Playland Park: the oval inside the amusement park

1916 — 1961

A trolley park that added a race track: The park began in 1880 as Springbrook Park, a trolley park on the St. Joseph River bounded by the river, Ironwood Drive, and Lincolnway East. A race track was added in 1916. Pete Redden became the park's manager in 1924 — the Clio entry says he bought it in 1925 — and renamed it Playland Park by a public contest. The park's grandstand hosted horse racing, the infield and oval carried midget and stock-car racing in the postwar years, and the ground hosted the county's 4-H Fair for many years; the park's baseball life, as the Blue Sox' home, is in the Sports record. Playland Park closed in 1961, and its ground became a lighted par-3 golf course that ran for some forty years.

A name the databases divide on: Motor Sport Magazine's circuit database carries this oval under another name — "Frontier Park Speedway" — and gives it a different life: operating 1919–1942, "originally a dog track," paved in 1954 and closed in 1977, replaced by a golf course. That entry stands at odds with the local record above — a track added in 1916 and a park closed in 1961 — and its details are printed here as the divergence they are. Its 1954 paving and later closing closely parallel Council Bluffs, Iowa's speedway at its own Playland park, and the entry is best read as a same-name contamination in the database, not as South Bend's record; this section follows the local record.

Sources:

1. Playland Park (Indiana), compiled from John Palmer, South Bend in Vintage Postcards (Arcadia, 2005), pp. 109–112 — Springbrook Park from 1880, the bounds, the race track added in 1916, Redden's management from 1924 and the Playland name, the 1961 closing and the par-3 golf course that followed.
2. The Clio, Playland Park entry — Redden's purchase in 1925, horse racing at the grandstand, the park as the 4-H Fair's host for many years, and some 3,700 spectators at the 1952 stock-car race.
3. Motor Sport Magazine, circuit database, "Frontier Park Speedway" — the divergent entry: 1919–1942, a dog track originally, paved 1954, closed 1977; printed as a conflict, not adopted.