South Anthony Boulevard and Rudisill Boulevard — the southeast cross

THE SOUTHEAST · SOUTH ANTHONY BOULEVARD × EAST–WEST RUDISILL BOULEVARD

Two planned boulevards cross in southeast Fort Wayne, and the crossing is the area's center of gravity. Rudisill Boulevard is the older and grander: a three-mile east–west road developed by the Board of Park Commissioners beginning in 1912 to George Kessler's standards — a 100-foot right-of-way, a 40-foot planted median, four 10-foot lanes, and 30-foot shoulders — running along the St. Marys River between McMillen Park on the east and Foster Park on the west. Kessler's park-and-boulevard system put Rudisill at the southern edge of the built city, and development obeyed the plan in sequence: the boulevard's western portion filled with neighborhoods at once, the central core became a commercial stretch, and the eastern section did not develop until after World War II. A 25-foot residential buffer was added in the mid-1920s; the road was widened in 1973 at the cost of bands of its trees; and the City commissioned a Rudisill Boulevard Cultural Landscape Report in 2007 to manage what survives of the design. The West Rudisill end, at Broadway, is treated as a district in the Architecture and Neighborhoods sections; the boulevard as a corridor is the east–west spine of the whole south side.

South Anthony Boulevard is Rudisill's north–south counterpart in the southeast: the continuation of the Anthony Boulevard line south of the Maumee, running from the river through McMillen Park's edge and the Pettit-Rudisill and Village Woods neighborhoods to Paulding Road and the Hessen Cassel junction. It is a working commercial arterial rather than a park boulevard — the Southeast Strategy Update lists "South Anthony" as a secondary focus area that "requires a corridor plan," and the City studied the boulevard's railroad conflict directly in the South Anthony Grade Separation Study of 2012. Its largest single piece of ground was Southtown Mall, at Lafayette Street/U.S. 27 and South Anthony: Fort Wayne's second enclosed mall, developed by Melvin Simon & Associates on an 86-acre site, opened in stages through 1969 (the Wolf & Dessauer store's grand opening was March 10, 1969; the mall-wide dedication September 16), passed a million square feet with its 1982 expansion, and then declined with the south side's industrial base — a decline contemporary accounts tied in part to the International Harvester closure. The mall closed February 1, 2003; the City acquired the site by eminent domain and demolished it in 2004; and the ground reopened as Southtown Crossing/Centre power-center retail, anchored by Walmart and Menards — the corridor's reinvention in the big-box form. Under the Southeast Strategy, the South Anthony Boulevard Streetscape, over $1.0 million in improvements, is recorded complete, and the corridor remains one of the strategy's named reinvestment lines.

Sources: The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Rudisill Boulevard landscape record; City of Fort Wayne, Reports & Plans (Rudisill Boulevard Cultural Landscape Report, 2007; South Anthony Grade Separation Study, 2012); City of Fort Wayne, Southeast Strategy Update (adopted January 2021) and Southeast Strategy implementation page (South Anthony Streetscape, complete); Mall Hall of Fame / DeadMalls Southtown Mall records, from the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel; Southtown Mall (opened 1969, closed 2003, demolished 2004).