Fort Wayne, Indiana · 21st century
2010s
49 dated events in 2010s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
21st century 49 dated mentions
2010s
- 2010A congressman's resignation
At record size: Representative Mark Souder resigned his House seat on 21 May 2010 over an affair with a member of his staff — the district's service scandal of the modern era, stated here at the size the public record gives it.
- 2010The largest of all: Lilly Endowment's 35 million builds a pharmacy college in Fort Wayne
In December 2010 Lilly Endowment Inc. granted 35 million dollars to Manchester University to establish a college of pharmacy — and the college was sited in Fort Wayne, on the city's northeast side, where Manchester built an 82,000-square-foot facility at 10627 Diebold Road and seated its inaugural pharmacy class in the fall of 2012.
- 2010The institutional table: school lunch at city scale
Fort Wayne Community Schools stated in 2010 that its Nutrition Services served more than 4.5 million meals a year, with 68 percent of students participating in the free and reduced-price program — 17,856 students on free lunch and 3,235 on reduced in the prior year.
- 2010The downtown return: Courtyard 2010, Hampton 2019, the Bradley 2021
The return began with Harrison Square, the development built around Parkview Field (opened 2009): at the corner of West Jefferson and South Harrison, White Lodging opened the Courtyard by Marriott in 2010…
- 2010The world's largest high-heel race
The race: Guinness World Records' own record page reads: "The largest high heel race was achieved by 967 participants at an event organised by Women's Bureau, Inc. (USA) at Headwaters Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, on 11 September 2010."
- 2010The network today · a million counted uses
The City has run infrared trail counters since 2010 — fourteen locations in the system's earlier years — and publishes the tallies with Fort Wayne Trails and NIRCC.
- 2010–2024The district named: a state cultural district, 2021
The name: The district the Fine Arts Foundation imagined in 1961 acquired its modern name in 2010, when Arts United established a formal name and brand, Arts Campus Fort Wayne, for the downtown concentration it convened: seven venues and 17 presenting and resident arts and cultural organisations on the Arts United…
- 2011The Champagne Club
The city's one documented club: In 2011 a private membership club named the Champagne Club opened in Fort Wayne — the opening date given in its business listings, and consistent with the statement, made in open council session eight years later, that it had then been open eight years.
- 2012The modern ledger: what the federal count says
In 2012 the Fort Wayne metropolitan area exported $1.4 billion in merchandise, as the Commerce Department's Indiana figures of the period record.
- 2012Pharmacogenomics: Manchester's Fort Wayne first
The nation's first degree in a new science: Manchester University opened its Fort Wayne campus in 2012 with a Doctor of Pharmacy program — northern Indiana's pharmacy school, seeded by a $35 million Lilly Endowment grant whose gift record is the Donations record's — and graduated its first class in May 2016.
- 2012The hospital gifts: a doctor's million, and what does not count
The landmark is the Mirro Family Foundation's 1 million dollar lead gift, announced in July 2012, for the research and education center Parkview built at its new regional medical center — the Parkview Mirro Center for Research and Innovation, named for Dr. Michael Mirro, the Fort Wayne cardiologist, and his wife Jeanne.
- 2012The laureate who came: Aung San Suu Kyi at the Coliseum
On the morning of Tuesday, 25 September 2012, she spoke in Burmese, with English translation on the arena screens, at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum; the Associated Press put the crowd at about 5,100, most of them Burmese, many of them seeing her for the first time since the 1988 crackdown in their homeland.
- 2012The five-hundred-dollar theatre
In 2012 Rick Kinney bought the vacant theatre at a tax sale for five hundred dollars.
- 2012The new neighbors: coyote, bobcat, and the watched city
Fort Wayne's documented city record runs through its newspapers and its police: in April 2012 the News-Sentinel published a photograph of two coyotes roaming southwest Fort Wayne, in the Fall Creek addition off Bass Road near the University of Saint Francis…
- 2012–todayManchester University Fort Wayne
Course: The college became Manchester University on July 1, 2012, and the first pharmacy class enrolled that August at 10627 Diebold Rd; the inaugural class graduated in May 2016.
- 2013The modern tail · the federal record
On February 14, 2013, Christopher Seals, 24, of Fort Wayne, robbed the PNC Bank in Fort Wayne with a dangerous weapon.
- 2013–2026More Animals of Record: A Gibbon, Two Lions, Hellbenders, and Two Tigers in a Pandemic
The gibbon: On 16 April 2013 a rare Javan gibbon was born at the zoo.
