The Famous Downtown Addresses — Courthouse Square, the Lincoln Bank Tower and the Embassy Theatre

Three downtown buildings are famous as places in a way that exceeds their architecture, which is treated in full in the Architecture chapter; they are entered here briefly, for their stories. The first is the Allen County Courthouse, on the square bounded by Berry, Calhoun, Lewis and Clinton streets — the seat of county government since 1902 and a National Historic Landmark since July 31, 2003. Its fame is national and specific: it is one of the finest Beaux-Arts courthouses in America, with an interior program of murals and scagliola that preservationists travel to see, and its green dome is the city's visual signature, the point by which Fort Wayne orients its postcards and its skyline.

Across Berry Street at 116 East Berry Street stands the Lincoln Bank Tower, the Art Deco skyscraper that was the tallest building in Indiana from 1930 to 1962 and the tallest in Fort Wayne until 1970 — a tower raised in the first year of the Depression as a statement that the city intended to continue. Its banking lobby has a second fame, as a film location: the last shot of Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men (1997) was filmed in the tower, as the Fort Wayne on Screen entry below records.

A block west, the Embassy Theatre, opened in 1928 as a movie palace with the adjoining Indiana Hotel, is the city's great preservation story. Closed and under threat of demolition in 1972, it was saved by a citizens' campaign led by Robert Goldstine that raised $250,000 to buy it; the Embassy Theatre Foundation acquired it in 1974, it was listed on the National Register in 1975, and from 1976 its Grand Page organ — one of the largest theatre organs ever built — was returned to playing condition. The Embassy is the rare famous place whose fame is the rescue itself: Fort Wayne's proof, cited wherever the building is written about, that the city would pay to keep its landmarks.

Sources: National Park Service landmark and register records (Courthouse, designated July 31, 2003; Embassy Theatre, listed 1975); the Architecture chapter of this history for all three buildings' full records; Embassy Theatre Foundation histories.