The modern layer: care in the community

1963 — today

What replaced the institutions: The system that stands where the institutions stood is deliberately un-institutional. For people with developmental disabilities, the Developmental Center's 2007 closure completed a forty-year emptying: its last 210 residents moved mostly to homes in the community, and developmental services in Fort Wayne now run through community providers, group homes, and state waiver programs rather than any campus — the accredited center of 1986 has no successor building. For mental illness, the documented structure is the one the preceding entries built: Park Center, the nonprofit community mental health center descended from the child guidance clinic, provides the city's principal dedicated inpatient psychiatric service alongside its outpatient, crisis, and residential programs, today as a Parkview affiliate; Parkview's own Behavioral Health service is part of the hospital system's record and is told in the Hospitals section, and the Irene Byron institution — a tuberculosis sanatorium whose name the county home later carried — belongs to the Epidemics section, each cross-referenced here in a line rather than retold. The present-day map of beds, crisis services, and providers is kept in the Current record. One boundary of this account should be stated as plainly as the rest: the community mental-health center for the counties northeast of Allen is the Northeastern Center, headquartered at Auburn in DeKalb County, whose inpatient hospital stands at Kendallville in Noble County; it serves the region from outside the city, and it is named here only so the map is not left with a false blank. What Fort Wayne's own record shows, from the insane ward behind the poor farm to the group homes in ordinary streets, is a complete arc — custody, segregation, sterilization, and at the end a deliberate return of care to the community, with the buildings demolished, the names partly recovered, and the archive, at last, open.

Sources:

1. Inclusion Daily Express, 25 October 2005, and PBS Fort Wayne, The Forgotten (2022) — the closure plan's community placements and the last resident's departure on 18 April 2007.
2. Park Center, Inc., City of Fort Wayne zoning filing (2017), and Parkview Health, 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment — Park Center's inpatient and community programs, its group homes, and its present Parkview affiliation.
3. Hospitals section of this history — Parkview Behavioral Health within the Parkview system record, and the Northeastern Center's inpatient hospital at Kendallville, outside this city's record; Epidemics section of this history — the Irene Byron Sanatorium and the county institution's tuberculosis course.