Fort Wayne Today: The City in 2026

Fort Wayne Today

Fort Wayne in late 2026 is a city of roughly 273,000 people — the second-largest city in Indiana and the unquestioned center of the northeast corner of the state — in the middle of the longest sustained building run in its modern history. The factories that defined the twentieth-century city are mostly gone or transformed, but the city that replaced them is not a shrunken version of the old one. Downtown, written off a generation ago, holds a ballpark, a convention center, new hotels, hundreds of new apartments, a rebuilt riverfront and the region's largest private employer a few miles north. The old General Electric works on Broadway, empty for years, is now a mixed-use district called Electric Works with a corporate headquarters, a food hall, a school and, as of April 2026, its first residents. The airport just finished a $145 million terminal rebuild after setting passenger records in back-to-back years. A professional soccer club opened the largest soccer-specific stadium in Indiana in May 2026. And the city's politics turned a page in 2024, when Mayor Tom Henry's death in office brought Sharon Tucker — Fort Wayne's first Black mayor and second woman mayor — to the office she still holds. This section records the city as it stands: its numbers, its government, its employers, its schools and hospitals, what it has built lately, what it watches and celebrates, and the events of the last decade that made it this way.

The City in Numbers

The Census Bureau counted 263,886 people in Fort Wayne at the 2020 census, and its population estimates program put the city at 273,203 on July 1, 2024 — growth of about 3.5 percent in four years, steady rather than spectacular, and enough to keep Fort Wayne firmly the state's second city (U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts: Fort Wayne city, Indiana, V2024 estimates). The wider Fort Wayne metropolitan area — Allen, Wells and Whitley counties — was estimated at 462,978 people in the Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey one-year estimates, released September 11, 2025 (U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 2024 1-year estimates). Greater Fort Wayne Inc., the regional chamber and economic development organization, frames the city's reach much wider: an economic center for more than 1.5 million people within a 60-mile radius, drawing workers, shoppers and hospital patients from northwest Ohio as well as northeast Indiana (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., Invest in Fort Wayne & Allen County, 2026).

The city proper is younger than the nation. The median age in Fort Wayne city was 35.0 years in Census Bureau survey data published in 2024, against a national median near 39 (U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, as compiled 2024). Women are 51.0 percent of the population and people 65 and over are 15.2 percent (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2020–2024). By race and origin, the city's population is 64.9 percent white alone and 14.1 percent Black alone, with a foreign-born share of 9.0 percent — a figure that understates what a walk through the city shows: Fort Wayne hosts one of the largest Burmese refugee communities in the United States on its southeast side, significant Hispanic communities, and newer arrivals from Africa, Asia and Latin America, all tracked in the Fort Wayne Urban League's State of Black Fort Wayne report and similar community studies (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2020–2024; Fort Wayne Urban League, State of Black Fort Wayne, 2026).

Money is the city's persistent tension. Median household income in Fort Wayne city was $61,422 in the 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates (in 2024 dollars), with per capita income of $33,812 and 16.0 percent of residents in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2020–2024). The metro area does better — median household income of $71,251 in the 2024 ACS one-year estimates — because the suburbs capture much of the region's professional wage base (U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 2024 1-year estimates). Housing remains comparatively cheap: the median value of owner-occupied homes in the city was $188,900 in 2020–2024 survey data, and the metro's median owner-occupied value was $245,800 in the 2024 ACS, with median gross rent of $1,056 a month (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2020–2024; ACS 2024 1-year estimates). The city counted 110,929 households in 2020–2024, averaging 2.38 persons each; 94.7 percent of households had a computer (U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2020–2024). The workforce, by metro survey, is concentrated in education and health care (23.2 percent of resident workers), manufacturing (20.0 percent) and retail (11.4 percent), with a mean commute of 22.9 minutes and unemployment of 3.5 percent in the 2024 ACS snapshot (U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 2024 1-year estimates).

Allen County, which Fort Wayne dominates, keeps growing on the strength of the city's suburbs and exurbs. The county attracted more than $589 million in new private investment in 2022 alone (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., January 2023), and GFW reported over 1,000 new jobs and $2.6 billion in private investment across Allen County in 2024 — the strongest year in its records (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2024 results, as reported 2025). In 2025 the city was named the 10th best-run city in the country in a national ranking Mayor Tucker cited in her 2026 State of the City address (City of Fort Wayne, State of the City address, February 11, 2026).

Government Today

The mayor. Sharon Tucker, a Democrat, is the 37th mayor of Fort Wayne. She took office on April 23, 2024, in a ceremony at the Clyde Theatre, sworn in by Deputy Mayor Karl Bandemer — the man who had served as acting mayor for the previous three and a half weeks (US 93.3/Adams Radio Group, April 23–24, 2024). The office had fallen vacant when Mayor Tom Henry died of stomach cancer on March 28, 2024, at age 72, less than five months after winning a fifth term (Associated Press via Indiana Business Journal, April 21, 2024). Under Indiana law, the party of the departed officeholder fills a vacancy by caucus; on April 20, 2024, ninety-two Allen County Democratic precinct committee members chose Tucker, then the City Council's Sixth District representative, on the second ballot, over a field of seven candidates that included state Rep. Phil GiaQuinta, the Indiana House Democratic leader (Journal Gazette, as reported by AP, April 2024). Tucker became the first Black mayor in Fort Wayne's history and the second woman to hold the office, and she serves the remainder of Henry's term, through December 31, 2027 (Indiana Business Journal, April 21, 2024). She kept Bandemer on as deputy mayor (US 93.3, April 2024).

Tucker's administration has governed through the arrival of Indiana's Senate Enrolled Act 1 — the 2025 property-tax law, signed by Governor Mike Braun, that cuts local property taxes and restructures local income taxes, and that city officials say will reduce Fort Wayne's revenues year by year as it phases in (City of Fort Wayne, September 2025). Her proposed 2026 budget, presented with City Controller Pat Roller, was built around that squeeze: she announced the city remained in strong fiscal health but trimmed the proposal by almost $20 million rather than spend above 2025 levels, holding more than $41 million of investment in neighborhood infrastructure — $31.7 million for streets, roads and bridges, $4.9 million for sidewalks and alleys, $3.9 million for trails (City of Fort Wayne, September–October 2025; Journal Gazette budget coverage, fall 2025). The pattern repeated, sharper, in 2026: council cut roughly $11 million from her proposed 2027 budget before passing it unanimously in late October 2026 (WPTA, October 28, 2026). Her second State of the City address, delivered February 11, 2026 at the Grand Wayne Center under the theme "Fort Wayne — Investing in Ourselves," announced the completion of the Waynedale 2040 plan, a Safe Neighborhoods initiative and a downtown master-planning process, and reported more than $41 million invested in neighborhoods in 2025 with $37 million planned for 2026 (City of Fort Wayne, February 11, 2026). Signature Tucker initiatives include a Mayor's Young Adult Council for residents aged 19–26, a Mental Health Commission, and distribution of more than $1 million to local groups through a National Opioid Settlement Committee (City of Fort Wayne, February 11, 2026). In 2026 the city won a U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Award honorable mention for its Neighborhood Heat Mapping project and East Central neighborhood work, one of twelve mayoral programs honored nationally (City of Fort Wayne, June 2026).

The clerk. The Fort Wayne city clerk is Lana Keesling, who sits at the clerk's desk in council minutes through 2025 and 2026 (Fort Wayne City Council minutes, 2025–2026). The clerk's office keeps the city's records and runs its elections-adjacent paperwork; it also, in one of 2026's smaller civic stories, found a disposition for 87 pounds of foreign coins that had accumulated in city parking meters and offices over the years (WANE 15, 2026, as noted in The Local FW, November 3, 2026).

