The club at the Hallmark Inn

2000s — the surviving report carries no date

A collision, reported once: The first time Fort Wayne's swingers scene enters the general record, it does so sideways. A state program of the Indiana Department of Correction was housing released offenders — sex offenders among them, as many as sixteen former prisoners in all — at the Hallmark Inn, the motel at 3730 East Washington Boulevard (a former Days Inn; the Allen County Public Library's December 2004 newsletter describes it as a 60-room house with two lounges). When, in the Associated Press's words, "a private club with ties to a swingers' group" moved into the motel, the department moved its offenders out to a nearby motel rather than house them above the club. "We thought that made the most sense," a department spokesman told The Journal Gazette, whose reporting the wire story carried.

What the report does not say: Neither the club nor the swingers group is named in the dispatch, no address inside the motel is given, and no complaint, raid, or charge is recorded — the club had done nothing the report treats as actionable; its mere tenancy was enough to move the state's lodgers. The story survives in an undated trade-press reprint of the Associated Press item, and the date of the episode could not be fixed from the record reached; it belongs to the years when the motel traded under the Hallmark Inn name and the department was lodging offenders in Fort Wayne motels. It is printed here at exactly the size the evidence supports: one documented tenancy, one administrative reaction, no names.

Sources:

1. Associated Press dispatch from Fort Wayne, reprinted as "Indiana Cons Not Allowed Above Club," corrections.com (trade press) — the department's move, the figure of sixteen, and the spokesman's statement to The Journal Gazette. The reprint is undated; see this section's note.
2. Genealogy Gems, Allen County Public Library (December 31, 2004) — the Hallmark Inn, 3730 East Washington Boulevard, formerly the Days Inn, 60 rooms, two lounges.