Fort Wayne, Indiana · 21st century
2000s
55 dated events in 2000s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
21st century 55 dated mentions
2000s
- 2000The modern composition: the censuses of 2000, 2010 and 2020
The three most recent censuses describe a different city from the one the German-era counts describe: In 2000 the census counted Fort Wayne as 73.09 percent white alone (non-Hispanic), 17.20 percent Black alone, 5.78 percent Hispanic or Latino of any race, 1.53 percent Asian alone and 1.81 percent of two or more races.
- 2000Households and income, in dated snapshots
The population divided into households, and what the households earned — three snapshots, each dated, none of them interchangeable: At the 2000 census the city's 205,727 people formed 83,333 households, an average of 2.41 persons per household…
- 2000The present field: towers, records, and Project Gateway
Traffic set a record in 2000, lost it after the September 2001 attacks and the Indianapolis fare wars, then grew for ten consecutive years to a new record in 2019…
- 2000BAE Systems and Raytheon · the present primes
Controls, radios, and the aftermarket: BAE Systems' Fort Wayne presence dates, by the company's own account, to the 1980s — the GE aircraft-controls plant of the entry above, which came to BAE through Lockheed Martin in 2000.
- 2000The African/African-American Historical Society Museum
The African/African-American Historical Society Museum opened its doors on 1 February 2000, dedicated to the community by Chief Anthony Ogunsusi, whose ceremonial dress uniforms from the inauguration remain on display.
- 2000–2008The Richard years, and the south side's wound
Mayor Graham Richard (2000–2007) governed the stabilized city Helmke left: the agenda was quality-of-place and the long attempt to pull investment back downtown and to the south side.
- 2000–2023The other side of the ledger: the bust, and what it took
A winners list without its denominator is advertising: the dot-com era ended in the crash of 2000–2002, which erased the great mass of the period's celebrated companies, and no honest Fort Wayne account can print the wins as if the losses happened to other people.
- 2001The rest of the documented roll
In November 2001 he won $250,000 on a Polar Express scratch-off. In 2006 he won $25,000 in a holiday raffle game.
- 2001The Lutheran sister hospitals: Dupont, the Orthopedic Hospital, Rehabilitation, and Children's
Dupont Hospital, at 2520 East Dupont Road on the city's north side, opened in April 2001 with 131 beds, as a joint venture between the network and more than 260 local physicians; it was promoted at its opening — and the claim is carried as the network's own…
- 2001Pathway Community Church and the megachurch era
The founding: Pathway Community Church, the largest congregation of the suburban era, began when four families started praying together in 2001 about planting a church.
- 2001Closing: the famous wineries that are not Fort Wayne's
The same discipline applies to the rest of the regional circuit that visitor guides bundle with Fort Wayne: Byler Lane Winery at Auburn, in DeKalb County; Satek Winery at Fremont, in Steuben County — established 2001 and for years, as the local wine writers noted, the only winery in all of northeast Indiana…
- 2001Jefferson Pointe: the lifestyle center
Developed by RED Development on a 56-acre wedge between Apple Glen Boulevard, West Jefferson Boulevard, and Illinois Road — farmland at the I-69 edge when the century turned — its first phase opened in August 2001 and its second a year later.
- 2001Three groups become one · Fort Wayne Trails, 2011
The second, Aboite New Trails , was created in December 2001 in the township suburbs southwest of the city; its co-founders Lynn Reecer and Stephanie Schultz built it after the death of a close family friend and cyclist in 2001, and over the following decade the organization raised $13 million and built over twenty…
- 2001The mileage, as stated · a dated ledger of the network's size
2001: about 18 miles of trails and greenways in the area (Fort Wayne Trails' own retrospective). 2006: just over 34 miles of trails in Allen County, in the Northeastern Indiana Regional Coordinating Council's first inventory of the county's trails and sidewalks.
- 2001The Aboite Trails · the southwest builds its own
The Aboite Trails are the network's suburban half: a web of paved paths along the roads, parks and hospital grounds of Aboite Township, southwest Fort Wayne, built by the citizens' group Aboite New Trails (founded December 2001…
- 2001–2007The 84-million-dollar bond and the new Main
The vote: In 2001 Allen County taxpayers approved a bond of 84,000,000 dollars to expand and completely renovate the Main Library and to renovate or build eleven branches.
- 2001–2012Trai Essex: a state title at Harding, two Super Bowls in Pittsburgh
The Harding double: As a basketball senior Essex averaged 19.6 points and 12 rebounds a game and led Harding to the 2001 Class 2A state championship, finishing fifth in school history with 1,135 career points…
- 2001–2025Aboite builds its own: a death on Arcola Road and sixteen years of phases
Aboite New Trails, Inc. was created in December 2001.
- 2002Mustard Seed Furniture Bank
Founding: The Mustard Seed Furniture Bank was founded in 2002 by a group of Fort Wayne business friends and professionals — the first furniture bank in Indiana.