City Council. Fort Wayne is a second-class city under Indiana law, divided into six council districts, each electing one member, with three more members elected at large — nine members in all, serving four-year terms with no term limit (City of Fort Wayne, District Maps; Fort Wayne City Council). The current council, elected in November 2023 and seated through 2027, stands six Republicans to three Democrats. Its president is Russ Jehl and its vice president is Martin Bender (Fort Wayne City Council composition, retrieved November 2025; City of Fort Wayne staff directory, 2026). The members:

• First District — Paul Ensley (R), the northeast district (City of Fort Wayne staff directory, 2026).
• Second District — Russ Jehl (R), council president, in his fourteenth budget cycle in 2026 — among the council's longest-serving members (Journal Gazette budget coverage, 2025).
• Third District — Nathan Hartman (R) (City of Fort Wayne staff directory, 2026).
• Fourth District — Dr. Scott Myers (R). Myers's 2026 included an OWI arrest in June 2026, a period in a rehabilitation facility, a three-month absence from council, and a one-year driver's license suspension with 180 additional days of restricted driving — all covered by local outlets through the fall, with Myers telling WOWO he had "real accountability" and had never stopped working for his district (WOWO and WANE 15, 2026, as summarized in The Local FW, November 3, 2026).
• Fifth District — Geoff Paddock (D), the council's senior Democrat and its longtime finance committee chair (Fort Wayne City Council minutes, 2025).
• Sixth District — Rohli Booker (D), who arrived by the same caucus mechanism that made Tucker mayor: Booker, then vice president of the Fort Wayne Community Schools board, won the April 2024 Democratic caucus to fill Tucker's vacated Sixth District seat and was sworn in that spring (Fort Wayne Politics, May 2024).
• At large — Martin Bender (R), council vice president (City of Fort Wayne staff directory, 2026).
• At large — Michelle Chambers (D) (City of Fort Wayne staff directory, 2026).
• At large — Tom Freistroffer (R) (City of Fort Wayne staff directory, 2026).

The council meets Tuesdays at Citizens Square, 200 East Berry Street, in Room 035, working through standing committees — Public Works, City Utilities, Finance, Regulations — whose chairs in 2025 were Bender, Myers, Paddock and their colleagues (Fort Wayne City Council minutes, February–May 2025). The district map dates to August 23, 2022, when the council completed the once-a-decade redistricting after the 2020 census, moving a single precinct to balance the six districts (City of Fort Wayne, District Maps). Council business in 2025–26 was dominated by the Senate Enrolled Act 1 revenue squeeze — the July 2025 defeat of an urban trail segment on cost grounds, scrutiny of the city's tax-abatement practice, and the multi-million-dollar cuts taken out of both the 2026 and 2027 budgets are all part of that one story (Journal Gazette meeting coverage, July 2025; WPTA, October 2026).

How the government is structured. Fort Wayne runs on the mayor-council ("strong mayor") model: the mayor is chief executive, appointing department heads and the deputy mayor, proposing the budget and administering the city's divisions — Public Works, Parks and Recreation, Community Development, Neighborhoods, City Utilities, Police and Fire among them. The council legislates, appropriates and confirms. City Utilities deserves a line of its own: it runs the Three Rivers Water Filtration Plant and the city's water, sewer and stormwater systems as a municipally owned utility, and Tucker's 2026 address promised multiple water, sewer and stormwater projects through the year (City of Fort Wayne, February 11, 2026). Public safety staffing is a standing budget fight: the 2026 plan held the police department at 510 officers (City of Fort Wayne, February 2026). The city and county share a building — Citizens Square houses both city departments and county offices — and a set of joint or overlapping services, from the joint Department of Planning Services to the Fort Wayne–Allen County Airport Authority and the Allen County Public Library, a county-wide system governed by its own board. Planning for the unincorporated county runs through the county, while the city plans inside its limits; annexation has repeatedly pushed those limits outward, most consequentially into Aboite Township.

Allen County in brief. County government sits in the same building. The three-member Board of Commissioners — Richard E. Beck, Therese M. Brown and Ronald W. Turpin — is the county's executive and legislative body for unincorporated areas, owning county buildings and signing county contracts; the commissioners' legislative session agenda for February 13, 2026 lists all three at Citizens Square (Allen County Board of Commissioners, February 13, 2026). The seven-member Allen County Council is the fiscal body, adopting the budget and appropriating money; its president is Robert A. Armstrong, and its March 11, 2026 meeting minutes list members Kyle Kerley, Lyndsey Hammond, Tom A. Harris, Bob Armstrong, Paul Lagemann, Ken Fries and Don Wyss, with Auditor Jackie Scheuman attending (Allen County Council minutes, March 11, 2026). Sheriff Troy Hershberger, elected in November 2022 and sworn in December 29, 2022, runs the Allen County Sheriff's Department and, by state law, keeps the county jail at 417 South Calhoun Street (Allen County Sheriff's Department; Indiana Code 36-2-13-5). The November 3, 2026 general election put a long list of county offices before voters — prosecuting attorney (Tesa Helge), circuit court clerk, recorder, auditor, assessor, sheriff and two commissioner seats among them (Allen County GOP candidate slate, October 2026) — and, on the same ballot, a question with no precedent: Public Question No. 3, asking voters in Allen, DeKalb and Steuben counties whether inland casino gambling should be permitted in their county under a 2026 state law requiring a developer to invest at least $500 million. The Journal Gazette noted before the vote that no operator might step up even with a yes, and that a no was final under the law's terms (Journal Gazette and WOWO, October 2026). The outcome of that vote belongs to the continuing record below.

The Major Employers

Fort Wayne's economy, measured by who signs the paychecks, rests on five legs: health care, manufacturing (trucks, steel, wire and defense electronics), specialty insurance, distribution and retail cooperatives, and the public sector of schools, universities and governments. Education and health services together account for roughly 47,500 jobs in the Fort Wayne metro area as of mid-2026 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, as compiled 2026). What follows are the employers that shape the city now, each with its present state.

Parkview Health

Parkview Health is the region's largest employer and its defining institution: a not-for-profit, community-owned health system headquartered in Fort Wayne that traces its roots to Fort Wayne City Hospital in 1878 (Parkview Health fact sheet, 2026). The system's own 2026 fact sheet counts more than 17,500 full-time and part-time co-workers; Greater Fort Wayne Inc.'s employer figures put Parkview at 8,986 full-time-equivalent employees in Allen County and 10,930 across the region (Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, as compiled November 2024). Parkview operates a network of hospitals across northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio — fifteen hospitals by 2026, after adding Parkview Logansport in 2025 — and serves a patient population its recruiters put at about 1.3 million people (Parkview Health leadership profile, WittKieffer, November 2025). Its chief executive is Rick Henvey, and its board chairman is, in a neat illustration of how small Fort Wayne's corporate summit is, Dan Starr — the chief executive of Do it Best (Parkview Health fact sheet, 2026).

The Fort Wayne core of the system is two campuses. Parkview Regional Medical Center, the tertiary hospital that opened on 17 March 2012 on the city's north side (one account gives 18 March), is the flagship: built for $536 million in its builders' and bankers' project reporting — a $575 million figure also circulates — and given 410 beds in one builder's account (JLL) and 446 in another (HKS), home to the Parkview Heart Institute, the Parkview Packnett Family Cancer Institute, Parkview Ortho Hospital and Parkview Women's & Children's Hospital (Parkview Health fact sheet, 2026). Parkview Hospital Randallia, the system's original campus in the middle of the city, continues as a full hospital rather than the afterthought some expected — Parkview's own materials give it 224 beds (November 2025 leadership profile) or 229 (organizational description), and do not confirm the 204-bed figure a fact sheet was said to carry when the flagship moved north (Parkview Health fact sheet, 2026). Parkview is still expanding: in late 2025 it was recruiting a president for two new hospitals — in West Lafayette and Lebanon, Indiana — slated to open in 2028, a sign that the system's growth frontier now lies across the state even as Fort Wayne remains its headquarters and center of gravity (WittKieffer leadership profile for Parkview Health, November 2025). The system crossed $3 billion in revenue, counts more than 1,200 physicians and advanced practice providers, and has in recent years been ranked among the country's most-loved workplaces in healthcare surveys (Parkview Health, November 2025).

Lutheran Health Network

Lutheran Health Network is the city's second hospital system and Parkview's direct rival, anchored by Lutheran Hospital of Indiana on the southwest side — a hospital whose own corporate lineage on local company lists reaches back to 1903 (Lutheran Health Network company profiles, 2026). The network is the northeast Indiana arm of Community Health Systems, the Franklin, Tennessee-based for-profit chain, and it operates Lutheran Hospital, Dupont Hospital on the north side, the Orthopedic Hospital, Lutheran Children's Hospital and a set of affiliated facilities and physician practices across the region (Lutheran Health Network, 2026). Greater Fort Wayne Inc.'s figures put Lutheran at 4,075 full-time-equivalent employees in Allen County and 5,317 regionally (Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, as compiled November 2024). Between them, Parkview and Lutheran give Fort Wayne something few cities its size have: two competing full-service systems, each with a Level II trauma center — Parkview Regional Medical Center and Lutheran Hospital — a redundancy local business recruiters cite by name (Greater Fort Wayne Inc. and regional profiles, 2026). The rivalry is fought campus by campus: Lutheran's recent building program has included a 60,000-square-foot fifth-floor addition at Lutheran Hospital and a run of medical offices and freestanding emergency departments, even as Parkview expands its north-side campus (regional construction reporting, 2026).

