The northwest node: Portage Avenue and Cleveland Road

PORTAGE AVENUE AT CLEVELAND ROAD · THE CITY'S NORTHWEST SIDE · AND THE AVENUE'S OLDER CENTERS

The node the west side blamed: When the Redevelopment Commission wrote down why LaSalle Square failed, it named this corner: "the Portage Avenue/Cleveland Road retail and commercial development." The intersection, at the city's northwest edge where Portage Road meets Cleveland Road, collected the big-box trade of the north and west sides in the years around the century's turn, in the airport tax-increment district's orbit. Its anchor is the Meijer supercenter at 3600 Portage Road — the Michigan chain's one-stop store, groceries and general merchandise under one roof — trading at the corner today on the company's own store list, with its gas station on Cleveland Road beside it; the store's opening year was not reached and is stated as a gap rather than guessed. Around the anchor the corner filled with the form's usual company — discount and dollar stores, a Walgreens at 2845 West Cleveland Road, and the fast-food rows of both roads — a node assembled parcel by parcel, never a single center with a single name, and for that reason easy to miss in the record and impossible to miss in the traffic.

The avenue's older retail: Portage Avenue had a shopping-center history long before the node. Just north of downtown, the Portage Street Market was developed in the 1960s as a neighborhood center — a building of about 40,000 square feet in the consultants' later measurement. Its second life arrived as a study: a 2018 development analysis prepared for the corridor (Urban Advisors with Opticos Design) proposed repositioning the aging center around a smaller, 12,000-square-foot neighborhood grocery with a hardware store, the rest of the building cheaply retrofitted into market stalls for small food businesses and artists — the neighborhood center's documented answer to the big-box node three miles up its own avenue. Between the two, the avenue holds the whole taxonomy of the city's retail in one street: the nineteenth-century storefront blocks at its south end, the 1960s neighborhood center, and the supercenter node where the avenue meets the bypass-era road grid.

Sources:

1. South Bend Redevelopment Commission, regular meeting minutes, October 20, 2006 — "the Portage Avenue/Cleveland Road retail and commercial development" named among the causes of LaSalle Square's decline.
2. Meijer, store locator, store 120 (current, November 2026) — the Meijer supercenter at 3600 Portage Road, South Bend, with the Meijer Express station at 21501 Cleveland Road.
3. Urban Advisors and Opticos Design, "South Bend, IN: Portage Market — Development Analysis" (2018) — the Portage Street Market developed in the 1960s as a neighborhood center; the 40,000-square-foot building; the recommended 12,000-square-foot grocery and market-arcade retrofit.