ARCH: the organization, 1975 to its fiftieth year

1975 — present

A bicentennial committee that refused to disband: ARCH Inc. — the name, its founders insist, was never meant to stand for anything, though "Architecture and Community Heritage" came to be used as the tagline — was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in July 1975, in ARCH's own words "a child of a committee created to guide Fort Wayne's celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976." Behind it stood, its history says, more than twenty years of community concern over losing historic buildings to postwar development. Its founders believed Fort Wayne could "stand with the nation's finest examples of historic cities if they could just stop its oldest buildings being torn down."

The first two decades ran on partnerships. With the Junior League, ARCH created the Operation Preservation revolving fund; with the city, it joined the first survey of historic properties and served as the first administrator of the city's facade grant program. In 1978 ARCH established its Most Endangered List and presented its first preservation awards, now the ARCHie Awards; the endangered list has been published in documented years since, including the lists of 2010, 2012 and 2014 carried in the Journal Gazette. In 1988 ARCH became a funded member of Arts United. In 1994, as the city celebrated its own bicentennial, the committee that had created ARCH selected it to become steward of the Heritage Trail. The surveys continued — the city interim survey published in 1996, and later five county historic-resource surveys under contract with the state. Under executive director Angie Quinn, from 1997, ARCH professionalized: Quinn and her successor Michael Galbraith became its first staff certified by the state as Qualified Professional Historic Preservationists, and the organization added some twenty National Register and local-district nominations, tax-credit services and house-history research. Galbraith left in 2016; Connie Haas Zuber, a former newspaper journalist and city magazine editor, became executive director in 2018. ARCH's current public campaign, First Option, urges developers to consider existing buildings first, citing research putting the heritage investment in the city's oldest neighborhoods at more than $3 billion — a figure printed here as ARCH's own.

Sources:

1. ARCH Inc., "Becoming ARCH: History & Organizational Background" (archfw.org) — the founding, the Junior League and city partnerships, the 1978 list and awards, Arts United 1988, the Heritage Trail stewardship, the surveys, and the directors.
2. City of Fort Wayne, "Preservation Month 2024 — People Saving Places" (Engage Fort Wayne) — Connie Haas Zuber's tenure from 2018 and the organization's fiftieth-year standing.
3. Around Fort Wayne, "Design and preservation awards" (November 17, 2010), and the Journal Gazette endangered-list reports of November 2012 and May 2014 — the published endangered lists.