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AFTER THE FACTORY CITY · 1984 TO THE PRESENT, IN BRIEF
The partial refill: The first answer was another truck plant. On 31 August 1984 Fort Wayne celebrated the coming of General Motors; its Fort Wayne Assembly opened in 1986 — some accounts give 1987 — with about 3,000 jobs, and in 2024, employing 4,320, it stood as the city's largest manufacturer, building Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups. The recovery around it was real but different in kind: by the late 1990s unemployment had fallen to 2.4 percent (1998), and the twenty-first-century economy the city's summaries describe rests on distribution, transportation and logistics; healthcare; professional and business services; leisure and hospitality; and financial services — with manufacturing still employing 16.9 percent of Allen County's workforce in the figure those summaries carry, half the share of the peak era. Parkview Health, not a factory, became the region's largest employer; the defense electronics of the Magnavox and ITT succession shrank to one or two percent of the population's employment. The full modern account is the Current section's; this section closes where its subject closes.
The shape of the change: Stand on Broadway and the whole story is in one view. The General Electric campus that employed 20,000 in 1944 dwindled through the same decades — its last operations winding down in 2014, the complex closed in 2015 — and rose again as Electric Works, a mixed-use innovation district in the old factory buildings: offices, a school, a clinic, a market, where the motors were made. The buildings are the Architecture section's; the meaning is this section's to state once. Fort Wayne's industrial revolution took a canal town of artisans and made it a factory city of a third of a million people's region; the revolution's reversal took the factories and left the city — larger, more various in its work, and no longer able to say, as it could for a hundred years, that trains kept America rolling and Fort Wayne kept the trains rolling. What it makes now, and who makes it, is told in Fort Wayne Today.
Sources: Chicago Fed, Fort Wayne Profile (the GM plant's 1986 opening and its employment); the city's economic summaries as compiled in the Fort Wayne record (the twenty-first-century sector list, the 16.9 percent manufacturing share, the defense share, the 1998 unemployment figure, GM's 4,320 in 2024); News-Sentinel (the 31 August 1984 GM celebration); the Architecture section's Electric Works record (the 2014–15 wind-down and closing and the redevelopment) and Indiana Landmarks (the 1944 peak of 20,000 against the present use).