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1993 — 2002
The decay: The Allen County Courthouse of 1902 — Brentwood S. Tolan's Beaux-Arts pile, built for $817,553.19 and listed on the National Register in 1976 — was allowed to decay from inside. A 1930s interior restoration had damaged the murals, decorative ceilings and scagliola it meant to refresh. By 1993 preservationists learned that water leaking through the inner glass dome was weakening the glue holding Charles Holloway's rotunda murals; the paintings stood in danger of falling five stories. In November 1995 the statue of Miss Liberty was taken down for repairs after her fingers fell onto a car.
The rescue: Local officials, lawyers and architects formed the Allen County Courthouse Preservation Trust, which met for the first time on 30 August 1994 to raise the money. Mural restoration began in February 1995; the murals alone cost $1.4 million, restored at a pace of a single square inch at a time, across some 40,000 square feet of scagliola in 24 varieties. The whole campaign ran $8.6 million over eight years. The courthouse was rededicated on its centennial, 23 September 2002, and designated a National Historic Landmark on 31 July 2003 — the strongest answer an American city can give to the question of whether a building was worth saving.
The attached loss: The rescue had a price beyond money. For Courthouse Green, construction began 30 April 1998; several buildings along Court Street were demolished, and the one-acre plaza was dedicated on 15 October 1999 at a cost of $3.2 million. The fight over the courthouse was therefore two fights: whether to save the building — settled, emphatically, in favour — and what the saving would clear away around it. The heritage record owns the wider preservation wars — the Landing in 1965, the Embassy, Baker Street Station, and the Haynes House designation fight in the architecture record — and they are pointed to there, not retold here.
Sources:
- News-Sentinel courthouse timeline (egen.fortwayne.com) and Ted Shideler's courthouse history — the decay, the Trust's formation, the restoration figures and the rededication.
- Walls & Ceilings magazine, October 2000, and the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society's courthouse pages — the mural and scagliola restoration.
- The heritage record, Historic Preservation — the Preservation Trust's $8.6 million campaign, begun in 1994, and the National Historic Landmark designation.