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Pettit-Rudisill, in southeast Fort Wayne between Pettit Avenue and Rudisill Boulevard, is documented as a modern neighborhood more fully than as a platted one: no nomination, association history, or plat account for the neighborhood as a whole was found, and its origin and name are not stated here rather than guessed. The City's Southeast Area Development Strategy of July 2007 gives the housing layer: many of the homes between Rudisill Boulevard and Pettit Avenue were built between 1940 and 1955, dominated by very small single-family houses of less than 1,000 square feet, with about 10 percent vacant and 45 percent renting households at the 2000 census; the American Community Survey's 2020–2024 block-group estimates put the median year built at 1955.
The neighborhood's school, Merle J. Abbett Elementary on Smith Street, named for the superintendent of 1932–1952, was dedicated November 5, 1950 — the first Fort Wayne school built after the Second World War — and the Franciscan Center, founded in 1989 by Sally Ley and Jean Kelly as a sack-lunch and shelter program, works from the former Sacred Heart Parish school on Gaywood Drive. The association is long-lived: Alice Schoppman, who died in 2009, was a founder and past president of the Pettit-Rudisill Neighborhood Association, and the City's October 2025 registered list names its current president. (Pettit-Rudisill is not the Rudisill-Plaza association farther east, whose published history is a separate family's memoir; the two are kept apart in this section.) On December 1, 2021, United Way of Allen County chose Pettit-Rudisill, with Bridge of Grace Compassionate Ministries, as the pilot neighborhood for its Strong Neighborhoods initiative.
Brewer Park, at 800 East Pettit Avenue, reopened after a $2.6 million redevelopment on September 3, 2025, with two playgrounds, a splash pad, a pavilion, basketball courts, and a quarter-mile walking path; the city's 2026 infrastructure program carried the neighborhood's concrete street repairs into their fifth and sixth phases. Pettit-Rudisill is listed in the note at the end of this section among the neighborhoods documented only in part.
Sources: City of Fort Wayne, Southeast Area Development Strategy, July 2007; United Way of Allen County, Strong Neighborhoods announcement, December 1, 2021; City of Fort Wayne, "Reimagined Brewer Park Reopens," September 3, 2025, neighborhood infrastructure releases, May 27 and August 19, 2026, and Registered Neighborhoods list, October 20, 2025; ACGSI elementary schools page (Abbett Elementary, citing Fort Wayne Community Schools); Today's Catholic, September 16, 2014 (Franciscan Center); Alice Schoppman obituary, Fort Wayne Newspapers, December 1, 2009; American Community Survey 2020–2024 estimates via BestNeighborhood.