General Motors — Fort Wayne Assembly

Sixteen miles southwest of downtown, in Roanoke, General Motors' Fort Wayne Assembly is the region's largest single manufacturing site and the plant that builds America's best-selling trucks: the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500. The plant employs about 4,100 workers — Greater Fort Wayne Inc.'s count is 4,320 — represented by UAW Local 2209 (GM communications, 2023–2026; Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, November 2024). On March 25, 2026, a black 2026 Silverado High Country rolled off the line as the plant's 11 millionth vehicle (General Motors Manufacturing communications, March 25, 2026). The plant's future is currently being bolted into place around the workers building today's trucks: GM's $632 million investment, announced in June 2023, is funding new conveyors, tooling and equipment in the body and general assembly areas to prepare for the next generation of internal-combustion full-size pickups (General Motors, June 2023; GM Authority, April 2026). GM frames Fort Wayne's $632 million as part of $2.8 billion invested in Indiana since 2013 (General Motors, 2026). In an industry pivoting to electric vehicles, Fort Wayne Assembly's assignment is the opposite bet: it is one of the plants GM is spending on to keep gasoline trucks coming into the 2030s.

BAE Systems

BAE Systems' Fort Wayne operation belongs to the company's Electronic Systems sector, in its Controls and Avionics Solutions business — the part of BAE that builds flight-critical controls: aircraft engine and flight controls, cabin and cockpit systems, hybrid-electric drive systems and the circuit card assemblies underneath them, for commercial and military customers around the world (BAE Systems, Fort Wayne facility postings, 2026). The Fort Wayne campus runs two sites; the South site specializes in commercial aircraft engine and flight controls and has expanded to integrate U.S. defense work into the same production facility (BAE Systems job postings, 2026). Local production workers are represented by the IUE-CWA, with posted starting wages of $23.00 an hour for operations associates in January 2026 (BAE Systems, January 2026). Regional profiles describe a controls, avionics and C4ISR campus of roughly 1,500 people (regional industry profiles, 2026). BAE does not publish a Fort Wayne headcount; what is public is the direction — the company describes its flight-controls business as experiencing unprecedented growth and has been hiring program managers, engineers and production staff in Fort Wayne through 2026 (BAE Systems, 2026).

L3Harris Technologies

L3Harris has worked in Fort Wayne for more than 55 years, building the electro-optical and infrared sensors that fly on weather satellites — its Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) instruments are among the core sensors of U.S. weather forecasting — and, increasingly, the infrared payloads that watch for missiles (L3Harris, Fort Wayne careers and Indiana fact sheet, 2026). The company's Indiana fact sheet counts 630 Indiana employees, about 340 of them engineers and scientists, at an average salary near $138,700 (L3Harris Indiana fact sheet, 2026). In April 2025 L3Harris completed a $125 million expansion of its Fort Wayne space manufacturing site on West Cook Road — a 95,000-square-foot facility able to produce 48 infrared payloads a year — built to support the missile-warning and missile-tracking programs grouped under the "Golden Dome" homeland defense initiative (L3Harris, April 2025; Zacks, January 2026). The work followed: on July 13, 2026, the Space Development Agency awarded L3Harris a contract worth up to $955 million to build 18 missile-tracking satellites, on top of an $843 million Tranche 3 award the previous December, with the spacecraft to be ready for launch by the end of 2028 (Army Recognition, July 14, 2026). Some third-party regional profiles put L3Harris's broader Fort Wayne footprint much higher than the company's own 630-employee fact sheet; the company's published Indiana figure is the one used here (L3Harris Indiana fact sheet, 2026).

RTX (Raytheon)

RTX, the company formed from Raytheon Technologies, keeps a Fort Wayne presence that Greater Fort Wayne Inc. lists among the county's major private employers under its Raytheon name (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., Invest in Fort Wayne & Allen County, 2026). The Fort Wayne operation descends from the city's long defense-electronics lineage — the Magnavox and ITT lines of military electronics work that made the city a defense town in the Cold War — and RTX's local workforce works in defense electronics and related engineering. RTX does not publish a Fort Wayne headcount, and this record does not invent one; the verified facts are the presence itself, its standing on the county's major-employer roster, and its place in the same defense cluster as BAE and L3Harris (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026). The cluster got a further member in the mid-2020s: SH America, a South Korean EV-components supplier to Samsung, committed $62 million and 400 jobs to a new plant in the Stonebridge Business Park, feeding the battery plants Samsung is building with Stellantis and GM elsewhere in Indiana (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026).

The 122nd Fighter Wing

The Indiana Air National Guard's 122nd Fighter Wing — the "Blacksnakes" — flies from Baer Field Air National Guard Base at Fort Wayne International Airport, and in April 2026 it completed one of the largest changes in its history: a three-year conversion from the A-10 Thunderbolt II to the F-16 Fighting Falcon. The conversion was directed by the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, signed December 23, 2022, which replaced the wing's 21 A-10s with Block 40 F-16s; the first F-16 arrived in October 2023, and the wing demonstrated full mission readiness — including live munitions — at the Checkered Flag 26-1 exercise at Tyndall Air Force Base before regaining combat certification (National Guard Bureau, April 28, 2026). The F-16 is a homecoming: the 122nd flew an earlier generation of F-16s from Fort Wayne from 1991 to 2010 (National Guard Bureau, April 28, 2026). Wing commander Col. Scott T. Boatright called the conversion a "resounding and historic success" (WPTA, April 27, 2026). By June 2026 Indiana's congressional delegation was already lobbying the Air Force to consider the 122nd as a future F-35A basing location, citing a wing manned at 108 percent with retention above 90 percent (Indiana congressional delegation letter, June 18, 2026). The wing is both a major employer on the city's south side and a daily fact of life: its jets are the loudest regular sound in Fort Wayne's sky.

Steel Dynamics

Steel Dynamics Inc. (Nasdaq: STLD) is the largest company headquartered in Fort Wayne by revenue and the city's claim to a Fortune-scale corporate headquarters. Founded in 1993 by former Nucor executives including Mark D. Millett — still its chairman and chief executive — the company grew from a single Indiana minimill into one of the largest steel producers and metals recyclers in the United States, with operations across the U.S. and Mexico (Steel Dynamics, 2026). Its fiscal 2025 revenue was $18.2 billion, and it reported about 14,400 employees company-wide as of February 2026; its headquarters staff works from 7575 West Jefferson Boulevard in southwest Fort Wayne, with a local Allen County workforce Greater Fort Wayne Inc. counts at about 1,200 (Steel Dynamics 2025 annual report figures, as compiled 2026; Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, November 2024). The company's mills are elsewhere — the original flat-roll mill is in Butler, Indiana, a half-hour northeast — but the decisions, the treasury and the name on the building are Fort Wayne's.

Fort Wayne Metals

Fort Wayne Metals is the quiet center of the city's medical-manufacturing niche: a headquarters company that draws and processes precision wire — much of it in stainless steel, titanium and specialty alloys — for medical devices used inside the human body, from guidewires to implant components (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026). Greater Fort Wayne Inc. counts it at 1,419 local employees, and its cumulative investment in Allen County stood at $260.4 million in GFW's 2026 expansion guide, second only to GM among listed manufacturers (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., Invest in Fort Wayne & Allen County, 2026). The company was acquired by Axel Johnson Inc., and followed the acquisition with a further $18.5 million commitment and 150 more jobs (regional industry reporting, 2026). It also trains its own pipeline: Fort Wayne Metals is one of the anchor employers of the Northeast Indiana FAME chapter, whose 2025 signing cohort placed local high school students with the company through Ivy Tech (Ivy Tech Fort Wayne, April 2025).

Sweetwater

Sweetwater, headquartered on the city's northwest side, is the largest online retailer of musical instruments and pro audio equipment in the United States — a company that grew from a Fort Wayne recording studio into a national e-commerce operation with a campus that doubles as a concert venue, music school and destination for visiting musicians (Sweetwater; Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026). Local employment figures cluster around two thousand: Greater Fort Wayne Inc.'s compiled figures put Sweetwater at 2,011 local employees, and regional profiles describe roughly 2,300 (Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, November 2024; regional profiles, reviewed August 2026). GFW's 2026 guide lists $85.2 million in cumulative Sweetwater investment in Allen County (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026). Sweetwater matters to the city's self-image out of proportion to its headcount: it is the employer visiting executives are driven past, and its in-house software, logistics and sales-engineer workforce is a standing exhibit in the city's tech-recruitment pitch.