- 2014–2016The Australian Rebuild, 2014–2016
The phases: Phase one opened in 2014: a new entryway beside the train station, expanded restaurant seating and restrooms, and the station renamed the Z.O.&O. Railroad — the name the zoo's train carries today.
- 2014–todayOld National Bank in Fort Wayne
Old National Bancorp of Evansville entered Fort Wayne by acquiring Tower Bank (Tower Financial Corporation) in April 2014, and made the Lincoln Bank Tower at 116 East Berry Street its Fort Wayne banking-market headquarters — returning the 1930 tower to a bank's head office use.
- 2015The clerk's office video
Thirty-two years, one tape: Sandy Kennedy was the longest-serving city clerk in Fort Wayne's record — thirty-two years, 1983 to 2015.
- 2015The downtown arena that a study stopped
The recommendation: Mayor Tom Henry's Downtown Arena Study Committee, chaired by Sweetwater founder Chuck Surack, began meeting in June 2015 and reported on 21 March 2016: unanimously, the city should pursue a downtown arena of 5,000 to 6,000 seats on the block west of the Grand Wayne Center, across from Parkview Field.
- 2015ITT's radios — SINCGARS and the tactical-communications works
The lineage of the works is the lineage of the company: ITT's defense business was spun off as Exelis in October 2011, and Harris Corporation acquired Exelis for $4.75 billion in May 2015, the transaction that carried both the Fort Wayne radio works and the weather-instrument works of the next entry into Harris, and in 2019 into L3Harris.
- 2015The factory that almost fell: Electric Works
Demolition was the discussed option: When General Electric closed its Broadway campus in 2015 — a complex that had employed some 20,000 people at its height — the end, at first, looked like the standard one.
- 2015Let's Comedy: open mics, a festival, and comedy outside the club
Let's Comedy was formed in March 2015 by Ryan Ehle, Jared Busch, Haley Johnson, and Alex Price, who had noticed the gap plainly: Snickerz was still standing but booking fewer shows, and no one under twenty-one could attend there — there was no open mic circuit where local comics could work.
- 2015–2022Electric Works · the near-death, and the opening
The General Electric campus on Broadway — 39 acres, eighteen buildings, 1.2 million square feet, grown from the Fort Wayne Electric works of 1883, the ground where some 40 percent of the city's workforce had drawn pay at the wartime peak — wound down with GE's exit…
- 2015–2026The Last Decade: 2015–2026
2014–2015 — GE closes the Broadway campus. General Electric's last operations at the Fort Wayne works that had employed generations end in 2014, and the complex is permanently closed in 2015, leaving 39 acres and 18 buildings empty southwest of downtown (Electric Works project history, 2023).
- 2015–todayThe return to Fort Wayne
In January 2015 the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma announced it would open a Cultural Resources Extension Office in Fort Wayne — the city its own language names Peehkahkionki — to serve the tribal citizens of the lower Great Lakes and to work, on the ground, in the ancestral homeland.
- 2015–todayThe research city now: the Mirro Center
The center: The modern layer of this record is institutional, and its anchor is Parkview Health's Mirro Center for Research and Innovation, which opened in April 2015 on the Parkview Regional Medical Center campus: a $20 million, 82,000-square-foot building that folded in a Parkview Research Center then already twenty-five years old.
- 2016Lewis Street · Mohamedtaha Omar, Adam Mekki and Muhannad Tairab
On the afternoon of 24 February 2016, a young man named Aboubakar Souleimane stopped by a vacant house at 808 East Lewis Street — a house the neighborhood knew as a hangout for the young people of Fort Wayne's East African community — and found three bodies inside.
- 2016Three Rivers Distilling Company: the distillery returns
Two airmen and a still: Fort Wayne's making record resumes on March 28, 2016, when Three Rivers Distilling Company began operations at 224 East Wallace Street, just south of downtown, in a 7,100-square-foot brick building that had first been occupied by the Holsum Bakery from the 1940s into the 1970s.
- 2016The scene today: festivals and free nights
A festival of its own: In September 2016 Fort Wayne acquired the thing its music scene had never had: a destination festival.
- 2016Three Rivers Music Theatre
Founding: Three Rivers Music Theatre was founded in 2016 by Andy Planck, a Fort Wayne native (Northrop High School, then Ball State's musical theatre program) who had worked in New York and on national tours, come home in 2009, and spent years building the plan with the Small Business Development Center.
