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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.
Does the building still exist?
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.
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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G Dewey Powell posted
GE Complex - out the window of a Cessna.
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)
