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1851–1914 · EVERY ROAD ITS OWN STATION
The canal-basin depot: Fort Wayne never had one station in its railroad century; it had a procession of them, one for nearly every road. The first stood where the two transport ages met: a frame depot and engine house at the canal basin, at the northwest corner of Lafayette and Columbia streets, at the end of the track that ran down the middle of Lafayette Street — ACGSI dates the first depot on that corner to 1851, before the rails themselves arrived, and the 1907 Fort Wayne News account places the frame depot and engine house at the foot of Columbia, on six acres Allen Hamilton donated for depot purposes, with five more acres from Hanna for the shops. When the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago consolidated and moved its facilities south, the Lafayette Street track was taken up.
The Pennsy depots: The Pennsylvania's own sequence ran from that first frame building to the shops-side depot built in 1860 near Calhoun Street — the station of the Civil War and Gilded Age city, standing roughly where a Calhoun Street car wash stands today — and then, when the south-side tracks were elevated in 1911–13 and the 1860 depot removed, to the station that still defines the city's railroad memory: the Pennsylvania Railroad Station on Baker Street, opened 23 March 1914 before ten thousand visitors. Baker Street Station is Architecture's building and Famous Locations' landmark; here it is recorded as the working depot it was — the busiest passenger station in the city from its first day, fifty trains a day in the 1920s, some three thousand people a day passing through in the Second World War, whistle-stop speeches by every president from Harding to Eisenhower, a major renovation in 1952, and Amtrak's last tenantship to November 1990.
The other roads' houses: The Wabash kept its depot on Grand Street — Grand Avenue in some accounts — between Calhoun and Harrison on the south side of its tracks; its final station there, a two-story building of 1913 built as part of the south-side elevation (the second floor at track level, in place of Baker Street's subway stairs), stood until it was torn down in the 1980s. The Nickel Plate's passenger depot stood on Superior Street between Calhoun and Clinton; the elevation of 1953–55 replaced it with a new elevated station opened in October 1955, and the old depot was razed — Cityscapes says soon after the elevation; the railway carmen's lodge history captions its photograph of the old depot as taken just before its razing in 1969, and the two accounts stand unreconciled. The Grand Rapids and Indiana's station was the brick building on Main Street across from Lindenwood Cemetery, later a monument shop. The Michigan Central — the New York Central's name on the old Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw line — used the depot off Wells Street at Cass. A city that arrived by train arrived at one of five or six different front doors, each with its own railroad's name over it; the 1946 proposal to unite them all in a single Union Station on the Baker Street site, with a plaza across Brackenridge Street, was promoted and never built.
Sources: ACGSI Railroad History of Fort Wayne — the 1851 first depot at Lafayette and Columbia, the Quest Club station list (the elevated Nickel Plate station, the Wells-and-Cass Michigan Central depot, the Wabash station on Grand Avenue, the Grand Rapids and Indiana station on Main Street), and the Baker Street page — the 1860 station removed for the 1911–13 elevation, the last Amtrak stop 11 November 1990; NRHP record for the Pennsylvania Station — the 23 March 1914 opening and ten thousand visitors, fifty trains a day in the 1920s, three thousand people a day in the Second World War, the presidential whistle-stops, the 1952 renovation, the Wabash station of 1913 and its two-story answer to the elevation; Michael Hawfield, "Old train stations sadly reflect Fort Wayne's past," News-Sentinel — nearly one hundred trains from seven railroads a day in 1914 and the unbuilt 1946 Union Station plan; TCU Lodge 6760 history — the Wabash depot on Grand Street torn down in the 1980s and the old Nickel Plate depot photographed before its razing in 1969, carried against Cityscapes' "torn down soon after" in the text.