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Forest Park began with an estate sale. In November 1905 the Fort Wayne Forest Park Company and the Tri-State Loan and Trust Company bought the 160-acre Taber estate, and the Forest Park Addition was platted the same year — a grid of six north-south and four east-west streets — with the Tri-State company as trustee. (A neighboring district's nomination dates the plat to 1906; the Forest Park nomination's own 1905 date is used here, and the variance is noted at the end of this section.) The Forest Park Company's president was Louis F. Curdes, the developer who had sold out Williams-Woodland Park by lottery two years earlier. In January 1910 Curdes put a boulevard plat before the Board of Works, and with the support of Charles Worden and Colonel David Foster he replatted a third of the original addition as Forest Park Place: lots on Florida Drive slightly larger, lots on Forest Park Boulevard significantly larger, around an expansive planted median. The boulevard itself is 130 feet wide, entered through stone gateposts, and it was advertised in 1911.
Success pulled the boulevard north: the Driving Park Addition of 1913 extended it one block from East State Boulevard to Dodge Avenue, across the old racetrack ground. Forest Park Elementary, designed by Guy Mahurin and built in 1925–27, serves the neighborhood that took the addition's name. The Forest Park Boulevard Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 30, 2007, with 93 contributing buildings built between about 1890 and 1955. The Forest Park Boulevard Neighborhood Association's Home and Garden Tour with ARCH, most recently June 21, 2025, is the district's public face. The district's buildings are treated in the Architecture section.
Sources: National Register nomination, Forest Park Boulevard Historic District (Ref. 07000212); City of Fort Wayne historic district brochure; ACGSI Forest Park and elementary schools pages; City of Fort Wayne Engage, 2025 tour notice.