The Demolition Ledger — What Was Lost

A built history that lists only survivors lies by omission. The documented losses, in brief: the Aveline Hotel, built 1860–63 by Francis Aveline at Calhoun and Berry and for 45 years the city's leading hotel, burned in the early morning of May 3, 1908, with eleven to twelve lives lost — the toll contested in the record: eleven in the next-day wire reports, twelve in Griswold's 1921 retelling and the History Center/ACGSI tradition; the Shoaff Building took its site. The old Pennsylvania depot near Calhoun Street came down in 1911–13 for the track elevation that produced Baker Street Station. The Anthony Hotel, above, was imploded on January 13, 1974 — and 1974 took the other grand hotel too: the Hotel Keenan, Charles Weatherhogg's thirteen-story house at Harrison and Washington, dedicated November 24, 1923, and billed as "Fort Wayne's Largest and Finest Hotel," host in its day to Presidents Truman and Kennedy, was demolished on October 20, 1974; the Grand Wayne Center stands on its site. The Snyderman House, Graves's sculptural masterpiece of 1972, was lost to arson in 2002. Against the ledger stand the near-misses that survived by effort: the Landing, protected in 1965 as clearance plans circled; the Embassy, bought from under the wrecking ball in 1974; and Baker Street Station, saved in 1996 with two demolition permits already issued. The Baltes Hotel at Berry and Harrison appears in period newspapers and in 1938 film of the downtown streetscape; its end is not established in the sources consulted for this chapter, and it is entered here as an open question rather than a date.

Sources: ACGSI, Aveline Hotel and Hotel Keenan pages (drawing on Griswold's 1921 Journal Gazette history series and ARCH's February 20, 2020 Keenan retrospective); Corey McMaken, "1974: Explosive demolitions of Van Orman, Keenan hotels," Journal Gazette (July 25, 2019); Advanced Media Integration, 1938 Fort Wayne footage notes, for the Baltes Hotel's period presence.