars the dealers sold had become the region's youth culture with wheels.
Grape Road and Ireland Road: The corridors of the present trade are Grape Road in Mishawaka and Ireland Road on South Bend's south side. Grape Road holds Basney Honda at 3820, Gurley Leep's Motorwerks at 4004, Jordan Lexus at 4325 and the Gurley Leep headquarters above them, with Basney's BMW and Mazda stores on State Road 933 at the corridor's north end, on the road to Niles and Tyler's lots. Ireland Road holds the leg's two oldest living names facing the same traffic: Gurley Leep Ford at 320 East Ireland and Gates Chevrolet at 311 East Ireland, opened in 2023, with Gates Toyota at 640 West Ireland. A buyer driving Ireland Road today passes, within a few hundred yards, a dealership founded in 1977 and one founded in 1928. East of the region the pattern completes itself in Elkhart, where Lochmandy, founded as a Buick store by Michael Lochmandy in 1954 with a Rambler store added in 1957 and the two merged in 1993 on the North Nappanee Street site built in 1995, anchors the Michiana trade's eastern end under its founder's family name.
The pattern: Every era's row stands where that era's transportation put the traffic, and in South Bend every era also stands in a relation to the factory. Downtown stood beside it. The boulevards outlived it. The corridors replaced it, Grape Road's rise following the shopping migration north and Ireland Road's following the suburbs south, exactly as the trade once followed the plant gates. The houses that survived the moves are the ones in this section with founders' names still on them, Gates from 1928, Jordan from the 1940s, Tyler from 1969, Gurley Leep from 1977, Basney from the 1970s, which is why this section was worth running on its own: in Michiana as in Fort Wayne, the car dealer is one of the last businesses where the name over the door is still, as often as not, the family that started it. South Bend's version of the story has one chapter no other city can match, and it is the chapter this section began with: for its first century, the sellers and the makers were neighbors, and when the makers stopped, two of the sellers bought the flagship and kept it alive themselves.
Sources:
- The addresses and dates as carried in the articles of this section.
- Lochmandy Motors, the house's own history as carried in its company profiles (the 1954 Buick founding by Michael Lochmandy, the 1957 Rambler store, the 1993 merger, the 1995 North Nappanee Street site).
- Round the Bend Now and Then, McKinley Avenue cruising history (the Strip from about 1979 for more than twenty-five years; the South Bend Tribune articles of 1981-2005).