Lessons from Fort Wayne

Downtown Fort Wayne in 1960

Earlier this week I traveled to Fort Wayne, Indiana to look at buildings in their downtown for possible conversion to residential lofts. Downtown Fort Wayne has several new developments that are breathing much needed life into the the city's core including a new baseball stadium for the minor league Tin Caps (who previously played in a suburban location), a new convention center and a new hotel going up nearby. What downtown Fort Wayne lacks though is downtown residents, but the current mayor Tom Henry is trying to change that. As part of the stadium project, a developer promised to build a new condo and retail development overlooking the new field, but has failed to start the project. Hmmm, sound familiar?

Somehow this smaller city managed to completely miss the nation wide housing boom that started around the millennium and came to a crashing halt last year, leaving the downtown area with almost no housing except two 60's modern apartment highrises in the northeast edge. With new stadium condo deal dead for now, the mayor is trying to get developers to convert older buildings with the use of historic tax credits, like St. Louis has been so successful in doing. The problem: there aren't many buildings left downtown! Previous administrations allowed Fort Wayne's downtown to be turned into an almost un-ending sea of asphalt. Driving into downtown (and Googleing beforehand) I was absolutely stunned at the amount of surface parking permeating the majority of the blocks. Of the actual built structures, that do exist, the percentage of either stand alone parking garages or buildings with large integral garages also seemed high. The number of existing buildings ripe for residential conversion is very small.

Downtown Fort Wayne today. The red areas are all surface parking,
parking garages, lawns (non-park space) or vacant land.

The lessons from Fort Wayne are that we should continue to fight to prevent the loss of our built environment for lesser uses like parking lots. The other lesson is that we have more here in St. Louis than we sometimes realize. Sometimes we here in St. Louis have a tendency to beat ourselves up, especially when we experience a loss...I know I am guilty of this, and occasionally some even threaten to move away. We should to remember that although we have lost many great buildings, we would be hard pressed to find what we have left in any comparable city in the US. We need to keep fighting to keep what makes St. Louis unique. We will never be New York, San Francisco or Chicago, but they will never have our affordability, quality of life or our buildings.