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George E. Kessler of St. Louis — the landscape architect of Kansas City's celebrated park and boulevard system — began work for Fort Wayne in 1911, reporting to the Board of Park Commissioners. His first Fort Wayne commission set the pattern of private money building public ground: Thieme Drive, a Beaux-Arts riverfront drive and park along the St. Marys in the West Central neighborhood, funded by a Thieme family offer the city accepted, built in 1911–1912. It is today the only riverfront drive surviving from the plan.
The plan itself — the Park and Boulevard System of Fort Wayne, drawn by Geo. E. Kessler & Co. and published with his map in 1912 — took the city's unique fact, the confluence of three rivers, and organized everything around it: a series of riverside parks and drives, and a ring of grand boulevards around what was then the perimeter of the city, girding the uncoordinated subdivisions and tying the existing parks into one system. Rudisill Boulevard and Anthony Boulevard, east and south, are its surviving armature. Kessler designed Rudisill Boulevard, drew the plan for Lakeside Park, laid out Foster Park, designed park features including the Thieme Drive overlook — and designed a Three Rivers Park at the confluence that was never built. Implemented aggressively from 1912 onward, most of the plan was in place by 1955; the Chicago firm of Bennett, Parsons & Frost updated it in 1927, and two more of the system's shapers, the landscape architect Arthur Shurcliff (whose 1926 general plan for Franke Park survives in part in its drives) and Adolph Jaenicke, the city's first superintendent of parks and forester (from 1917), carried it into the next generation. On December 28, 2010, the Fort Wayne Park and Boulevard System Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places — nationally significant for its association with Robinson and Kessler, only the second park system in Indiana so listed, and the documentary frame under which the boulevard neighborhoods entered the Register one by one, as the Architecture chapter records.
Sources: National Register nomination, Fort Wayne Park and Boulevard System Historic District (Fife, Storrow and Lippens, 2010) and the City of Fort Wayne's listing announcement (January 7, 2011); The Cultural Landscape Foundation, "Thieme Drive" (Kessler's 1911 report; construction 1911–1912); Allen County Genealogical Society parks pages, copying the Cultural Landscape Foundation (Kessler's Rudisill, Lakeside and Foster work; Three Rivers Park unbuilt; Shurcliff and Jaenicke); Griswold (1917), Ch. XLVIII (Kessler engaged with the River Front Commission; Griswold's text renders the name "George B. Kessler").