Broadmoor Shopping Plaza: the first plaza

PLANNED 1954 · NORTHEAST CORNER OF MIAMI STREET AND IRELAND ROAD · THE SOUTH SIDE

Seventeen stores and 450 parking spaces: The plaza form reached South Bend on the south side, at the corner where the enclosed mall would later rise across the street. The Redevelopment Commission's South Side history records the Broadmoor Shopping Plaza on the northeast corner of Miami and Ireland: a plan of 1954 for a center of 17 stores and 450 parking spaces, built by the Hilton Construction Company of Kenneth Woods, South Bend. The Commission's own two accounts do not quite agree on the birthday, and both are printed: its narrative history says Broadmoor "opened for business in 1954," while its timeline separates the 1954 plan from construction, which it dates to 1956. The plaza served the Broadmoor and Scottsdale subdivisions rising around it — the first South Bend retail built for the automobile rather than the streetcar — and it endured: the Commission's timeline records a refurbishing in 1988, and when the city drew its South Side Economic Development Project District in 2003, Broadmoor stood as one of the district's three sub-districts, the plan's tables listing the plaza in the hands of ILOne Holdings Inc. of Cincinnati and the plan's judgment calling the Broadmoor sub-district stable. Across Ireland Road from the plaza, the corridor filled in around it — Erskine Plaza opened in 1989 on the mall's side of the road — but Broadmoor is the corner's original: the oldest shopping center ground in the city still carrying its first name.

Sources:

1. South Bend Redevelopment Commission, Resolution No. 1955, South Side Economic Development Project District Plan (2003) — the district history and timeline: the 1954 plan (17 stores, 450 spaces; Hilton Construction Co., Kenneth Woods), the narrative's "opened for business in 1954" against the timeline's "1956: construction begins on Broadmoor Shopping Plaza," the 1988 refurbishing, the sub-district tables and ownership, and Erskine Plaza's 1989 opening.