Vera Bradley

Vera Bradley, the women's handbag and accessories company founded in Fort Wayne in 1982 by Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia R. Miller, spent four decades headquartered in Roanoke, southwest of the city. On June 23, 2026, the company announced it would move its headquarters into the city: roughly 40,000 square feet on the second and third floors and part of the ground floor of Building 33 at Electric Works, 1610 Broadway, with the move expected before the end of 2026 (Vera Bradley announcement via Electric Works, June 23, 2026; WPTA, June 23, 2026). The company keeps its warehouse in Roanoke and has listed its Roanoke design center for sale (Electric Works, June 23, 2026). The move was read locally as a homecoming — a nationally known consumer brand choosing the old GE campus over the suburban office park — and it made Vera Bradley the second Fort Wayne-founded headquarters company to anchor Electric Works, after Do it Best.

Do it Best

Do it Best Group, the member-owned hardware, lumber and building-materials cooperative headquartered at Electric Works, is by its own description the world's largest home improvement buying cooperative — and, as of 2022, the largest privately held company in Indiana (Do it Best, 2026; Wikipedia summary of Indiana company rankings, 2022). The cooperative moved its world headquarters from New Haven to Building 26 at Electric Works in December 2022, becoming the campus's anchor tenant, with more than 450 people now working at the headquarters (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., January 2023; The Local FW, February 17, 2026). Then it made the biggest deal in its history: after True Value filed for bankruptcy on October 14, 2024, Do it Best stepped in as stalking-horse bidder and closed the acquisition of substantially all of True Value's assets on November 22, 2024, for $153 million — inventory, brand rights, a paint manufacturing facility and more than 4,500 store locations, bringing the combined network to over 8,000 locations in the U.S. and more than 60 countries (Do it Best, November 22, 2024; HBS Dealer, November 22, 2024). The deal won the Association for Corporate Growth's 2024 Deal of the Year award for Indiana (Do it Best, April 18, 2025). In May 2025 Do it Best completed a merger with Minnesota-based United Hardware, adding the Hardware Hank brand and growing membership by more than 20 percent (Do it Best, 2026). On July 1, 2026, Do it Best Group announced that True Value's world headquarters would move from Chicago to Fort Wayne, aligning both brands' headquarters at Electric Works, with Chicago office operations to conclude in October 2026 (Do it Best Group announcement, July 1, 2026; Hardware Retailing, August 2026). The group, led by CEO Dan Starr, reported fiscal-year sales of $4.35 billion excluding True Value's partial year — approaching $5 billion with it (HBS Dealer, September 9, 2025). In early 2026 the company sought city and county support for a $12 million expansion at Electric Works that would create 180 jobs at an average wage of $46.82 an hour (The Local FW citing the Journal Gazette, February 17, 2026).

The Insurance Cluster

Specialty insurance is the city's white-collar signature — a cluster descended from Lincoln National's Fort Wayne founding that still punches far above the city's weight. Lincoln Financial Group is headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania today, but Fort Wayne remains one of its largest employment centers: about 1,700 local employees in Greater Fort Wayne Inc.'s compiled figures, working in the downtown towers that still anchor the skyline (Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, November 2024). MedPro Group, the Medical Protective Company, is a Berkshire Hathaway company headquartered at 5814 Reed Road; it was formed in Fort Wayne in 1899 and effectively invented professional liability insurance for physicians, which it still writes nationwide (MedPro Group; Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026). Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company, headquartered at 6400 Brotherhood Way, was founded in 1917 by evangelical Mennonites in nearby Grabill to insure churches, moved to Fort Wayne in 1939, and is today the second-largest U.S. provider of property and casualty insurance to Christian churches and ministries, led by chairman, president and CEO Mark Robison (Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company, 2026). K&K Insurance Group, a specialist in sports and leisure risks, is likewise listed among the county's headquartered major employers (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026).

Distribution, Retail and the Rest of the Roster

Amazon is, by compiled local figures, the county's second-largest private employer at about 4,650 workers, spread across its Fort Wayne-area fulfillment and logistics operations (Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, as compiled November 2024). BFGoodrich's tire plant at Woodburn, on the county's east side, employs about 1,500 (Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, November 2024). Shambaugh & Son, the mechanical and electrical contractor headquartered in Fort Wayne, counts about 1,302 (Greater Fort Wayne Inc. figures, November 2024). Frontier Communications' Fort Wayne operation — the old Verizon/GTE telephone workforce, running network operations and field service for the incumbent carrier — changed hands at the corporate level when Verizon completed its acquisition of Frontier; postings through 2026 show Fort Wayne network-operations staff transitioning into Verizon's compensation and benefits programs (Frontier/Verizon job postings, Fort Wayne, 2026). Walmart's cumulative Allen County investment of $181 million in GFW's 2026 guide reflects its supercenter and distribution footprint (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026). The public sector rounds out the roster: Fort Wayne Community Schools, the City of Fort Wayne, Allen County government, Purdue University Fort Wayne and Ivy Tech are each employers in the thousands or high hundreds, and Parkview and Lutheran's counts above make the two hospital systems plus FWCS the city's true employment base.

Higher Education

Fort Wayne is a college town that rarely calls itself one. Four institutions anchor the city, with a fifth — Indiana University Fort Wayne — specializing in health professions on the Parkview/Purdue corridor.

Purdue University Fort Wayne is the city's public university and the largest of the group: more than 8,100 students in the state's 2025 guide to colleges, with 5,013 undergraduates listed, a 13:1 student-to-faculty ratio, and particular strength in business, nursing and engineering (Learn More Indiana, Guide to College, August 2025). National college databases put its current enrollment at 7,206 students taking classes (IPEDS-derived compilations, 2026). The university's degree-seeking headcount rose 1.3 percent in the most recent Indiana Commission for Higher Education census, to 6,171 from 6,092 — its first uptick in years, against a statewide 2 percent rise that broke a thirteen-year slide (Indiana Commission for Higher Education, via Purdue Fort Wayne, 2025). The notable exception is international enrollment: PFW's international student count fell 37 percent in fall 2025, to 280 from 442, part of a national decline (Indiana Commission for Higher Education fall 2025 data, as reported November 2025). On the ground, the campus is mid-expansion: the Trace, a roughly $100 million, 600-bed student housing complex at Purdue Fort Wayne, was set to open in August 2026 (regional construction reporting, 2026). PFW's Mastodons compete in NCAA Division I, and its men's basketball team plays at the Memorial Coliseum. The university is also the city's research arm — its Community Research Institute produces the data behind studies like the Urban League's State of Black Fort Wayne (Fort Wayne Urban League, 2026).

Indiana Tech, founded in 1930, is a private university on the near east side enrolling 1,361 undergraduates on campus by the state's 2025 guide, with total enrollments near 2,770 including its online and adult programs (Learn More Indiana, August 2025; IPEDS-derived compilations, 2026). Its profile is engineering, computer science, business and a nationally competitive athletics program. In October 2025 Indiana Tech joined the Higher Education Coalition — seven institutions, including PFW, IU Fort Wayne, Ivy Tech, Manchester, Trine and Vincennes — guaranteeing admission to Fort Wayne Community Schools graduates with a 2.5 GPA and waiving dual-credit tuition (Indiana Tech, October 29, 2025).

The University of Saint Francis, founded in 1890 in the Catholic Franciscan tradition, enrolls about 2,300 students across more than 60 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs, with strengths in nursing and health sciences (University of Saint Francis, 2026). Its Fort Wayne campus enrollment was 1,524 students in fall 2026, within a system total of 2,168 across Fort Wayne, Crown Point, Gas City, Lafayette and online — the university's highest total since 2021 (University of Saint Francis, September 1, 2026). Its campus is also home to Bishop D'Arcy Stadium, where Fort Wayne FC played its pre-professional seasons.

Ivy Tech Community College — Fort Wayne is the region's workforce engine: 8,900-plus students enrolled in the 2024–25 academic year across 56 academic programs, serving eleven counties from its Coliseum Boulevard campus and a Warsaw satellite, with 144 faculty and 212 staff (Ivy Tech Community College, Fort Wayne campus profile, 2026). The state approved a $66 million renovation and modernization of its Coliseum Campus in April 2024, consolidating programs displaced from the north campus (Indiana House Republicans, April 19, 2024). Ivy Tech runs the Northeast Indiana FAME apprenticeship pipeline with employers including Steel Dynamics and Fort Wayne Metals (Ivy Tech, April 2025), hosts Electric Works' Amp Lab partnership counterpart programs, and in 2026 received part of a $3 million Google grant to the Ivy Tech Foundation for statewide workforce training (WPTA, November 2026).

Indiana University Fort Wayne educates health professionals — nursing, dental, medical imaging and allied fields — in affiliation with IU's health schools, and since the 2025–26 school year has offered seamless admission to FWCS graduates with a GPA of at least 2.0 (Indiana University Fort Wayne, 2024). Together the city's institutions enroll something on the order of twenty thousand students, and they double as the city's largest stable employers after the hospital systems.

