Fort Wayne Malls and Shopping Centers: Glenbrook, Southtown and More

Malls & Shopping Centers · From the first plazas to the lifestyle centers

Fort Wayne learned to shop in a new shape three times. The first shape was the plaza: in the middle 1950s, within about three years, the city got its first two big open-air centers, one on the south side and one on the north, and the News-Sentinel's millennium history could write that by the end of the decade "the entire city either shopped at Southgate or at Northcrest." The second shape was the enclosed mall: Glenbrook in 1966 and Southtown in 1969 roofed the plaza over, climate-controlled it, and pulled the department stores out of downtown for good — the downtown Wolf & Dessauer, the city's flagship for a century, closed in 1979, a decade and a half after the trade had moved. The third shape came in two waves: the power center of the 1990s and 2000s, a row of big boxes sharing a parking field, and the lifestyle center, which put the sidewalks back outdoors and dressed them as a small town's main street — Jefferson Pointe, in 2001. This section holds the documented record of those centers: when each opened, who built it, what anchored it, what killed it or kept it alive, and what stands on the ground now. The firms that anchored them are treated as businesses in the Business section; the roads that carried shoppers to them are treated in the Corridors section. What belongs here is the centers themselves.