Parkview Field — 1301 Ewing Street

Parkview Field, at 1301 Ewing Street downtown, is the modern landmark that proved Fort Wayne's downtown revival had an engine. The ballpark was built as the keystone of the Harrison Square project — a development of roughly $120 million that put the ballpark together with a hotel, housing and retail on former surface parking at the city's center — and it opened on April 16, 2009, before a sold-out crowd, with the newly renamed Fort Wayne TinCaps beating the Dayton Dragons 7–0. The ballpark itself cost about $31 million and seats 8,100. The TinCaps drew 404,418 fans in their first season downtown, 378,529 of them in the regular season, and won the Midwest League championship that same year, and the park has been repeatedly ranked among the best ballpark experiences in the minor leagues. Its predecessor, Memorial Stadium out by the Coliseum, had stood barely sixteen seasons; Parkview Field's fame is that it worked — it is the site most often cited, in Fort Wayne and outside it, as the model of a small-city downtown ballpark district. The club and its seasons are the Sports chapter's; the Harrison Square development record is in Fort Wayne Today. The location fact stands on its own: the most internationally written-about address in twenty-first-century Fort Wayne is a ballpark that opened in 2009.

Sources: Parkview Field and Fort Wayne TinCaps records (milb.com); Parkview Field opening record, April 16, 2009 (8,100 capacity; 7–0 over Dayton; sold-out crowd); Harrison Square project accounts.