Health Care Today

Fort Wayne is the hospital city for a region of well over a million people, and its two systems divide the city between them. Parkview Health, the not-for-profit system, holds the north: Parkview Regional Medical Center's campus on Dupont Road — 359 beds in the towers, plus the attached Parkview Ortho Hospital and Parkview Women's & Children's Hospital (108 beds) — and, in the center city, Parkview Hospital Randallia — bed count unreconciled in Parkview's own materials (224 in the November 2025 leadership profile; 229 in the organizational description) and Parkview Behavioral Health at 105 beds (Parkview Health fact sheet, 2026; WittKieffer leadership profile, November 2025). Parkview's physician arm, Parkview Physicians Group, grew from six physicians in 1995 to a group the system describes at more than 1,200 physicians and advanced practice providers across the network (Parkview Health, 2025–2026). Lutheran Health Network, the for-profit Community Health Systems network, holds the southwest with Lutheran Hospital — the system's anchor and, like Parkview Regional, a Level II trauma center — plus Dupont Hospital on the north side, the Orthopedic Hospital, Lutheran Children's Hospital and Lutheran's specialty and rehabilitation facilities (Lutheran Health Network, 2026). The two-trauma-center arrangement is the clinical fact local leaders return to: a city of 273,000 with the trauma depth of a much larger metro (regional profiles, 2026).

Around the two systems sits a supporting layer: Ortho Northeast, the independent orthopedic group headquartered in Fort Wayne and listed among the county's major employers, whose surgeons practice at the ortho hospitals (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026); Indiana University Fort Wayne's health-professions programs feeding the workforce; and a safety-net tier of community clinics — including the Fort Wayne Urban League's partnership with Alliance Health Centers, and a health-clinic renovation at the Urban League's Hanna Street facility begun in April 2026 (Fort Wayne Urban League, April–October 2026). Parkview's expansion horizon is the system's widest ever: new hospitals planned in West Lafayette and Lebanon for 2028, recruited for in late 2025, would extend the Fort Wayne-headquartered system across central Indiana (WittKieffer, November 2025).

Development and the Built City Now

Electric Works. The largest single fact in today's Fort Wayne is the reuse of the General Electric Broadway campus: 39 acres and 18 historic buildings, more than 1.2 million square feet, closed by GE — its last operations ceased in 2014 and the complex was permanently closed in 2015 — and redeveloped by Ancora (with RTM Ventures lineage) as a mixed-use district (Electric Works; Meetings Today, 2024). The West Campus opened in stages in 2022 — Fort Wayne Community Schools' Amp Lab welcomed its first students in August 2022, the Union Street Market food hall opened that November, and anchor tenant Do it Best opened its headquarters in early December; the campus's public opening day was November 23, 2022 (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., January 2023; Electric Works Quest Club paper, March 2023). Phase I cost about $280–286 million (City of Fort Wayne redevelopment materials, 2021–2023; Electric Works, 2026). Phase II, The Elex — two multifamily buildings with ground-floor commercial space, 296 mixed-income units (207 market-rate, 89 affordable at 30–80 percent of area median income) — opened in April 2026, with Merchants Capital arranging more than $99 million in debt and tax-credit equity financing, including a $34.4 million Freddie Mac loan and $9.5 million in low-income housing tax credit equity; the developers are Biggs Group with Ancora, Weigand Construction and MSquared (Merchants Capital, May 27, 2026). The Elex is named for the Elex Club, the pioneering organization of GE's women employees (Merchants Capital, May 27, 2026). Building 33, new construction on the campus, takes Vera Bradley's headquarters in late 2026, and Lake City Bank signed in October 2026 for 17,525 square feet — a market headquarters and retail branch opening in the first half of 2027 (Electric Works, June 23, 2026; Bradley Company, October 2026). Phase III, an east campus and industrial west campus expansion, is the stated next step (Merchants Capital, May 2026).

The riverfront. Fort Wayne's three rivers were its reason for existing and, for most of the industrial century, its back fence. The current era began August 2019, when Promenade Park — a $25 million park on the St. Marys River at the Wells Street Bridge — opened as Riverfront Phase I, designed from the start for full accessibility (City of Fort Wayne Riverfront materials, 2019–2021). Private money followed the public park: the Riverfront at Promenade Park, an $89 million apartment and garage project, opened its garage in early 2022 and its apartments that November (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., January 2023). Riverfront Phase IIA, on the south bank between Promenade and Headwaters parks, was completed in 2025 (The Local FW, June 17, 2025). Phase IIB — $28.3 million of public space on the north bank: an esplanade with cascading steps and a "discovery ascent," an urban trail, a hammock grove, an accessible boulder mound and a north-lawn amphitheater with urban swings — is under construction with completion anticipated in 2026 on the city's schedule and by summer 2027 on the parks department's later telling; in December 2025 the city announced that new federal and state "no-rise" floodway permit conditions had forced the tree canopy trail and public docks out of the phase, freeing roughly $7–8 million for other riverfront work (City of Fort Wayne, December 3, 2025; City of Fort Wayne Parks & Recreation, 2026; The Local FW, June 17, 2025). The private rim keeps filling: The Eddy, Barrett & Stokely's $45 million mixed-use riverfront project near the Wells Street Bridge — the firm's third riverfront housing project after the Riverfront at Promenade Park and the Lofts at Headwaters Park — broke ground in December 2025 (City of Fort Wayne State of the City, February 2025; regional construction reporting, 2026); the Treeline District, Browning Real Estate Partners' redevelopment of the former Pepsi warehouse site with apartments, retail, park space and a garage, was slated to start construction in late 2025 (City of Fort Wayne, February 2025).

The Landing and downtown. The Landing — Columbia Street, the city's first commercial street, rebuilt as a mixed-use district in a $35 million adaptive-reuse project opened in 2020 — added 70 mixed-income homes in its first phase and 21 in its second (City of Fort Wayne redevelopment materials, 2021; The Local FW, June 17, 2025). Its third phase, The Landing Exchange at 555 South Harrison Street, is a $20 million Model Group project with 40 housing units, 20 percent of them affordable, and 5,000 square feet of retail planned for a grocery market; construction was underway in 2026 (City of Fort Wayne, 2026; The Local FW, June 17, 2025). Around it: the Ash Skyline Plaza and Skyline Tower complex (a $113 million project completed in 2018, still the downtown skyline's newest major silhouette), the Grand Wayne Convention Center — the city's meeting hall, where the mayor gives the State of the City — and The Pearl, a seven-story mixed-use building with housing, commercial and event space that opened in fall 2024, followed by a Pearl Arts Center phase with a health clinic underway (City of Fort Wayne, February 2025). The Bradley, a boutique hotel from the Vera Bradley founding family, and the Hampton Inn by Parkview Field fill out the visitor stock. In July 2026 the city kicked off "Make It Downtown," a ten-year strategic plan for downtown — the first since the 2003 Blueprint for the Future — with adoption expected in April 2027; the city's own inventory of the catalytic two decades lists Parkview Field, Harrison Square, Ash Skyline Tower, Superior Lofts, the Urban Trail, Cityscape Flats, The Landing, The Bradley, Promenade Park, Electric Works, The Pearl and the Arts United Center expansion (City of Fort Wayne, July 29, 2026). Visit Fort Wayne, the convention and visitors bureau, markets the result; its Grand Wayne Center and hotel plant hosted events from the National Genealogical Society's 48th Family History Conference (May 27–30, 2026, drawn by the ACPL Genealogy Center) to the usual run of state conventions (National Genealogical Society conference reporting, May 2026).

Parkview Field and the Coliseum. Downtown's anchor remains Parkview Field, opened in 2009 as the keystone of Harrison Square and still routinely described by visitors as one of the best ballparks in the minor leagues: over 8,000 seats, 16 luxury suites and 11,000 square feet of event space in the middle of downtown, home of the TinCaps (Visit Fort Wayne, 2026). Four miles northeast, the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum — the county-owned arena and expo center at 4000 Parnell Avenue — remains the region's big room: Komets hockey, Purdue Fort Wayne basketball, the expo center's trade shows, concerts and, in May 2026, a WWE Saturday Night's Main Event (event listings, 2026).

