Broadway — the electric corridor

THE NEAR SOUTHWEST · BROADWAY, MAIN STREET TO RUDISILL

Broadway is the corridor the electric age built. The Jenney Electric Company came to Fort Wayne in 1881, started in a cramped brick building at Wells and Superior, and by 1886 had moved to a new plant on Broadway by the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago tracks — the plant that passed to General Electric in 1899 and gave the southwest side its defining employer for a century. The street carried the workers and the current both: Fort Wayne's streetcars reached Broadway early (the Broadway route dates to 1888 in the transit record), the Belt Line of 1888 ran Broadway from Main south to Creighton, and in July 1892 Fort Wayne Electric electrified the city system at a cost of $100,000. Broadway's storefront row grew up as a streetcar shopping street serving the plant gates and the neighborhoods — Poplar, Oakdale, Historic South Wayne — behind it, and the corridor's buildings, from the plant complex to its small commercial blocks, are treated in the Architecture section.

The corridor's modern arc runs through the plant. General Electric's long contraction ended at Broadway with the campus's sale and reinvention as Electric Works — the West Campus opened November 23, 2022 — and the street below it has been re-planned in the same years: the Packard 2030 neighborhood plan (adopted May 2023) names the Broadway Corridor between Park Avenue and Rudisill for a beautification strategy of street trees, banners and signage tying it to Foster Park, and the corridor's own civic ritual, Christmas on Broadway, has run for more than two decades at Broadway Plaza. Broadway is the rare corridor in this section whose anchor employer left and whose anchor came back in a new form, on the same ground, under a name that remembers the first one.

Sources: News-Sentinel, Cityscapes, "Light of the world" (Dec. 19, 1982) — Jenney Electric to Broadway 1886, GE absorption 1899, electrification July 1892; Fort Wayne transit route record (Broadway route, 1888–1960); Historic Belt Line Tour brochure (Belt Line, 1888); City of Fort Wayne, Packard 2030 (adopted May 2023), implementation actions 3.10; Famous Locations section (Electric Works West Campus, opened Nov. 23, 2022).