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Announced jointly by Mayor Harold S. Zeis and the Allen County Commissioners in July 1965 as part of downtown renewal, the combined City-County Building at 1 East Main Street, between Calhoun and Clinton and directly across Main from the courthouse, was designed by Strauss Associates Inc. — the successor firm of the Lincoln Tower's A. M. Strauss — with Eggers & Higgins of New York, and built by Hagerman Construction. Ground was broken in the fall of 1968 and the cornerstone laid in 1969. The building is ten stories of precast concrete, 217,000 square feet, and is described by the Allen County genealogical society's places file as an outstanding example of the style that came to be called Brutalism. City employees moved in on March 11, 1971, and the building was dedicated that September. (One local summary dates its completion to 1970; the move-in and dedication record places it in 1971.)
It served as the shared home of city and county administration for forty years. When most of those offices moved in June 2011 to Citizens Square — the 1950s Wolf & Dessauer department-store building at 200 East Berry, bought by the city in 2009 — the Main Street building was renovated as headquarters for the city and county police and the city fire department, and on April 23–24, 2012 it was renamed the Edwin J. Rousseau Centre, for the councilman, county councilman and commissioner whose forty years in Fort Wayne and Allen County elected office had made him, among other things, one of the building's own champions. Rousseau had died in 2009, aged 76.
Sources: ACGSI, City County Building page (drawing on Corey McMaken, "1966 to 1970: Creation of City-County Building in downtown Fort Wayne," Journal Gazette, February 23, 2023, and Allen County Government, April 23, 2012); The History Center, Old City Hall record; American Courthouses (courthouses.co), Allen County entries, for the Eggers & Higgins attribution; Around Fort Wayne, "Citizens Square Officially Open" (June 27, 2011).