The airport. Fort Wayne International Airport (FWA) finished the largest project in its history in August 2026: Project Gateway, a $145 million, seven-year terminal overhaul in two halves — the West Terminal expansion completed in May 2023 (about 45,000 square feet added, 47,000 renovated) and the East Terminal, which moved all gates and boarding bridges to the second floor and ended ground-level boarding for good (Fort Wayne–Allen County Airport Authority; Passenger Terminal Today, August 14, 2026). The finished terminal measures 159,000 square feet (Airport Authority). Traffic justified it: FWA served 983,042 passengers in 2025 — 494,014 enplanements — a record, up 14.7 percent over 2024's record 856,803, with 14 nonstop destinations on four airlines (American, United, Delta and Allegiant), including Allegiant's Fort Lauderdale service launched in November 2025 (Fort Wayne–Allen County Airport Authority 2025 annual report; FAA statistics, 2025). The airport authority also runs Smith Field, the north-side general aviation airport. Baer Field, the Guard base, shares the FWA field.

Roads, trails and utilities. The city's capital rhythm is set by its annual neighborhood infrastructure program: more than $41 million invested across the community in the 2025 construction season, with a similar $37 million planned for 2026, spread across streets, bridges, sidewalks, alleys and trails (City of Fort Wayne, 2025–2026). The trail network — the Rivergreenway along the three rivers and its connectors — keeps closing gaps: in 2026 the city and Fort Wayne Trails marked completion of the Pufferbelly Trail's "Golden Spike" section from Ice Way to Washington Center Road (City of Fort Wayne, 2026). City Utilities' long tunnel and sewer-consent work continues underneath the city in the background of every budget. The region's road skeleton is unchanged in outline — I-69 down the west side, I-469 around the east, US 24/30/33 and SR 14/37 feeding in — with the airport, the GM plant and the southwest suburbs all hanging off the I-69 corridor.

Sports Today

The Komets are the city's oldest sporting institution and its winter heartbeat: professional hockey in Fort Wayne since 1952, today in the ECHL, playing at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum before some of the most durable crowds in minor-league hockey. The 2026–27 season is the franchise's 75th-anniversary season, prepared under head coach Ben Boudreau, who succeeded Jesse Kallechy (121-69-20-6 over three years); the 75th-season fan fest is set for 13–15 November, against Toledo and Cincinnati (Journal Gazette, Komets coverage, 2026; Komets releases). The Komets opened the season at the Coliseum in late October 2026, with the Toledo Walleye in on October 31 and the season's first weeks bringing the usual rivals — Indy, Cincinnati, Bloomington — through Parnell Avenue (ECHL game records, October–November 2026).

The TinCaps play the summer shift: the San Diego Padres' affiliate in the Midwest League, at Parkview Field since 2009, in a ballpark that anchors downtown's evening economy from April to September (Visit Fort Wayne, 2026). The 2026 TinCaps were a losing team — 50–69 in late August, chasing West Michigan from six and a half games back with sixteen to play — in a season whose local headlines were as much about the ballpark's second life as a community venue, including an October 2026 fall exhibition between Indiana University and Huntington University, the first college baseball sample of October at Parkview Field (Journal Gazette, TinCaps coverage, 2026).

Fort Wayne FC is the new arrival, and the fastest-moving story in the city's sports history. Founded in 2019, the club spent five seasons in pre-professional USL League Two at Bishop D'Arcy Stadium on the University of Saint Francis campus, then turned professional: on February 24, 2025 it was announced the club would join USL League One for 2026, with majority owner Mark Music — the CEO of Fort Wayne-based Ruoff Mortgage — privately funding a soccer-specific stadium on Bass Road at I-69 (Fort Wayne FC; Ruoff Mortgage Stadium records, 2025–2026). Ground was broken April 16, 2025; construction ran late, forcing the club to play its first two months of 2026 entirely on the road; the stadium — named Ruoff Mortgage Stadium on April 2, 2026 — opened May 2, 2026 with a 2–2 draw against Charlotte Independence before a temporarily limited crowd, and held its grand opening July 4, 2026, a 3–0 win over Spokane Velocity before the full house (Ruoff Mortgage Stadium records, 2026). At 9,200 seats it is the largest soccer-specific stadium in Indiana (Fort Wayne FC, 2026). Fort Wayne native DaMarcus Beasley, the former U.S. national team star, serves as the club's director of football operations; Mike Avery coached the first pro season, which ended October 24, 2026 with a 2–0 home loss to Athletic Club Boise that closed the door on a playoff berth — "just the start," Avery called it (Fort Wayne FC, October 24, 2026).

The Mad Ants are gone. The NBA G League franchise that played at the Coliseum as the Fort Wayne Mad Ants from 2007 to 2023 was moved by Pacers Sports & Entertainment toward Indianapolis in stages: announced May 8, 2023, parked at Gainbridge Fieldhouse for two seasons as the Indiana Mad Ants, and rebranded April 16, 2025 as the Noblesville Boom, which opened its new arena in Noblesville on August 8, 2025 (NBA G League franchise records; Riverview Health Arena history, 2025). Fort Wayne's claim on the franchise now is historical — sixteen seasons, one of the G League's best local identities, and a name (a nod to General "Mad" Anthony Wayne) that stayed behind when the team left. College sports fill the rest of the calendar: Purdue Fort Wayne's Mastodons in Division I (men's basketball at the Coliseum), Indiana Tech's Warriors and Saint Francis's Cougars in the NAIA, and the Summit Athletic Conference's Friday nights across the FWCS high schools.

Arts, Culture and Institutions

The Embassy Theatre, opened in 1928 as the Emboyd at 125 West Jefferson Boulevard, is the city's grand room: a restored movie palace and stage house — Indiana's largest historic theater, home of the Grande Page pipe organ — hosting the Broadway at the Embassy touring series, concerts, comedy and the Fort Wayne Philharmonic (Embassy Theatre; Visit Fort Wayne, 2026). The Fort Wayne Philharmonic ("the Phil"), the region's orchestra, performs at the Embassy and across the community; its Phil After Dark series was on the city's November 2026 calendar (The Local FW, November 3, 2026). The Arts United Center on the downtown arts campus is in the middle of the Arts Campus Fort Wayne "A Soaring" expansion and modernization campaign, a 2024–2026 project (Arts Campus Fort Wayne, 2023–2026).

The Fort Wayne Children's Zoo, on 38–40 acres at 3411 Sherman Boulevard in Franke Park, is the city's most-visited attraction and a perennial on national top-ten zoo lists, with more than 1,000 animals across its African Journey, Australian Adventure and other zones, open seasonally from late April through October (Fort Wayne Children's Zoo; Visit Fort Wayne, 2026). The museum row downtown and midtown: the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the History Center (the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society's museum in the old City Hall), Science Central — the hands-on science center in the old City Light & Power plant on Clinton Street — and the Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory at 1100 South Calhoun (Visit Fort Wayne, 2026). Twenty miles northeast in Auburn, the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum remains the region's other nationally known museum, a short drive rather than a city institution.

The Allen County Public Library is the institution other cities' genealogists know Fort Wayne by. Founded in 1895, the system runs a 367,000-square-foot main library downtown at 900 Library Plaza and branches across the county, and its Genealogy Center is the largest public genealogy collection in the United States — more than 456,000 print volumes and 660,000 microfilm and microfiche items, drawing researchers from every state (Allen County Public Library; Genealogy Center descriptions, 2026). The draw is measurable in hotel nights: the National Genealogical Society chose Fort Wayne for its 48th Family History Conference, May 27–30, 2026 (National Genealogical Society, 2026). The library system's Lincoln Collection — one of the country's significant Abraham Lincoln collections, inherited from the Lincoln National foundation — and its role as the region's public computing and meeting infrastructure make ACPL, quietly, one of the most-used public institutions in the county.

Media Today

Fort Wayne's news comes from a thinner bench than a generation ago, but the core outlets are intact. The Journal Gazette is the city's daily newspaper and paper of record — the source other outlets credit on city budgets, council votes and court news — publishing daily behind a paywall (Journal Gazette, 2025–2026). Television is a three-newsroom market plus public media: WANE 15 (CBS) and WPTA — "21Alive," carrying ABC and NBC programming on its channels — lead local TV news, and both were cited throughout 2026 on everything from early-voting counts to the mayoral budget fights (WANE 15; WPTA, 2026). WOWO 1190 AM remains the region's news-talk radio institution; WBOI, the NPR affiliate of Northeast Indiana Public Radio, covers the city from its public-radio newsroom; PBS Fort Wayne carries local documentary and public-affairs programming, including its The 260 conversations with city leaders (WBOI; PBS Fort Wayne, 2026). WBCL, the Christian radio network based at Taylor University's Fort Wayne lineage, covers community news for its audience (WBCL, 2026). The newest layer is digital-native: The Local FW, a subscription newsletter that marked its third anniversary in February 2026 and has become required reading in City Hall for its meeting-by-meeting development coverage; Input Fort Wayne (the former Current Fort Wayne), a solutions-journalism outlet covering neighborhoods and development; the Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly; and AroundFortWayne, the long-running civic blog that republishes city documents and speeches in full (The Local FW, February 17, 2026; Input Fort Wayne, 2026).

