The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The postwar system was built at neighborhood scale: the Jefferson Recreation Center (1945), the Franke Park Day Camp and Franklin B. Meade's world flower collection planted in Foster Park (1946), the McCulloch Center and Shoaff Lake (1947), and a pool-building year in 1949 — the Foellinger Theatre rising in Franke Park as the News-Sentinel's gift in honor of Oscar Foellinger, dedicated August 10, beside the Memorial Pool built with $95,000 of tax funds and the McMillen pool, $95,000 of its $105,000 given by the McMillen Foundation. In Franke Park, Fred B. Shoaff's 1952 gift of 54.36 acres for a bird and wildlife sanctuary became, by way of a 1962 advisory committee, the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo, opened July 3, 1965 — the institution the Current chapter profiles. Shoaff gave again in 1955, 169 acres for Shoaff Park, the year the board adopted the First Class City Park Law; in 1956 the McMillen Ice Arena opened as the first artificial ice rink in Indiana. Freimann Square's land came from the Redevelopment Commission in 1970 and the square was completed in 1973, the year the department also took over the City Utilities and Reservoir parks; the Park Foundation was established in 1972. Headwaters Park, the flood-ground park at the confluence that Kessler's unbuilt Three Rivers Park had imagined eighty years before, was transferred to the department by the Headwaters Park Alliance in the spring of 2023.
By the department's own dated figures the growth reads: park acreage reached 1,640 acres in 1967; the 2024 inventory counted 87 public parks totaling 2,805 acres with four golf courses, 50,000 street trees and 25,000 park trees in the department's care; the city's current published figures give 89 parks and 2,840 acres, Franke Park the largest at about 339 acres and Orff Park the smallest at two-hundredths of an acre, with fourteen miles of Rivergreenway trail inside the city. The founding purchases of 1863–1864 and the drawn system of 1909–1912 are still legible inside those numbers — most of the ground Fort Wayne plays on was given, planned or taxed into public hands before 1930.
Sources: Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department, published chronology (entries for 1945–1973) and "Fun Facts" / Park Information pages (current figures); Wikipedia, "List of parks in Fort Wayne, Indiana" (2024 inventory: 87 parks, 2,805 acres).