- 2016–2017The proprietary colleges that closed
What the record shows: The state's defunct-institutions list records a cluster of Fort Wayne closures in the for-profit shakeout of the 2010s: American National University's Fort Wayne campus (6131 N. Clinton St), closed June 3, 2016…
- 2016–2026The newest links, and the loop still to close
On Saturday, 16 April 2016, more than a hundred residents turned out for the ribbon cutting of the first trail connection from Waynedale to the Rivergreenway: new sidewalk along Lower Huntington Road, widening over the bridge across the St. Marys River, meeting a new eight-foot-wide trail ramp down to the St. Marys Pathway.
- 2017The pay-to-play ordinance: two vetoes overridden, one injunction
The council passed the ordinance in 2017 and amended it in 2018 — both times over Mayor Tom Henry's veto. The suit: In April 2019 Kyle Witwer, the owner of Witwer Construction, and Kimberly Witwer sued the city, alleging the ordinance violated free speech and equal protection.
- 2017Electric Works: the deal the city killed and then revived
The city bought the campus from GE in 2017 for $5.5 million; the development agreement with RTM Ventures was extended five times; in April 2020 fifty prominent citizens wrote against a fifth extension.
- 2017The catheter era matures: TAVR and the accredited heart-failure program
In November 2017 the hospital announced it was first in the region to perform the TAVR procedure without general anesthesia.
- 2017The Fort Wayne Comedy Club: Michael Moses's room in New Haven
Michael Moses, who had begun his own stand-up career in Fort Wayne in 2005 — a colleague signed him up for an open mic at Snickerz — spent years on the road, then opened the Fort Wayne Comedy Club in 2017 inside 469 Sports and Spirits at 1324 Minnich Road in New Haven, saying plainly that he opened it because Snickerz…
- 2017Fernando Tatis Jr.: one summer at Parkview Field
Fernando Tatis Jr. was an 18-year-old shortstop from San Pedro de Macoris, in the Dominican Republic, in the San Diego Padres' organisation, when Fort Wayne's TinCaps of the Midwest League gave him his first full professional season in 2017.
- 2018The missing · two open files
Kevin N. Nguyen (FWPD case #2018-12) went out for the night in downtown Fort Wayne and did not come home.
- 2018The Cold Cases That Were Solved
The city's most famous cold case — the 1988 murder of April Tinsley, closed in 2018 when forensic genetic genealogy named her killer — is told in this history's high-profile file and stands here in a single line, as the proof of the principle that the rest of this entry documents: in Allen County, cold cases close.
- 2018Timothy L. Johnson Academy Middle School
It files its own audits, separately from the elementary's, beginning with 2018-19; it holds its own federal district record, an independent charter district at 4625 Werling Drive with a grade span of six to eight and a staff count of thirty-seven in the 2024-25 directory data; and its authorizer reviews it on its own each year.
- 2018The Don Wood Foundation: the manufacturer-endowed newcomer
Origin and purpose: Don Wood, founder of 80/20 Inc. — the Fort Wayne maker of modular aluminum framing systems — established his foundation in 2018, originally as the 80/20 Foundation Trust; Input Fort Wayne's profile dates its beginnings to 2017.
- 2018–2020The first podcast wave: the city talks to itself
Input Fort Wayne's profile of its host, published 3 October 2018, describes Sonya, a first-generation Mexican American living on the city's south side, who "hosts a podcast called Fort 806 that focuses on the stories of Fort Wayne locals".
- 2018–todayJamia Arabia Noor Ul-Huda — Fort Wayne Myanmar Islamic Educational Academy
Founded: September 2018, by Burmese refugee and immigrant families — the first school opened for Burmese Muslims in the Fort Wayne area, in a city that became one of the largest Burmese refugee communities in the United States.
- 2019The $5.2 million claimed by a trust
One ticket matched all six numbers in the drawing of October 16, 2019, for a $5.2 million jackpot.
- 2019The record since, in full
Silence, again: After August 2019 the Champagne Club returns to the condition in which it had spent its first eight years: present in business listings, absent from the news.
- 2019The world's largest guitar pedalboard, assembled at the Clyde
On 9 July 2019, at Sweetwater's Clyde Theatre in Fort Wayne, the guitarist Rob Scallon and Sweetwater assembled and played the largest guitar effects pedalboard ever recorded by Guinness World Records: 319 pedals…
- 2019–todayInternational Leadership School
Abdulwahab Abashaar of Indianapolis and Fort Wayne Muslim community leaders decided in 2018 to found it as the city's Muslim population grew, and in May 2019 the school petitioned the Indiana State Board of Education for freeway accreditation, planning to open for 2019–20 at 4508 Parnell Ave with more than 50 students…