Southgate Plaza: the first plaza

OPENED 1955 · PETTIT AVENUE AND CALHOUN STREET · THE SOUTH SIDE

The shape arrives: The department stores saw it coming first. Sears, Roebuck left downtown in 1953 for a new store at Rudisill Boulevard and South Clinton Street — a freestanding suburban store with a parking lot, two years before the form had a name here. The form arrived in full in 1955, when Southgate Plaza opened at Pettit Avenue and Calhoun Street on the south side: forty stores on forty acres, in the News-Sentinel's millennium-history summary, "with plenty of easy parking." A City of Fort Wayne account of the era calls Southgate "the city's first major shopping center," and the claim has stood as the record's own wording ever since — the first center in Fort Wayne built as a single planned retail place rather than a street that accumulated stores.

What Southgate sold was not only goods but a new geography of errands. Downtown shopping had meant the bus, the transfer, and the walk between stores in the weather; the plaza meant one drive, one lot, and every stop under a shared canopy of signs. The center sat at the edge of the Lafayette Place neighborhood, whose National Register nomination calls Southgate "a major landmark on the city's south side" and "a primary shopping area since the 1950s" — a strip center that became, in the nomination's phrase for the surrounding streets, the south side's commercial front door. It worked for decades in that role, and it works still: the plaza trades today with a Kroger supermarket at 218 East Pettit Avenue among its anchors, its mid-century bones re-fronted many times over. The plaza era's first monument turned out to be a survivor, not a ruin.

Sources:

1. The News-Sentinel, millennium history series, "1950–1959: Downtown celebrated last glory days" (Fort Wayne Newspapers, 2000) — Sears's 1953 move; Southgate's 1955 opening, forty stores on forty acres at Pettit and Calhoun.
2. City of Fort Wayne, Robert E. Meyers Park dedication account (August 14, 2009) — Southgate named "the city's first major shopping center."
3. National Register nomination, Lafayette Place Historic District — Southgate as a south-side landmark and primary shopping area since the 1950s.