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1959 — present
A landmark earned at the stove: Henry Freistroffer was a welder with seven children and an eighth coming when his wife's small inheritance gave him the stake to buy the tavern at 536 West Main Street in 1959; the family had grown up in Lakeside and bought close to home. Henry's became the downtown room of Fort Wayne's newspaper people, theater folk and art-school students — Fort Wayne Magazine writes that several episodes of any creative Fort Waynian's life story are likely to have unfolded there — and outgrew its tavern beginnings into a full restaurant whose kitchen the magazine treats as a landmark in itself. Henry died in 1979, the year his son John graduated from Indiana University; John, at twenty-one, took over the family bar and has run it since, through downtown's decline and its renaissance alike. The bar history of the house is the Bars section's; what belongs here is the table: Henry's is the documented case of a Fort Wayne workingman's tavern that grew, over sixty-five years, into one of the city's defining dining rooms without leaving its address.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne Magazine / FortWayne.com, "The Family Way" — the 1959 purchase by Henry Freistroffer, the welder and the inheritance, the clientele, Henry's 1979 death and John Freistroffer's takeover, the "as deserving of commemoration as the Lincoln Tower" judgment.
- Bars & Nightclubs — Henry's record as a bar (1959), cross-referenced and not retold here.