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The Landing is the hundred block of West Columbia Street, and it is where Fort Wayne began as a commercial place. Columbia Street began as a trail leading west from the military garrison, and it took its name from Dana Columbia, hotel keeper and canal boat operator. The Wabash and Erie Canal made it: ground was broken for the canal in 1832 and it was dedicated in 1843, and the street's rear doors faced the canal and its docks, with the Orbison Basin at Harrison Street and the Comparet Basin at the east end. For nearly a century this was the principal business street of Fort Wayne — the terminal for passengers and freight arriving by stagecoach and canal — and the name "The Landing" is the canal word for the place where the boats came in. The name was fixed to the block in the preservation fight of 1965, when Canal Days, Inc. and local advocates saved the street from demolition; The Landing was dedicated on October 23, 1965. The canal right-of-way itself was sold in 1880 and is now occupied by the elevated railroad.
The block survived fires, a 1978 streetscape renewal, and decades of vacancy before the Downtown Trust — a nonprofit formed in 2011 to buy underused downtown property — assembled the buildings and chose Cincinnati's Model Group to redevelop them. The $32.2 million project renovated seven historic buildings and built one new one, with 70 apartments and 56,000 square feet of commercial and retail space; the new West Columbia Street streetscape, a pedestrian plaza, was unveiled on October 24, 2019, and the district reopened as a pedestrian entertainment street in 2020, with dining, shops, and live music on summer weekends. The Landing is a local historic district and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its buildings are treated in the Architecture section.
Sources: Roy M. Bates and Kenneth B. Keller, "The Columbia Street Story," Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society; ARCH Fort Wayne, The Landing heritage page and historic marker text; City of Fort Wayne release, October 24, 2019; Visit Fort Wayne, guide to historic sites (updated 2026).