- 2002–2013Bernard Pollard: South Side's Bonecrusher, and the third ring
The making: As a South Side senior in the fall of 2002, Pollard was an all-state defensive back with numbers that read like a misprint: 13 forced fumbles in 12 games, 112 total tackles, and two interceptions, with work at receiver and on the school's sprint relay besides.
- 2002–2022Stacy DeGrandchamp · the backyard fight and the seventeen-year silence
Stacy Maria DeGrandchamp was seventeen, a student at Wayne High School, when she was stabbed during a fight in the backyard of a Fort Wayne home on 15 August 2002, at a party at her ex-boyfriend's house.
- 2002–2026Indiana Tech: a coach's name on the track, and the Zollner million
The university's older landmark gift came from a Fort Wayne fortune of an earlier era: in 2002 the Fred Zollner Foundation gave 1 million dollars toward the Zollner Engineering Center, carrying onto the campus the name of the Zollner Piston founder whose Pistons had made Fort Wayne a basketball town two generations before.
- 2004Chloe Chambers: raised here, racing the world
Fort Wayne's driver on the Formula ladder: The most successful racing driver Fort Wayne has produced in the modern record was born in Guangdong, China, on June 14, 2004, and raised in Fort Wayne — the Haas Formula 1 team's announcement calls her "from Fort Wayne, Indiana," and the Associated Press calls her a Fort Wayne native.
- 2004Forest Park Elementary School
The district's directory for 1948 to 1949 lists Forest Park School at 2004 Alabama Avenue, the address it still holds, and tells families how to reach it: "State Boulevard Trolley Coach to Alabama Avenue."
- 2004Coolah, the last Tasmanian devil outside Australia
When Australia banned the export of the endangered species, the zoo's remaining devil became a population of one planet-wide significance: Coolah, seven and a half years old, who died on 18 May 2004 of complications of inoperable cancer — at his death, the last Tasmanian devil living anywhere outside Australia.
- 2004Five wildebeests on the streets
On 19 October 2004, five wildebeests broke through a gate and jumped a fence and roamed the streets of a north-central Fort Wayne neighborhood for hours.
- 2004–2020Art as policy: murals, bike racks, and Art for All
In 2004 the Mastodons on Parade put temporary painted mastodon sculptures downtown, a success the university's next project cited as its precedent.
- 2004–2026The Escapes, at the Size the Record Gives Them
2004: Five months after Coolah's death, the zoo made national news of a different kind. On 19 October 2004, five wildebeests broke through a gate and jumped a fence and roamed the streets of a north-central Fort Wayne neighborhood for hours.
- 2005The Burmese table: Little Burma feeds itself, then the city
The newest table is a neighborhood: The community itself is the Communities section's; its food record begins in print in July 2005, when the Journal Gazette's account of the growing refugee settlement named the groceries that fed it: Little Burma, selling Oriental groceries and food products on South Lafayette Street…
- 2005The marsh rebuilt: Eagle Marsh and the carp line
The Little River Wetlands Project established the preserve in 2005 on farmed wetland in the Little River valley, on the St. Lawrence continental divide itself, and has planted over 45,000 trees, shrubs, and native plants across it; the Project protects more than 1,300 acres in the watershed in all.
- 2005The Towpath · canal, then interurban, then trail
It was built in phases through the 2000s: in November 2005 Mayor Graham Richard announced the DNR had awarded the City a $150,000 federal grant toward a Towpath portion, in the same season the city planned another mile of the trail; in November 2006 INDOT and the City together awarded $1.5 million to Aboite New Trails…
- 2005–todayThree groups become one, and the Rangers who walk it
The rest is volunteers, and the volunteer corps has a name and a founding date: the Greenway Rangers, begun in 2005, six years before the merger that is usually treated as the system's organizational birthday.
- 2006Girl Scouts of Northern Indiana-Michiana
On 26 August 2006 the Girl Scouts of the USA adopted a national realignment from 312 councils to 109, and the Fort Wayne council was merged into a new body: Girl Scouts of Northern Indiana-Michiana, formed from the Indiana Lakeland, Limberlost and parts of the Singing Sands and Tribal Trails councils.
- 2006–2009The board · 2006–2009
Alexia Ray Vidales (case #2006-9) was killed on February 5, 2006, in the 4400 block of Oliver Street. Timothy C. Zimmerman (case #2007-11) was killed on April 13, 2007, in the 400 block of Greenlawn Avenue.
- 2006–2026Larry Lee: one alumnus, five gifts, four institutions
The gifts: In 2006 Lee gave 5 million dollars to IPFW — the largest individual gift in that university's record at the time — funding the indoor track in the Student Services Complex and athletics scholarships.
- 2006–todayTowles Intermediate School
Founded: Towles opened in the fall of 2006 at 420 East Paulding Road as a first through eighth grade Montessori school, the first public school in Indiana to offer Montessori across that span.
- 2006–todayPoka-Bache: the eighty-mile idea
It is a State Visionary Trail, initially proposed in 2006 on the coalition's own account, drawn to connect Pokagon State Park near Angola, in Steuben County, with Ouabache State Park near Bluffton, in Wells County, Ouabache pronounced Wabash, passing through DeKalb and Allen counties between them.
