The bank buildings

1930 – 2024

The tower: The Lincoln Bank Tower at 116 East Berry Street, opened 16 November 1930 — twenty-two stories, 312 feet, $1.3 million, the tallest building in Indiana until 1962 — remains the skyline's bank: built by a German-American bank that had renamed itself for Lincoln, held by Norwest to 1995, bought and refurbished by John Tippmann Sr. in 1998, home to Tower Bank from 1999 and to Old National's Fort Wayne market headquarters since 2014. Its full building history is carried in the business record's Lincoln entry and the architecture record.

The other monuments: The Fort Wayne National Bank answered it in 1970 with its own twenty-six-story tower on West Berry, the city's tallest building from 1970 to 1982, standing today as the PNC Center. The Anthony Wayne Bank built its fifteen-story headquarters in 1964 — its bank gone into Summit in 1987, the building converted to condominiums in 2011. The Peoples Trust and Savings Company built the era's most playful bank architecture: pyramid-roofed branches designed by George Nelson and Gordon Chadwick, of which the North Anthony Boulevard example survives as a restaurant, its three sister pyramids no longer banks. And the layer is still being written: STAR Financial Bank's $45 million headquarters rose downtown in 2024, the first new bank headquarters building of the consolidation age.

The corners: Under the monuments, the directories keep the older geography: bank corner against bank corner at Calhoun and Berry — First & Hamilton at the southeast, the Old National at the southwest, the Hamilton National at Calhoun and Main — when a Fort Wayne bank's address was its advertisement and its vault was its argument.

Sources:

1. The business record of this history, Lincoln National Bank entry — the tower's opening, dimensions and succession of occupants.
2. ACGSI, "Fort Wayne National Bank" — the bank building's construction (1969) and its years as the city's tallest.
3. The the Businesses section — the Anthony Wayne Bank Building (1964) and the Peoples Trust pyramids.
4. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Historic Preservation & Archaeology, on the Peoples Trust pyramid branch, North Anthony Boulevard — the Nelson and Chadwick design and the surviving branches.
5. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne City Directories, 1903 and 1918 — the bank corners.