The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1910 — present
Downtown first: Read in sequence, the addresses in this section are the trade's map of the city. It starts downtown, where everything started: Columbia Street and Pearl Street and Maiden Lane in the 1910s, within walking distance of the courthouse, when a dealership was an agency with a telephone. Its second home was South Clinton Street at the Pennsylvania elevation, where Grieger's three blocks of lots stood in the railroad's shadow and the used cars filled the old depot's ground — the trade still tied to the rail city it was replacing.
The boulevards: The postwar trade moved to the wide streets. Coliseum Boulevard took Glenbrook Dodge at No. 100 West in 1979 and Bob Thomas Ford at No. 310 West, the two of them anchoring the corridor under a 232-foot flagpole. Illinois Road took DeHaven Chevrolet at 5200 and Bob Thomas Ford West at 5321, neighbors again. Lima Road took Don Ayres Honda at 4740, on the north side where the suburbs were growing, with Kelley Chevrolet on Value Drive by the Interstate 69 interchange. And the newest ground is the southwest corridor itself — Kelley's fifty-five acres off I-69 at State Road 14, the Ayres Acura store in the southwest — the trade following the interstate exits exactly as it once followed the rail elevation.
The pattern: Every era's row stands where that era's transportation put the traffic: the rail depot's street, the streetcar-and-highway boulevards, the interstate interchanges. The rows grew their own neighbors from the same trade — Grieger's used-car lot stood behind a Mike's Car Wash, the chain Edward and Joseph Dahm started in Fort Wayne in 1948 and built into one of the largest car-wash companies in the country, which washed its hundred-millionth vehicle in 2012: the automobile's Fort Wayne was an ecosystem of family businesses, not a row of franchises. The houses that survived the moves are the ones in this section with founders' names still on them — Kelley from 1952, DeHaven from 1964, Ayres from 1970, Glenbrook from 1979 — which is why this section was worth running on its own: in Fort Wayne, the car dealer is one of the last businesses where the name over the door is still, as often as not, the family that started it.
Sources:
- The addresses and dates as carried in the articles of this section.
- Allen County Genealogical Society, D surnames page (the Dahm brothers and Mike's Carwash, from 1948).