The ledger of losses

1962 — 2025

What the arguing is about: The Architecture section keeps the demolition ledger entry by entry; the heritage record is which losses the city still argues about, and they cluster. The year 1974 took both grand hotels in a single year: the Anthony Hotel — Charles Weatherhogg's 1908 house at Berry and Harrison, with Louis Sullivan's hand in its lobby — was imploded on January 13, 1974, and the Hotel Keenan, Weatherhogg's thirteen-story house of 1923 that had hosted Presidents Truman and Kennedy, was demolished on October 20, 1974; the Grand Wayne Center stands on the Keenan site. A decade earlier the Paramount Theatre, the 1930 movie palace, had been demolished in 1962 — its record is in the Theaters section — and in 2002 the Snyderman House, one of Michael Graves's first two Fort Wayne houses, was lost to arson.

The argument continues in the present tense. The S. F. Bowser building on Creighton Avenue went from ARCH's 2012 endangered list to demolition in 2016. And in July 2025 the former St. Hyacinth Catholic Church — closed as a parish in 1995 and awaiting demolition to give the homeless-family nonprofit Vincent Village room to operate — gave up its cornerstone capsule before the walls came down, an episode carried in the time-capsule entry below. The ledger's lesson, as the record gives it, is not that Fort Wayne demolishes carelessly; it is that every generation's list of the obviously dispensable contains at least one building the next generation would have fought for, which is the entire premise of the endangered list.

Sources:

1. Architecture, "The Demolition Ledger — What Was Lost" — the Anthony and Keenan dates, the Snyderman arson, and the Aveline fire, cross-referenced and not retold.
2. Theaters — the Paramount Theatre (1930–1961, demolished 1962), cross-referenced.
3. Allen County Genealogical Society, ARCH Inc. page — the Bowser building's path from the 2012 list to its 2016 demolition.
4. Today's Catholic, "A Glimpse into the Past: St. Hyacinth Time Capsule Opened" (August 5, 2025) — the closed church, the coming demolition, and Vincent Village.