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1966 — 1971
What the ordinance did not save: The 1965 ordinance protected one block. The rest of Columbia Street — for a century the city's commercial spine — went the other way. The city's own preservation history calls the demolition of East Columbia Street, beginning in the fall of 1966, only months after West Columbia became a local historic district, "the most obvious illustration of Urban Renewal in Fort Wayne": scores of historic commercial buildings, from Calhoun Street east to Clay Street and from Main Street north to the rail elevation, were removed, and the cleared ground received the City-County Building, Freimann Square, the Arts United Center, the Museum of Art and Fire Station No. 1.
The News-Sentinel's Kevin Leininger, looking back in 1982, called it one of the city's greatest magic tricks — "it made almost an entire street disappear" — and noted that the Randall Hotel, at the west end of the surviving block in the early-1960s photographs, had itself been torn down in the 1960s and replaced by a parking lot. The asymmetry is the record: preservation in Fort Wayne began as a one-block exception to a clearance program, and the argument between the two impulses — keep the block, clear the district — has structured the city's heritage fights ever since.
Sources:
- City of Fort Wayne, "Mid-Century Modern in Fort Wayne" (Engage Fort Wayne, 2025) — the fall 1966 start, the clearance boundaries, and the buildings that replaced the street.
- Kevin Leininger, "'Magic' made Columbia Street disappear," Cityscapes, News-Sentinel, February 6, 1982 — the retrospective account and the Randall Hotel.