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Between the survey and the photograph, the city was pictured from an imaginary altitude. Albert Ruger's Bird's eye view of the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana (Chicago Lithographing Co., 1868) is the first of the panoramic views: the young railroad city drawn as if seen from a balloon, every church spire and factory standing, the rivers bending through it. The Library of Congress catalogs it in its Panoramic Maps collection; the Indiana State Library holds a modern reprint. Panoramas were subscription art, drawn to flatter the towns that bought them — the county genealogical society cautions that the Ruger's accuracy is questionable — and they are best read as portraits the city commissioned of itself, not as surveys.
The form peaked with the panoramic view of 1880, drawn looking southeast over a city of gasworks, rail yards, and new brick blocks — the work of Ruger and J. J. Stoner, lithographed by Beck & Pauli of Milwaukee; the Indiana Historical Society serves a zoomable copy. In 1907 the city's own historian gave the genre a working twist: B. J. Griswold's Griswold's birdseye view of the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, indexed for ready reference, published with W. W. Hixon, married the panoramic image to a street index, a finding aid in picture form. The Library of Congress holds it (item 75693225), and the Internet Archive serves a copy — the bird's-eye become a tool, two years before Charles Robinson arrived to tell the city its portrait needed a plan behind it.
Sources: Library of Congress, Panoramic Maps collection (2nd ed., no. 194), Ruger 1868; Indiana State Library, Allen County Maps page, call numbers 912.772 IALF68r (1868 reprint) and 912.772 IAlF80p (1880 panoramic); Indiana Historical Society digital collections, panoramic view of Fort Wayne, 1880; Library of Congress item 75693225 and Internet Archive item griswoldsbirdsey00gris0 (Griswold, 1907); ACGSI, Maps of Allen County, on panoramic accuracy.