The river as amenity: festivals, trails, and the facing of the water

1969 — TODAY

The last turn is back toward the banks: The city that had walled its rivers off behind dikes announced its change of heart, characteristically, with a party: the Three Rivers Festival, founded in 1969 and named outright for the confluence, drew an estimated 100,000 people to its first edition and a parade and sixty events at the Columbia Street Landing. The festival's own later history — its growth into the state's second-largest summer festival and its collapse into bankruptcy in February 2025 — belongs to the Fort Wayne Today section. The naming is what belongs here: by 1969 the rivers had become the city's brand before they became its amenity.

The physical turn took another half-century and a flood-control project to make the ground: Headwaters Park, in the confluence bottom, is treated with the parks. The riverfront proper began when Mayor Tom Henry made it a city priority in 2011 and the Riverfront Fort Wayne initiative followed; its first phase, Promenade Park — 4.5 acres on the north bank of the St. Marys at Superior and Harrison — opened with a three-day celebration August 9–11, 2019, drawing some 35,000 people on its opening weekend to a park designed to be stood in, boated from, and flooded safely, and Phase IIA followed on June 27, 2023. The Rivergreenway's twenty-five miles of path run the banks of all three rivers, the water-trail movement has put paddlers on the St. Joseph and St. Marys as a matter of course, and the city's own flag had been drawing the confluence as a white Y since 1916. The rivers' present condition, to close this record where it stands at this writing: the drinking water is award-winning and the tunnel is switched on; the phosphorus argument runs on, unresolved, in court and in the watershed; the Hosey Dam stands under a removal study; and the Little River's marsh, drained by 1890, is being bought back acre by acre. The stage, after two centuries of being worked, walled, and drunk from, is being looked at again — which is where every other section of this history came in.

Sources:

1. Three Rivers Festival records (Indiana Business Council legacy project file; festival history) — the 1969 founding, the first year's estimated 100,000 attendance and sixty events, and the festival's naming for the confluence.
2. City of Fort Wayne Parks & Recreation, Promenade Park facility record — the August 9–11, 2019 grand opening, the 35,000 opening-weekend visitors, and the June 27, 2023 opening of Riverfront Phase IIA.
3. Urban Land Institute, Developing Urban Resilience: Promenade Park — the 2011 mayoral priority, the Riverfront Fort Wayne initiative, the 4.5-acre site, and the 25-mile Rivergreenway.
4. the Parks & City Planning and Fort Wayne Today section, this record — Headwaters Park's flood ground, and the festival's 2025 end, in full.