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DOWNTOWN TO THE SOUTH CITY LIMITS · SOUTH CALHOUN STREET
Calhoun Street is one of the original streets of the 1824 town plat, the east–west dividing line of the city's address system, and — in Randy Harter's street-name account — named for John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. A proposal by the Fort Wayne MLK Club to rename the street for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., reported by Input Fort Wayne in 2020, did not carry; the bridge over the Maumee on U.S. 27/Clinton Street already bears King's name. What matters here is the street's working life: Calhoun begins at the St. Marys River at Headwaters Park and runs south the length of the old city to Tillman Road and the city limits, through some of the most ethnically diverse sections of Fort Wayne, and for two centuries it has been the south side's main street.
Its first commercial fact is the railroad. The depots and the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago shops cut the street's south end off from downtown, and the south side built its own retail row in answer: the Irishtown place file records that 1902–1904 South Calhoun was built in 1881 by Irish immigrant Lawrence Markey as a grocery, so that residents south of the tracks would not have to wait on trains to shop. The streetcar Belt Line, from 1888, ran south on Calhoun from Main to Creighton Avenue — the line's spine — and the groceries, saloons, and storefronts thickened along it. In 1910 the street carried the city's densest vice geography as well: the Crime History section counts 197 saloons in Fort Wayne that year, 39 of them on Calhoun. Through the twentieth century South Calhoun settled into its durable character — small, neighborhood-serving, often immigrant-run storefronts between the houses, auto-oriented uses mixed in — and its modern problem is the familiar one of an urban corridor zoned for a more industrial pattern than the one it actually lives.
The plans treat Calhoun as a first-rank corridor. The Southeast Strategy Update, adopted by the Common Council in January 2021, names Calhoun Street a primary focus area; a South Calhoun Corridor Branding project is complete under that strategy. In 2026 the City carried the strategy into zoning: proactive rezoning petitions REZ-2026-0032 through 0035, covering about 59 acres along South Calhoun from Grand Street to Rudisill Boulevard and Rudisill from Calhoun to Lafayette, proposed moving most of the corridor to the UC/Urban Corridor district — the class meant for exactly this kind of walkable mixed-use spine — implementing the Southeast Strategy and Packard 2030 recommendations. The Plan Commission staff report of August 2026 describes the street in the words this section would choose: "South Calhoun Street serves as a key north-south arterial connecting southern neighborhoods to the core of the city."
Sources: Randy Harter, "What's in a (street) name?", Fort Wayne Reader (June 1, 2018), via ACGSI street files; Input Fort Wayne, "Renaming Calhoun Street" (Oct. 7, 2020); ACGSI Irishtown place file (Markey grocery, 1881); City of Fort Wayne, Southeast Strategy Update (adopted January 2021); Fort Wayne Plan Commission staff report, REZ-2026-0032–0035 (August 2026); Crime History section (1910 saloon count).