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The Fort Wayne Hotel Company, organized by leading local businessmen and proposed first by dry-goods merchant Ernest Rurode, began construction in 1905 of a nine-story, 263-room hotel at 128 West Berry Street, the northeast corner of Berry and Harrison. It cost $500,000 and opened with a celebratory banquet in February 1908. The architect was Charles R. Weatherhogg of Fort Wayne — and, in the one documented collaboration of its kind in the city, Louis H. Sullivan of Chicago served as associate designer, as the National Register nomination for Weatherhogg's Blackstone Building records and ARCH's Weatherhogg biography confirms. The hotel was famous for its lobby: an ornate stained-glass skylight suspended over marble walls and gilded fixtures, with General Anthony Wayne's claimed family crest worked into the furniture, down to the chair backs.
Hugh Keenan first managed the Anthony, then his son James until 1947, when F. Harold Van Orman took the lease and the hotel took his name. The Van Orman — the Anthony again by the end — closed in September 1969, was used for fire-training exercises, and was condemned on May 3, 1973. On January 13, 1974, 294 explosive charges brought it down in nine seconds, Fort Wayne's first building implosion; the site at Berry and Harrison became a parking lot.
Sources: ARCH Inc., "Charles Weatherhogg, architect" (2023); National Register nomination, Blackstone Building (1988), for the Sullivan associate-designer credit; ACGSI, Named Places, Anthony Hotel; Kevin Leininger, "Anthony's tale," Cityscapes, News-Sentinel, January 23, 1982.