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1913 — 1974
The second house, and then the suburbs: Downtown fashion had a second pole. The Grand Leader opened on 15 October 1913 at Wayne and Calhoun in the remodelled White Fruit House quarters, billed as "Fort Wayne's newest department store," with twenty-eight departments under one roof; rebuilt at Calhoun and Wayne in 1928, it took the name Stillman's in the 1950s for its owner John Stillman and traded until 1974, when its block went for the Summit Square development. By then the trade had already moved: Glenbrook Square opened on the north side in October 1966 and Southtown Mall followed in 1969 (the openings, and the corridors that carried them, are the Corridors section's record). Fashion retail followed the national pattern out of the department-store downtown and into the enclosed mall — the Crystal Room's lunchtime runway replaced by the mall anchor store — and the downtown houses this section describes survive in the record as institutions precisely because nothing replaced them in kind.
Sources:
- Businesses, "Grand Leader — later Stillman's" — the 1913 opening, the twenty-eight departments, the 1928 rebuilding, the Stillman's name, and the 1974 closing; cross-referenced, not retold.
- Main Roads & Corridors — Glenbrook Square (opened October 1966) and Southtown Mall (opened 1969), cross-referenced.