Northcrest Shopping Center: the north side answers

BUILT 1957 · OPENED 1958 · EAST COLISEUM BOULEVARD (THE U.S. 30 BYPASS)

A center built with a neighborhood: Northcrest was not planted in front of houses that already stood; it was erected, in 1957, alongside the houses themselves. The Northcrest subdivisions — some 1,200 prefabricated National Homes houses, among the first great postwar subdivisions on the city's north side — were still being completed when the shopping center rose on the U.S. 30 bypass, the road now called Coliseum Boulevard, made reachable by the Nickel Plate track elevation finished in 1955. Kroger was the center's first tenant in 1957, and by 1960, in the News-Sentinel's north-side history, Northcrest Shopping Center "was in full swing." The center's own decade summary in the same newspaper dates its opening to 1958, the year the downtown Barr Street Market closed; the two accounts sit a season apart, and both are printed here as the record gives them.

The management line is itself a piece of the record: Goldstine Knapke Co., the Fort Wayne firm behind the subdivision, still managed the shopping center four decades later, an unusually long single hand on a retail property. The anchor tenant of the center's middle decades was a Montgomery Ward — the "Monkey Wards" of north-side memory — and the Ward building at 835 East Coliseum Boulevard is a Kohl's today, with T.J. Maxx and Best Buy in the center's current anchor row. Where Southgate served an established south side, Northcrest served a subdivision frontier, and the pairing set the pattern the next seventy years repeated: the roofs and the retail rose together, at the city's edge, and downtown's share of the city's shopping drained away to both ends at once.

Sources:

1. The News-Sentinel, millennium history series, "North side boomed in postwar era" (Fort Wayne Newspapers, 2000) — the center erected 1957; Kroger the first tenant; in full swing by 1960; Goldstine Knapke's management; the Northcrest subdivisions.
2. The News-Sentinel, millennium history series, "1950–1959" decade overview — Northcrest's opening dated 1958.
3. Groceteria, Fort Wayne chain grocery locations, compiled from city directories — Kroger at 705 East Coliseum Boulevard by 1960, in Northcrest Shopping Center.