On the second Saturday of October, the string lights strung above Ironworks Plaza will come on one last time for the 2026 season. The Mishawaka Market Under the Lights: Second Glow runs from 7 to 9 p.m. on October 10, closing out the market's eighth year with an evening of live music, vendors, food trucks, and drinks in the Ball Band Biergarten. There is no ticket and no gate. You simply show up on Ironworks Avenue.
The event is the nighttime bookend to a market that has become a Sunday morning ritual in this city on the St. Joseph River. From May 31 through September 27, the Mishawaka Market sets up at Ironworks Plaza every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., drawing local farmers, artisans, bakers, and food vendors. The 2026 season skipped three Sundays along the way, but otherwise ran straight through the summer. By the time the daytime season ends in late September, the market has spent nearly four months as the weekend anchor of downtown.
That the market has reached its eighth year is itself a small point of civic pride. The city frames it as a continuation of a longer local story: Mishawaka, it likes to note, has long had a reputation for agricultural success, and the market is meant to showcase that heritage in a modern, walkable setting. The Sunday market is run by the city's parks and recreation department alongside its Ironworks programming staff. Kaylan Chaput, the Ironworks Program and Events Director, described the appeal in a 2026 television interview: "It is amazing just to see all of these people come down, they're spending their hard-earned money and benefiting somebody else that's spending theirs to bring it to you. And just seeing all of these people here put the smile on my face, and I know, to the vendors and to the other people in the community, it's a great feeling."
The Under the Lights edition is newer than the market itself. It began in 2025, when the city first moved the market into the evening. The 2025 vendor application put the date plainly: "Mishawaka Market Under the Lights (MMUTL): October 4th – 7-9 PM," with the note that season vendors could take part at no extra charge. That first night market drew a crowd large enough to overwhelm the surrounding parking, with cars circling for spaces and visitors eventually leaving vehicles blocks away and walking back to the riverwalk. A local photographer who attended recalled a swarm of cars, a riverfront full of dogs, and a live music set that people listened to while the sun went down. The overhead lights along the riverwalk, she wrote, were the whole point.
That is the spirit the Second Glow inherits. The name signals it is the second such evening, and the last market of the season. Vendors who spent the summer under the Sunday sun get one more outing after dark, this time with the plaza lit and the music playing into the night.
The setting does much of the work. Ironworks Plaza sits at the north end of downtown Mishawaka, where the city's urban core meets the St. Joseph River. The riverwalk, a circular pathway linking both banks, has been upgraded in recent years with new landscaping and lighting, and it is that lighting that gives the night market its name. In winter, the same plaza hosts an ice rink with skating and bumper cars; in summer, it hosts concerts and the market. The plaza is also home to Sun King Brewery, the Indianapolis-based craft brewer that opened a tap room and food hall there in 2022, part of a broader push to enliven the downtown.
Just outside Sun King, along Beutter Riverfront Park, sits the Ball Band Biergarten. The name is a deliberate nod to local history. Ball-Band was the trademark of the Mishawaka Woolen Manufacturing Company, a rubber footwear maker whose red ball on a black band gave the brand its name, registered in 1901. Over more than half a century the plant grew from a single small building with a handful of employees into one of the largest rubber footwear operations in the world. Uniroyal bought Ball-Band in 1967, and in 1969 the last pair of shoes was made in Mishawaka. The factory site is now a public park. The biergarten that borrows the name is a European-style outdoor drinking space, and on the night of the Second Glow it will be pouring drinks for the market crowd.
For anyone planning to go, the practical details are simple. The market runs 7 to 9 p.m. on October 10 at Ironworks Plaza, 230 Ironworks Avenue. Admission is free and open to all. Expect live music, a full slate of vendors, food trucks, and beverages in the biergarten. Given how crowded the first Under the Lights proved to be, arriving early, or being ready to park a few blocks out and walk the riverwalk in, is the safer bet. Dogs are welcome but must be leashed, and alcohol is meant to stay within the designated areas.
There is a wrinkle worth noting for anyone relying on the city's own listings. The City of Mishawaka's event page for Under the Lights carries an October 3 date, while the Visit South Bend Mishawaka listing gives October 10, and the Visit South Bend entry is the one that carries the season-finale language. The October 10 date is the one consistent with the event as described here.
What the evening amounts to is a modest but genuine thing: a farmers market that has spent eight summers as a Sunday institution, given one final night under the lights before the season goes quiet. The vendors pack up, the music stops, and the plaza waits for winter and the ice rink. But for two hours on an October evening, the riverwalk glows, and the market gets its send-off.