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Fort Wayne's first famous aerial image came early: on October 20, 1912, the pioneer aviator Art Smith — the city's own "bird boy," whose story the People chapters tell — photographed the Driving Park from his airplane, a view of the fairgrounds no balloonist's drawing had matched for plain fact. The true aerial age, though, is the survey age: systematic photography flown to be measured. Its local archive is the county's Historical Imagery Viewer, reached through Allen County iMap, which runs aerial photography of the county from 1938 through 2018 in fourteen different years. A resident can dial from the late-Depression county — a grid of farms with the city a compact smudge at the rivers — forward through the subdivision decades to the present sprawl, watching the section lines of the 1820s survey fill in with rooftops, one flight at a time. The viewer is the Sanborn idea inverted: not building by building on paper, but the whole county at once, from above, on a screen.
Sources: ACGSI photo and maps pages, on Art Smith's October 20, 1912 aerial photograph of the Driving Park; ACGSI, Maps of Allen County, Indiana, describing the iMap Historical Imagery Viewer (aerial photography 1938–2018, fourteen years).