- 2007The reckoning: marker, regret, and the names restored
The state says it, a century later: Indiana's formal acknowledgment of its eugenics program came in 2007, the centennial of the law — not later, and it is dated here exactly.
- 2007From AWS to WindSwell: the disability foundation
Origin: When the board of Anthony Wayne Services — the disability-services organization founded in 1960 as the Allen County Council for Crippled Children and Adults, whose service story the Charities section tells in full…
- 2007The Chapman gifts: eight million dollars for the scholars of Purdue Fort Wayne
The gift: Howard and Betsy Chapman established the Chapman Scholars Program at the Fort Wayne campus in 2007, a full-cost scholarship endowment for high-achieving students; Howard Chapman had earlier endowed the Chapman Distinguished Professor of English with a gift of 1 million dollars, recorded in 2001.
- 2007A Pulitzer for a Fort Wayne reporter: Charlie Savage
Charlie Savage, a Fort Wayne native writing for the Boston Globe, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his 2006 series on presidential signing statements — the Globe's disclosure of how the Bush administration had used the statements to claim the power to set aside parts of laws Congress had passed.
- 2007–2009Fire, Then the African Journey, 2007–2009
On 2 November 2007, artificial rocks made of Styrofoam caught fire in the new African lion exhibit under construction, the centerpiece of the expansion.
- 2007–2023The Mad Ants years
Professional basketball's second Fort Wayne act: the Mad Ants — named for “Mad” Anthony Wayne — began play in the NBA Development League in 2007 at the Coliseum.
- 2008The library's ten million: the Auer endowment and the Rolland Lincoln gift
In August 2008 the ACPL Foundation received a 10 million dollar endowment from the Edward D. and Ione Auer Foundation, payable in yearly installments of 1 million dollars, directed to the library's Genealogy Center, then newly housed in the rebuilt Main Library and already the largest public genealogy collection in the country.
- 2008The Coliseum corridor's full-service house: Holiday Inn at IPFW, 2008
The corridor's full-service turn came on November 14, 2008, when the Holiday Inn at IPFW and the Coliseum held its grand opening at 4111 Paul Shaffer Drive, across from the Coliseum on the university campus: 151 rooms, ninety jobs, owned and managed by Focus Hospitality Services under an InterContinental Hotels Group license.
- 2008–2009The Lincoln Collection comes to the library
The gift: The museum's closure was announced in March 2008, and it closed to the public on 30 June 2008. In December 2008 the Lincoln Financial Foundation donated the collection to the people of Indiana — Governor Mitch Daniels made the announcement — and ownership of the collection rests with the State of Indiana.
- 2008–2022The Karpeles years: a manuscript museum in two churches
It opened in late 2008 in Piqua Hall, the domed 1917 First Church of God at 3039 Piqua Avenue, where rotating exhibits of historical maps shared the building with documents that included an original draft of the Bill of Rights, a 1503 copy of the Magna Carta, and a Thanksgiving proclamation signed by George Washington.
- 2008–2026Fares and the funding fights
The fare: The fare was five cents under the streetcars in 1913, a dollar under Citilink at the start of 2008, and $1.25 with a $3 day pass by 2012 — reduced fare sixty cents, monthly pass $45.
- 2008–2026Trine and Ivy Tech: the campuses that arrived with their donors
Ivy Tech: Ivy Tech's Fort Wayne campus holds the older landmark: in 2008 the Steel Dynamics Foundation gave 1.2 million dollars — then the largest corporate gift of the campus's capital campaign…
- 2008–todaySweetwater: the store that became a studio
Sweetwater, the Fort Wayne music retailer, launched its video effort in December 2008 with a part-time videographer and a part-time producer, years before most retailers understood the platform.
- 2009Parkview Field
The bet paid its first dividend on 16 April 2009, when Parkview Field opened downtown before a sellout crowd of 8,208: the Fort Wayne club — renamed the TinCaps , for the tin pot of Johnny Appleseed legend — shut out the Dayton Dragons 7–0.
- 2009Parkview Field opens
The ballpark was the centrepiece of the roughly $120 million Harrison Square project — the park itself about $31 million, with 8,100 seats.
- 2009Parkview Field opens · the ballpark that turned downtown
Parkview Field opened on 16 April 2009 before a sellout crowd put at 8,208 in most accounts and 8,206 in others.
- 2009–2014The Winter Street post · VFW Post 8147
In a 2014 decision, the Indiana Court of Appeals described "The Veterans of Foreign Wars Selmer Kinrick Post 8147" as a Fort Wayne post that "operates a club, at which the post periodically hosts social gatherings open to VFW members and non-members," and recounted a social event at the club on 17 October 2009 that…
- 2009–todayThree pathways from the zero marker
The Maumee Pathway runs east 8.75 miles along the north side of the Maumee to the City of New Haven's Moser Park, the most remote reach of the three, passing behind the city's treatment ponds; in 2009 the city built a spur from it to Coliseum Boulevard for emergency access and another entry point.