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| Add caption posted PJ McGillicutty And 69 yrs later it’s all gone. Just like that. [Note the date is 1949.] |
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| Great Memories and History of Fort Wayne, Indiana posted General Electric. Year? Eric L Lucas That feels right, John Veltum, that is the Wood works building, not building 17, the rail is not elevated, it was just before the Wood works merged with Edison electric and formed General Electric. John Veltum 1914 |
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| Tim Hermesdorf posted |
Jason Patton posted three images with the comment:
Fort Wayne Electric Co. (Electric Works)CA.1894 VS FUTUREFounded by visionary Ranald T. MacDonaldEarliest structures date back to 1893"UNPARALLELED, in a city of wonderful manufacturing successes, has been the remarkable rise and progress of the Fort Wayne Electric Co., an establishment which was in its infancy ten years ago, and which today stands in the very first rank of our great industries. A history of this enterprise would read like a romance. The story of its early struggle - of its tenacious fight for its existence, the lack of confidence of some of its stockholders, of the hopeful and enduring contest of its manager, of its slow but steady growth, of obstacles met and surmounted, of its final triumphant and brilliant success, gaining victory over every rival in the great field of electrical science."Source:- 1000 TO 1900 Millennium milestones in Fort Wayne (ACPL digital archives)Image Credits:- 1000 TO 1900 Millennium milestones in Fort Wayne (ACPL digital archives)- RTM Ventures
Sandra Roby: There is a book titled General Electric at Fort Wayne a 110 year history. I own a copy and I am pretty sure the library has a copy you can check out. Besides my mom working there we have many other relatives that did also.
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| 3 [There is a lot more resolution if you save it to disk and use a photo viewer.] |
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| Michael Arnold posted Old GE office building on Broadway before they tore it down. LueAnn Carroll: Was torn down in 2014 or 2015, after spending tons of money to put a small building up next to it in 2010 for the boiler, so the boilers from the buildings across Broadway would not have to heat it any more, in 2011 June the building was shut down for good. Also new carpet was laid on a couple floors in 2010 in May and June. |
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| Silva Lining Photography posted Nothing like finding a pretty cool picture from two years ago! I must have accidentally skipped over this one. 5/25/2018 |
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| Sandra Roby posted From my father in laws papers. |
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| Great Memories and History of Fort Wayne, Indiana posted Pennsy Train. Famed crack train “Broadway Limited” caught by News Sentinel photographer, John Stearns as it gathered speed leaving the city of Fort Wayne on its early morning run to Chicago. General Electric Plant on left. Date: 5/27/1958. |
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| Mike Snow posted January 31st 2018 marked the (50th year) passing of the Pennsylvania Railroad and once a proud company that employed 100's of Fort Wayne citizens and a railroad with routes all about the midwest including lines that that radiated out of Fort Wayne Indiana to the North, East, South and West of the Fort with shops located near downtown Indiana. The Pennsylvania Railroad contributed much to the growth and the future of Fort Wayne and many Families that are in Fort Wayne today came here cause of the Pennsy ! |
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| Great Memories and History of Fort Wayne, Indiana posted Lois Johnston Foote My first job out of high school was as a temp there, & my dad worked across Broadway for many years. We were able to drive together the summer I worked there. I remember being embarrassed as I walked the "gauntlet" of factory workers going to the park to eat lunch. Dick Tortuga This is the General Electric facility on the west side of Broadway... building 19 to the left. Arley Shock Gause Agriculture Works on Broadway, the present main location of General Electric. In 1888 the Thomas-Houston Electric Company purchased a controlling interest in the Jenny Electric Company and the firm was renamed the Fort Wayne Electric Works. An earlier merger of Fort Wayne Electric had some nostalgic connotations. A seventeen-year-old by the name of Thomas Edison was transferred to Fort Wayne in the summer of 1864 where he worked as a telegraph operator for the railroad. Edison reportedly stayed in a room above one of the Columbia Street business houses for several months before moving on to Indianapolis and then Louisville. In 1888 the entire Fort Wayne Electric Works were destroyed by fire. The rebuilt plant was back in operation in July 1889.....https://thewaynedalenews.com/.../a-fort-wayne-icon-the.../ |
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| Michael Jacyno commented on another posting of the above photo Simply amazing. Took this 3 or so weeks ago. Love seeing old photos of the campus.Millie Rhea Moody Is that now Science Central?Dennis DeBruler No. I found this building west of Broadway near the NS/Pennsy tracks: https://www.google.com/.../data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1so...Dennis DeBruler Science Central made use of the Cities Utilities Power Plant: http://towns-and-nature.blogspot.com/.../fort-wayne-in... |
