Jitneys, gasoline, and the law of the street

1902 – 1921

The horse's objection: The transition was contested in the street itself. By 2 September 1902 the Journal Gazette was reporting horses' antipathy to the new machines as a standing problem of city traffic, and the livery trade that the automobile was displacing housed, in the Winklemeyer barn of the 1899 account, the first automobile the contemporary press saw in the city. The horse-to-auto changeover in Fort Wayne ran through the same buildings: livery stables became garages, and the first automobile taxi service was, on DeVinney's reading, a livery business with touring cars.

Speed, enforced: The jitney era — unlicensed-feeling fleets of cheap cars for hire at a nickel a ride — brought the automobile under police discipline. After a jitney crash at Harrison and Lewis streets, the Journal Gazette of 7 November 1915 reported two jitney drivers arrested on traffic-law and speed charges, the complaints signed by Police Chief Charles Lenz, with bonds set at $500. Whatever Fort Wayne's first traffic ordinance said, by 1915 its speed law had a chief's signature and a bond schedule behind it.

The filling stations arrive: On 21 August 1921 the Journal Gazette counted the new furniture of the car city: "Four Gas Filling Stations are Being Erected Here this Summer." The first station in the city, the paper recalled, had been erected "five or six years ago" — about 1915 or 1916 — against neighbourhood opposition. By the summer of 1921 thirteen were operating: nine Standard Oil, two Sinclair, and two Red Fox Petroleum, distributing about 1,000 gallons of gasoline a day among them. The curbside pump and the drive-in station replaced the grocery-store can and the livery-yard tank inside six years.

Two firsts that do not date: Fort Wayne's first traffic signal and its first parking meters were both searched for this section, and neither date was found in the sources reached. The Allen County Genealogical Society's compiled timelines give the national firsts (the signal at Cleveland in 1914, the meter at Oklahoma City in 1935) but no Fort Wayne installation date, and the local press record reached here does not supply one. What is documented is the mature state: when the city replaced its meter stock in 2017, 764 meters were in service, and a former police chief described the outgoing machines as taking the city "from the '40s up to today's technology" — evidence that Fort Wayne's meters were a mid-twentieth-century installation, and no more than that. The two firsts stand as a named gap in the record.

Sources:

1. ACGSI, Automobile History in Allen County — the Journal Gazette items of 2 September 1902 (horses and automobiles), 7 November 1915 (the jitney arrests, Chief Charles Lenz, $500 bonds), and 21 August 1921 ("Four Gas Filling Stations are Being Erected Here this Summer": the first station five or six years before, thirteen operating, Standard Oil nine, Sinclair two, Red Fox Petroleum two, about 1,000 gallons daily).
2. News-Sentinel (2017), on the city's parking-meter replacement, as carried by GovTech — the 764 meters and former chief Rusty York's "from the '40s up to today's technology."