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The campus on Broadway began in 1881, when James A. Jenney brought his arc lamp and dynamo to Fort Wayne and Ronald T. McDonald organized the Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Light Company on November 1 of that year. The company bought the old Gause agricultural-works plant at Broadway and the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago tracks in 1885 — the nucleus of everything after. Thomson-Houston took control in 1888; the concern was reorganized in May 1899 as the Fort Wayne Electric Works; in June 1911 it was merged into the General Electric Company, and from January 1916 it operated simply as the Fort Wayne Works of GE. The Broadway halls of 1915 and 1917 and the campus's early reinforced-concrete construction — described in modern accounts as including the city's first reinforced-concrete building — housed motors, generators and transformers; the Winter Street and Taylor Street plants took the refrigeration, Monitor Top and wartime supercharger lines. At its late-1940s peak GE employed roughly 40 percent of the city's workforce; payrolls still topped 9,000 in the 1950s.
The long wind-down ended in stages: the last Broadway operations ceased in 2014, and GE permanently closed the 39-acre complex in 2015. (A popular online account dates the closing to 2016; the financing record of the redevelopment gives 2015.) In 2017 a partnership led by Ancora Partners acquired the campus. What followed is the largest adaptive reuse in the city's history: Electric Works, a $286 million public-private redevelopment — federal historic and New Markets tax credits, state credits, city money, debt and equity — that kept the campus's 18 buildings standing. The first phase, the West Campus, restored about 730,000 square feet in ten buildings under Weigand Construction and opened in November 2022, 69 percent pre-leased, with the headquarters of Do it Best Corp. (about 425 employees, moved in December 2022), the Union Street Market food hall, a health clinic, co-working space and a public high school. The General Electric Fort Wayne Electric Works Historic District — significant for the period about 1893 to 1969 — was listed on the National Register on February 27, 2023. A second phase, The Elex, $100 million of new apartment construction adjoining the campus, opened in April 2026.
Sources: B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), "The General Electric Works"; John Ankenbruck, Twentieth Century History of Fort Wayne (1975), via the Greater Chicago Insulator Club newsletter (April 2022); National Trust Community Investment Corporation, Electric Works financing announcement (March 15, 2021), for the 2015 closure, the 2017 acquisition and the $286 million phase one; Indiana DNR recent-listings newsletter, for the Electric Works Historic District (February 27, 2023); WPTA, "The Elex opens in Fort Wayne's Electric Works district" (April 15, 2026).