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| posted from Kenneth Childers 265 Old GE plant at Anthony & Wayne Trace [The Fort Wayne Market - a Parade exclusive 1951] |
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| posted from Kenneth Childers 270 Old water tower corner Anthony and Wayne Trace, looking southwest [photo by Childers 2017-09-03] 1 |
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| posted from Kenneth Childers 290 Industrial building corner Anthony and Wayne Trace, looking west [photo by Childers 2017-09-03] |
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| posted from Kenneth Childers 300 Corner Anthony & Wayne Trace, looking northwest, Fort Wayne [Childers 2017-09-03] |
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| Great Memories and History of Fort Wayne, Indiana posted The Fort Wayne lamp works of the Edison Lamp Works of General Electric was opened in September 1906. It operated as a satellite of the company's principal site at Harisson, NJ. Its initial location was on Montgomery Street (now East Douglas Avenue), and was founded in the Kaztenberg Bakery. During the winter of 1907 and 1908 a much larger factory was constructed on Holman Street (now East Brackenridge Street), this being notable as the first reinforced concrete structure in the city. The plant is of great historical significance, because shortly before Dr. William Coolidge completed his development of ductile tungsten wire, it was announced that Fort Wayne would be the factory to house the production of the new drawn tungsten lamps. In 1914 the plant was downsized due to the introduction of new lampmaking machinery, which reduced the necessary floorspace, and the top floor was leased out. Further imporvements in production mechanisation across the entire GE business meant that fewer factories were required, and on the 12th September 1924, the Fort Wayne facility was closed. Michael S Chandler Does the building still exist? Eric L Lucas I'm not sure if the article refers to the building on Broadway or elsewhere. There was a building on Broadway before building 17 and building 18 were built, it was torn down and 17 and 18 were built in its place. I don't know if the picture and article is the original building on Broadway or not. Nate Zweig Torn down in the 1970s or 80s. It was a landmark on Clinton, going south, just before the railroad underpass. It was a book warehouse for the FW Public Schools as far as I can remember. |
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| Photo from Kenneth Childers posting |
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| Photo from Kenneth Childers posting Kenneth also posted |
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| G Dewey Powell posted GE Complex - out the window of a Cessna. Becky Osbun Thanks for including one of the City's little gems, McCulloch Park. |
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| Great Memories and History of Fort Wayne, Indiana posted Photo from the Allen County Public Library looking the at the history of General Electric in Fort Wayne. |
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| Becky Osbun posted October 24, 1969. "THREE MILLIONTH MOTOR at G.E.'s Winter St. plant. Inspecting the motor with Wendel Haflich are from left: Charles W. Lockhart, Vice President of Sales for Buffalo Forge Co. (customer for whom the motor was completed), Joseph S. Lester, Schenectady, New York, Acting General Manager of SAC, and Robert H. Adams, Winter Street Plant Manager." - News-Sentinel, via ACPL Community Album (Hope someone can identify the G.E. employees pictured here.) [The plant used to border on Anthony Blvd. because I remember passing by it many times. We lived on Pontiac Street across from the Fruehauf Trailer office until my 3rd grade. But my memory is playing tricks with me. Looking at 1951 and 1962 aerials, there is a parking lot on the Anthony side of the property. The plant was south of the Pennsy tracks.Was the building so big that it looked close to Anthony? I knew it made electric motors.] |
Jeff Smith posted three images with the comment:
The General Electric Company (like several other prominent electrical houses in existence from the 1890s through the 1910s) had glass insulators specially made for them. These special order insulators were personally identified with the company’s initials. This insulator came from Fort Wayne and dates from probably 1900 to 1910 (or so).
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renovation
another renovation article (source) (Basketball court and Bowling Alley) It is wrong because GE proceeded the invention, in Fort Wayne, of magnet wire. But when it was developed, GE expanded to take advantage of it.
Wall Street Journal (source)
Neil Carpenter FORT WAYNE, Ind.—City developers are betting they can turn an abandoned complex, where General Electric Co. once employed almost 40% of the city’s workforce, into a development with loft apartments, an incubator office space for startups and a food hall.
The goal is to transform the city of 260,000, which has seen stagnant wages, a decline in domestic population and hasn’t fully been able to replace thousands of manufacturing jobs lost in the 1980s.
“We were among the Midwest communities that have been painted as part of the decaying Rust Belt for a long time,” said John Sampson, president of the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership, a business development group.
