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BUILT 1972 · 5629–5753 ST. JOSEPH ROAD · THE NORTHEAST SIDE
The Marketplace of Canterbury began as an ordinary thing: a Tudor-styled neighborhood center of about 89,650 square feet, built in 1972 on St. Joe Road to serve the Canterbury Green development then rising around its golf course and the young university campus nearby. Its second life began in 1984, when H. Stanley Liddell bought it — and, when his largest tenant moved out and left him 30,000 square feet of empty space, answered not by discounting the rent but by inventing a tenant: an indoor "Garden Mall" of boutique shops, a specialty grocery, and cafés, fitted inside the vacancy. Liddell then took over the adjoining spaces and opened Piere's Entertainment Center in November 1989 — five clubs under one roof, billed in its founder's obituary as a destination drawing from a 250-mile radius — and the strip center completed its transformation into the city's standing entertainment district, a bar-and-club cluster whose nightlife record belongs to the Bars & Nightclubs and Music sections. Liddell's 2013 obituary in the Fort Wayne newspapers called the Canterbury turnaround "the best example of Stan's entrepreneurial spirit, vision and courage," and the center trades on the model still: a locally owned strip whose biggest tenant is not a store at all. The Marketplace is the record's proof that in Fort Wayne a shopping center's salvation could come from selling evenings instead of goods.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne Newspapers, obituary of H. Stanley Liddell (February 6, 2013), via Legacy.com and the Allen County Genealogical Society's surname files — the 1984 purchase, the Garden Mall, the opening of Piere's.
- NAI Harding Dahm leasing flyer, Marketplace of Canterbury — built 1972; 89,650 square feet; 5629–5753 St. Joe Road.
- Bars & Nightclubs — Piere's opening date and club record, cross-referenced and not retold.