Neighborhoods and Districts Today

Downtown is a working district again: the courthouse, Citizens Square, the Grand Wayne Center, Parkview Field, the Embassy, the main library, the Landing, new apartment buildings (the Pearl, Cityscape Flats, Superior Lofts, the Riverfront at Promenade Park) and a hotel row — with a new ten-year downtown plan, Make It Downtown, in public engagement from July 2026 toward April 2027 adoption (City of Fort Wayne, July 29, 2026). West Central, immediately west of downtown, is the city's historic showpiece — the Victorian and early-twentieth-century houses along West Berry Street and its side streets, long the center of the city's preservation movement and its garden tours. The North Anthony corridor — Anthony Boulevard running northeast from downtown past Purdue Fort Wayne and Ivy Tech — is the city's education-and-retail spine, lined with the strip retail and restaurants that serve the college neighborhoods. Aboite Township, in the county's southwest, is where the growth went: the suburban subdivisions off Illinois Road and Jefferson Boulevard, Southwest Allen County Schools, and the shopping at Jefferson Pointe — the area whose annexation battles and school growth defined the city's edge politics for a generation, still filling in (Fort Wayne City Council rezoning records, 2025).

Waynedale, the southwest-side neighborhood annexed in the 1950s but never absorbed in spirit, keeps its own business district on Bluffton Road, its own parades and its own plan: the Waynedale 2040 plan was completed under Mayor Tucker in 2026, and plans for a rebuilt Fire Station No. 5 advanced the same fall after years of delay (City of Fort Wayne, February 2026; WOWO/WANE 15, October 2026). The southeast side — the Hanna Street corridor, Renaissance Pointe, the neighborhoods around South Anthony — is the city's most diverse and most disinvested quadrant, home to much of its Black community and its Burmese community, and the subject of the era's equity paperwork: the Fort Wayne Urban League's 2026 State of Black Fort Wayne report, produced with Purdue Fort Wayne's Community Research Institute, and Mayor Tucker's committee formed to answer it (Fort Wayne Urban League, October 27, 2026; The Local FW, November 3, 2026). The city's neighborhood-planning program has been formalizing the map: the Packard 2030 and Historic Northeast 2035 plans were adopted in 2024–25 (City of Fort Wayne, February 2025). East Central, just east of downtown, was the pilot neighborhood for the city's heat-mapping and tree-canopy work honored by the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 2026 (City of Fort Wayne, June 2026).

The Last Decade: 2015–2026

• 2014–2015 — GE closes the Broadway campus. General Electric's last operations at the Fort Wayne works that had employed generations end in 2014, and the complex is permanently closed in 2015, leaving 39 acres and 18 buildings empty southwest of downtown (Electric Works project history, 2023).
• August 2019 — Promenade Park opens. Riverfront Phase I, a $25 million park on the St. Marys River, opens to the public and starts the riverfront era (City of Fort Wayne Riverfront materials). Fort Wayne FC is founded the same year (Fort Wayne FC, 2026).
• 2020 — The Landing opens; the pandemic year. The rebuilt Columbia Street Landing opens its first phase (City of Fort Wayne redevelopment materials). In March 2020, Indiana's COVID-19 orders empty the new downtown as they do every American city (State of Indiana executive orders, March 2020).
• November 23, 2022 — Electric Works opens. The West Campus of the old GE works opens to the public: Amp Lab students had arrived in August, Union Street Market in November, and Do it Best's headquarters follows in December (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., January 2023).
• 2023 — Airport west terminal; the Mad Ants leave; GM's bet. FWA completes its West Terminal expansion in May (Airport Authority). On May 8, the Pacers announce the Mad Ants will move toward Indianapolis (NBA G League, May 8, 2023). In June, GM announces $632 million for Fort Wayne Assembly (General Motors, June 2023). On November 7, Tom Henry is re-elected to a fifth term (Associated Press, April 2024).
• February–April 2024 — Henry's death and Tucker's rise. Henry announces a late-stage stomach cancer diagnosis on February 26 and dies March 28, at 72 (Associated Press via IBJ, April 21, 2024). Deputy Mayor Karl Bandemer serves as acting mayor. On April 20, a Democratic caucus picks Councilwoman Sharon Tucker; she is sworn in April 23 as the city's first Black mayor and second woman mayor (US 93.3, April 2024). Rohli Booker caucuses into Tucker's council seat that spring (Fort Wayne Politics, May 2024).
• Fall 2024 — The Pearl opens; the True Value deal. The seven-story Pearl opens downtown (City of Fort Wayne, February 2025). True Value files for bankruptcy October 14; Do it Best closes its $153 million acquisition November 22 (HBS Dealer, November 22, 2024).
• February 2025 — Three Rivers Festival ends. The Three Rivers Festival board votes to file for bankruptcy, citing $300,000 in debt, canceling the festival held every year since 1969; the Farris brothers announce a replacement, Big Fort Fest, for the same July weekend at Headwaters Park (The Post & Mail, February 18, 2025).
• 2025 — Building season. Fort Wayne FC's move to USL League One is confirmed February 24, and ground breaks on its stadium April 16 (Fort Wayne FC, 2025). L3Harris completes its $125 million Fort Wayne expansion in April (L3Harris, April 2025). Do it Best completes the United Hardware merger in May (Do it Best, 2026). Big Fort Fest runs July 10–12 at Headwaters (Big Fort Fest, 2025). Riverfront Phase IIA is completed (The Local FW, June 17, 2025). Indiana's Senate Enrolled Act 1 property-tax overhaul is signed by Governor Braun, beginning the phase-in that now shapes every city budget (City of Fort Wayne, September 2025). FWA closes 2025 with a record 983,042 passengers, and Allegiant launches Fort Lauderdale service in November (Airport Authority 2025 annual report).
• February–April 2026. Mayor Tucker delivers her second State of the City on February 11 (City of Fort Wayne). GM builds its 11 millionth Fort Wayne vehicle on March 25 (General Motors, March 2026). The Elex's first residents arrive at Electric Works in April (Merchants Capital, May 27, 2026). The 122nd Fighter Wing completes its F-16 conversion, announced April 28 (National Guard Bureau, April 28, 2026).
• May–August 2026. Ruoff Mortgage Stadium opens May 2 with Fort Wayne FC's first home professional match (Fort Wayne FC, 2026). The National Genealogical Society holds its Family History Conference in Fort Wayne, May 27–30 (National Genealogical Society, 2026). Vera Bradley announces its headquarters move to Electric Works on June 23; Do it Best aligns True Value's headquarters to Fort Wayne on July 1 (Electric Works, June 23, 2026; Do it Best Group, July 1, 2026). The Space Development Agency awards L3Harris up to $955 million for missile-tracking satellites on July 13 (Army Recognition, July 14, 2026). The city launches the Make It Downtown plan on July 29 (City of Fort Wayne). FWA cuts the ribbon on the completed Project Gateway in August (Passenger Terminal Today, August 14, 2026).
• Fall 2026. The 51st Johnny Appleseed Festival runs September 19–20 (Johnny Appleseed Festival Inc., 2026). Purdue Fort Wayne's Trace housing opens for the fall term (regional construction reporting, 2026). Fort Wayne FC's first pro season ends October 24, just short of the playoffs (Fort Wayne FC, October 24, 2026). City Council passes the 2027 budget on October 28 after cutting about $11 million from the mayor's proposal (WPTA, October 28, 2026). On November 3, Allen County voters decide a full slate of county offices and Public Question No. 3, the casino question — the result to be entered in this record as it is certified (Journal Gazette; WOWO, October–November 2026).

The Year's Round of Events

The calendar still turns on the old pivots, with one new one. The Johnny Appleseed Festival — the third full weekend of September at Johnny Appleseed Park, period dress, open-fire cooking, and John Chapman's grave on the grounds — held its 51st edition September 19–20, 2026, and has announced its 52nd for September 18–19, 2027 (Johnny Appleseed Festival Inc., 2026). July now belongs to Big Fort Fest at Headwaters Park, the Three Rivers Festival's successor, which returned for a second year July 9–11, 2026 (festival listings, December 2025). Around them: GermanFest and GreekFest in June, RibFest, Pride Fest, Fiesta Fort Wayne at Headwaters, the Grabill Country Fair and Brewed IN the Fort in the fall, and Fright Night in October (Visit Fort Wayne, annual festivals guide, 2026; Indiana Home Match summer guide, 2026). The sporting seasons mark the year as reliably as the festivals: TinCaps baseball April to September, Komets hockey October to April, Fort Wayne FC's soccer spring through fall, the Children's Zoo's late-April-to-October season, the Embassy's Broadway series and the Philharmonic's season through the winter, and the farmers markets — including the Barr Street market downtown — on Saturday mornings (Visit Fort Wayne, 2026).