The project, budgeted for $440 million in a mix of public and private funds, will have part of its 39 acres complete and ready for leasing in 2020, but it will take almost a decade to completely overhaul the entire factory space that made motors and transformers for GE. “They are really swimming upstream here,” said Rob Paral, a demographer at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Fort Wayne, first settled in the 1790s as a military outpost where the St. Joseph and St. Mary’s rivers join to form the Maumee, boomed for much of the 20th century. By the 1980s, only a few hundred workers remained at the GE plant. GE eventually closed the plant in 2015.
As the factory’s impending abandonment was apparent, Eric Doden, then president of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, negotiated with GE to sell the site to a single developer, Baltimore-based Cross Street Partners, who are leading the project.
“What are your choices? To sit and look at this for 40 to 50 years as it crumbles?” said Mr. Doden, now chief executive of the Greater Fort Wayne Inc., the city’s chamber.
Developers behind similar projects in Durham and St. Louis say it can take decades for the benefits of such projects to take hold. Durham’s American Tobacco Campus, for example, opened in 2004, but has added amenities and facilities since, including a startup incubator, and only became a serious magnet for millennial talent in the past six years or so.
The project is one of the most ambitious efforts to convert industrial complexes into modern downtowns. In Durham, N.C., the American Tobacco Campus turned an old tobacco warehouse into a mixed-use district that has spurred the growth of a thriving startup scene. The Cortex district, made up of repurposed old factories and warehouses and also new construction, has done the same for St. Louis.
Durham and St. Louis planners say their efforts have been bolstered by a national trend of young people moving away from expensive coastal cities, like San Francisco and New York, to more affordable cities as well as multinational companies ditching suburban campuses for downtown locations, following a population shift.
Fort Wayne’s downtown has new loft buildings, condominiums, farm-to-table restaurants and coffee shops, and its downtown population has grown by 14% from 2000 to 2017, compared with 5% for Fort Wayne as a whole. Still, it is dominated by blighted residential areas, particularly around the GE site. The city’s domestic population has been in decline for years, bolstered only by new immigrants largely from Myanmar. “I didn’t step into downtown Durham for the first six years I lived here,” said Anil Chawla, founder of the startup ArchiveSocial. He has lived in Durham since 2004 and his startup was incubated at the American Underground space in the American Tobacco Campus. “But coming here and seeing how things have changed has been truly amazing,” he said.
Developers of the Fort Wayne project have taken exploratory trips to Durham. They are also borrowing from similar projects they have developed in other cities, including the Hoen Lithograph building, a similarly abandoned manufacturing building in Baltimore, and also the Cortex Innovation community in St. Louis.
“Our economic data and indicators are ahead of what Durham was 20 years ago, and the signs are encouraging,” said Mr. Sampson. “But it could still go either way.”
Today: An Abandoned GE Factory. Tomorrow: Hip Lofts (Wall Street Journal, 92 Comments that I can't see)
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| Developers asking for $65 million Another posting of another article on this subject |
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| Shawn Van Pelt posted General Electric sign |
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| Screenshot at -2:58 (source) Tim Tassler Know the facts about Electric Works http://www.journalgazette.net/.../judge-electric-works-on... |
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| Shawn Van Pelt posted The GE Broadway campus from the top of the Lincoln Tower a few years ago... Shawn Van Pelt posted GE Broadway Nancy Parker looks better than it actually does. Debbie Magsig Picture taken before the construction of City Flats Apts.! Fun to remember what was there before. |
I was unaware of a GE building on Edsall Avenue.
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| Becky Osbun posted General Electric Apparatus Service Shop, Edsall Avenue, Fort Wayne. - News-Sentinel, 6/11/1970 Thomas Faurote Northeast corner of Edsall & Chestnut Street, just one block north of New Haven Avenue and Adams School. |
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| Indiana Album posted [The consensus of the comments is that this is a GE building that is being built in the 1910s.] Jeff Smith shared |
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| Indiana Album commented on a post Photo |
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| Indiana Album commented on a post Photo |
Greg Michell posted two photos with the comment:
A couple of shots from the General Electric Campus. I found it interesting that there is a faded image showing "Fort Wayne Electric Works." I took this photo on 30 Sep 2018.. The GE Symbol Photo is one I took in 2004.
PBS Show (source)
In Sept 2020, I got hit with a Double Doomsday. Both Facebook and Google changed their software. I said "changed" instead of "updated" because the new software is not better. In fact, Google's Blogger software is far worse except for a search function that works. Specifically, it has three bugs concerning photos and their captions. So I'm no longer copying photos and interesting comments from Facebook. I'm just saving the link. I hope you can see posts in Private Groups.
A 1912 overview of the buildings (A comment noted that they had their own powerhouses for steam and electricity.)
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