South Bend Malls and Shopping Centers: The Street, the Mall and the Power Center

Malls & Shopping Centers · The street, the mall, and the power center

South Bend's shopping moved house four times. It began on one street: for the first half of the twentieth century the region's retail stood shoulder to shoulder on Michigan Street downtown, in two great department stores and the trade around them. The second house was the plaza — Broadmoor, on the south side's Miami and Ireland corner, in 1954. The third was the enclosed mall, and the city built two of them in two years: Scottsdale on the south side in 1973, a hundred stores under one roof, and the little North Village Mall on the north side in 1975. Both are gone. The mall that outlasted them stands six miles from Scottsdale in Mishawaka, and it is named in this section only at the size the boundary allows: University Park, opened 1979, is Mishawaka's. The fourth house is the one the city shops in now — open-air power centers on the Ireland Road corridor where Scottsdale stood and a mile west of it, a big-box node at Portage and Cleveland on the northwest side, and a lifestyle center the university built at its own gate. What belongs in this section is the centers themselves: the ground each stands on, city or neighbor stated plainly, when each opened, what anchored it, what emptied it or kept it full, and what stands there in November 2026.