The Landing: Fort Wayne's Oldest Street

Columbia Street is where Fort Wayne began. The road started as an unplanned track leading west from the American fort toward the portage. The first trading houses went up along it. The first hotel opened here in eighteen twenty three. The first post office in eighteen twenty. The first newspaper in eighteen thirty three. Every institution that a frontier town needed to call itself a real place appeared first on this street.

When the canal arrived in the eighteen thirties, Columbia Street became the beating commercial heart of the city. The western end, near the canal basins where boats docked to load and unload, became known simply as the Landing. Warehouses, mills, and merchants' offices crowded the waterfront. Canal boat crews lived and drank and fought here. For a brief, roaring decade, this half-mile of street was the center of commerce in northeastern Indiana.

Then the railroads came, and then the city kept growing southward and eastward, and Columbia Street became a backwater. By the mid-twentieth century, much of the old canal district had been demolished or left to deteriorate. The Landing itself was saved largely by accident: a historic district designation in nineteen sixty five protected one block of the original commercial buildings from the urban renewal programs that swept away everything around them.

In nineteen ninety four, what remained was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The neighborhood has been through multiple rounds of redevelopment since. The brick storefronts that survived are among the oldest commercial buildings in northern Indiana.

When you walk this block, you are walking the ground where Fort Wayne decided what it was going to become, before it was sure.