That is Fort Wayne as it stands at the end of 2026: a city that spent a decade rebuilding its center — riverfront, ballpark district, the GE campus, the airport, a soccer stadium — while its hospital systems, truck plant, defense shops and insurance companies carried the payroll, and while its politics passed, in one spring of 2024, from a sixteen-year mayoralty to a mayor no Fort Wayne had ever had before. The sections before this one record how it got here; this one is the baseline the next updates will be measured against.

The vote, when it came on November 3, 2026, was not close. In Allen County, unofficial final results reported by the Journal Gazette and compiled by Ballotpedia counted 61,310 votes against the question and 41,654 in favor — 59.5 percent no (Journal Gazette, November 2026; Ballotpedia, November 2026). The Indiana Capital Chronicle, reporting on election night with 98 percent of Allen County precincts counted, likewise put the no vote at 59 percent (Indiana Capital Chronicle, November 3–4, 2026). The other two counties named in the law voted the same way, by wider margins: DeKalb County rejected the question with nearly 65 percent voting no (7,374 no votes), and Steuben County with more than 58 percent voting no (6,234 no votes) (Journal Gazette, November 2026). Formal certification by the Allen County Election Board was still pending when this was written, but the margins — roughly twenty points in Allen County — were not in doubt.

The consequences are written into the law itself. House Enrolled Act 1038 (2026), which put the question on the ballot, provides that the Indiana Gaming Commission may not issue the act's new inland casino license in a county whose voters did not approve, and that a second public question under the act may not be held in that county (HEA 1038, adding Indiana Code 4-33-6-19.5 and chapter 4-33-6.8, 2026). With all three eligible counties voting no, the license has no county that can host it, and the commission's application process — developer applications had been due December 1, 2026, with final decisions by April 15, 2027 — has nothing to act on; gaming commission officials said after the vote that any next step belongs to the General Assembly (HEA 1038, 2026; Read Write, November 5–6, 2026). Full House Resorts, the Las Vegas company that had pushed to relocate its Rising Sun license to the northeast corridor, abandoned the relocation after the vote (Casino.org, November 4, 2026). What Allen County turned down was substantial on paper: a study the Gaming Commission commissioned from Spectrum Gaming Group had projected an Allen County casino at $204 million in revenue and $61 million a year in state taxes, and the license carried a $150 million fee against a minimum $500 million development commitment (Indiana Gaming Commission study, September 2025; HEA 1038, 2026). Mayor Sharon Tucker had supported the proposal; the opposition, organized as Save Fort Wayne, argued the social costs, and the voters settled it (Casino.org, November 4, 2026).

Schools Today: Fort Wayne Community Schools

The city's public schools are run by Fort Wayne Community Schools (FWCS), headquartered at 1200 South Clinton Street and routinely described as the largest school district in Indiana. The official count: 28,549 students enrolled in the 2024–25 school year, in 51 schools spanning pre-kindergarten through grade 12 in the 2025–26 directory (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, FWCS district record, 2024–25 and 2025–26). The district reports about 3,700 full-time-equivalent staff and a student-teacher ratio of about 13.4 to 1 (NCES Common Core of Data, 2024–25). Five comprehensive high schools — North Side, South Side, Northrop, Snider and Wayne — anchor the system, alongside middle schools, more than thirty elementary schools, seven magnet schools and the New Tech Academy; the district's own materials put more than 75 languages in its classrooms (Fort Wayne Community Schools, 2026). The district's rounded public figure of "nearly 30,000 students" is the one usually quoted; the 28,549 federal count for 2024–25 is the figure of record.

The superintendent is Dr. Mark D. Daniel, the district's 15th superintendent, in office since July 1, 2020. A 1979 graduate of North Side High School, Daniel returned to Fort Wayne after superintendent posts in Illinois and succeeded Dr. Wendy Robinson, who had led the district for seventeen years (Fort Wayne Community Schools, District Leadership page, 2026). The Indiana Department of Education's administrative review of the district for program year 2026 likewise lists Dr. Mark Daniel as superintendent (Indiana Department of Education, September 2025).

On the completion date, the published record is narrower than a range suggests. The city's December 3, 2025 update — the release that cut the tree canopy trail and the public docks from Phase IIB under the new no-rise floodway rules, freeing roughly $7–8 million for other riverfront work — stated plainly that "project completion is anticipated in 2026" (City of Fort Wayne, December 3, 2025). The newest dated status statement the city has published, its riverfront blog of July 28, 2026, describes Phase IIB as "well underway" across the Esplanade — the Overlook, Boulder Summit and Hammock Grove taking shape — with pedestrian path connections, street improvements, swings and landscaping still to come, and it offers no completion date at all (City of Fort Wayne, July 28, 2026). No city or parks statement found for this record announces an opening or sets a 2027 completion date; as of November 2026 the phase stands officially projected for 2026, unfinished at the last report, its completion not yet documented (City of Fort Wayne, December 3, 2025 and July 28, 2026).

The company's own current Fort Wayne page sharpens the number. L3Harris's Fort Wayne careers page, as published in late 2026, counts 610 Indiana employees — 320 of them engineers and scientists — across two Indiana locations, describing "more than 600 Indiana-based team members" at an average salary above $118,000 (L3Harris, Fort Wayne careers page, accessed November 2026). That stands consistently beside the 630-employee figure on the company's Indiana fact sheet cited above, and nothing published by the company or by Greater Fort Wayne Inc. supports the 2,500–3,000 figures that circulate in third-party regional profiles: Greater Fort Wayne Inc.'s 2026 business expansion guide lists L3Harris among Allen County's major employers without printing a headcount (Greater Fort Wayne Inc., 2026). Asked directly in July 2026, the site's general manager declined to give a site total but said the company had added about 100 people in Fort Wayne over the previous eighteen months (WPTA, July 15, 2026). The company's Indiana figure — roughly 610 to 630 — is therefore the number of record; the higher third-party claims are uncorroborated.

Parkview Field's 2026 gate is a matter of record: the TinCaps drew 325,807 fans over 64 home dates, an average of 5,091 a game, with 11 sellout crowds — third in the Midwest League in total attendance and one of the strongest draws at the High-A level (Baseball America, 2026 Minor League attendance table; The Baseball Cube, 2026 Fort Wayne TinCaps; Fort Wayne TinCaps game notes, September 1, 2026).

The Coliseum publishes no venue-wide attendance total, and none for 2025 or 2026 was found; the building's standing description of itself is that it hosts over one million visitors a year (Allen County War Memorial Coliseum, venue profile, 2026). Its anchor tenant's gate is a matter of league record: the Komets averaged 7,866 fans a game in the 2025–26 ECHL regular season, third in the league (ECHL, April 20, 2026), down from the franchise-record 8,185 a game set in 2024–25 (Fort Wayne Komets, April 2025).

The zoo publishes no dated season attendance total, and none for the 2025 or 2026 seasons appears in its releases or in local coverage. The figure the zoo gives for itself, in its current organizational materials, is "more than 600,000 guests annually" (Fort Wayne Zoo, organizational profile, October 2026). The last hard count in the record is cumulative: opening its 60th season on March 28, 2025, executive director Rick Schuiteman put the all-time gate at 25,615,315 guests since the zoo opened in 1965 (Whatzup, March 2025).

Public safety is one place where the city keeps a clean public record of itself: the Fort Wayne Police Department publishes its offense counts monthly. For 2024, the last full year the city has recapped in public, Fort Wayne recorded 33 homicides, cleared at a rate of 88 percent, and overall crime fell 2.81 percent — robberies down 14.8 percent, burglaries down 14.1 percent, vehicle thefts down 11.3 percent and property crime down 4.9 percent (City of Fort Wayne public safety recap, January 23, 2025). The decline steepened in 2025: by the mayor's year-end account, overall crime from January through November 2025 was down 18.45 percent against the same months of 2024 (WPTA, December 17, 2025). The department's cumulative table through April 2026 — the most recent complete monthly table published when this was written — counts 1,540 total offenses against 1,826 in the same four months of 2025, down 15.66 percent, at a crime rate of 563.23 per 100,000 residents against 691.97. Homicides stood at 4 against 11 (down 63.64 percent), robberies at 32 against 48, burglaries at 92 against 114 and larcenies at 1,077 against 1,311; assaults were the one major category up, 156 against 137 (Fort Wayne Police Department, Cumulative April 2026 Crime Statistics, City of Fort Wayne, 2026).