Wells Street - St. Marys River to State Street
Fort Wayne, Indiana

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All Photos Copyright © 2010 by Robert E Pence

Looking south across the old Wells Street Bridge, open to pedestrians and bicyclists, toward downtown. The bridge is a Whipple through
truss, built by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company, of Canton, Ohio, in 1884. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
A new bridge for vehicle traffic was built just a little bit west of the old one.

Saint Muddy Marys River. The Saint Marys River flows from Grand Lake Saint Marys at Celina, Ohio, to Fort Wayne, where it joins with the
Saint Joseph River to form the Maumee River. The Maumee flows northeastward through Defiance, Ohio, to enter Lake Erie at Toledo.

The part of Wells Street that once led to the bridge is now a stub that gives access to a few businesses. I've seen old photos of this building
showing it when it still had it's second-story bay windows.

The Cass Street Depot houses Fort Wayne Outfitters & Bike Depot, selling bikes and renting and selling kayaks. The station once served
Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and later New York Central trains between Fort Wayne and Jackson, Michigan.

The remains of a former wooden passenger car that had last served as a camp car for railroad right-of-way maintenance crews. It burned,
apparently set afire by vandals.

I took photos of the car in 1973 when it was stored on a siding in Ossian, Indiana, about 15 miles south of Fort Wayne.

A long-time Wells Street business.

Imagine MASTer Academy is a charter school on the grounds of a former Catholic orphanage, Saint Vincent's Villa. The Fort Wayne YWCA
was located here for several years, but was unable to sustain the costs to maintain the facility and sold it.

I've been past here at lunchtime, and they appear to be doing a very good
business. I haven't tried the ice cream, yet, but I've heard they have unique
flavors that are very good.

One of two Mexican Bakeries that I know of in Fort Wayne. Mexican pastries are tempting for their sheer beauty.

Used books, two levels of a double storefront packed floor-to-ceiling and wall-
to-wall and well-organized. There are books of all sorts, on many subjects.
It's a friendly store.

For many years this building housed Wells Street Hardware, a place that seemed right out of the fifties or sixties. They had everything a
hardware store could be expected to have, and repaired broken windows repaired screens. New owners closed up the street entrance
leaving only a parking-lot entrance, and narrowed the inventory to emphasize paint and painting supplies. Their changes made the store look
boarded up from the street; maybe that had something to do with their short tenure. I liked the original facade more than the cladding, but if
the store serves a neighborhood purpose, good for them. I wish them success.

Charles "Smoky" Montgomery was born in Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1922. He was a folk singer who never made it big on the professional
scene, but he was a founding member of the Country Music Association. He came to Fort Wayne with a job in pharmaceuticals, and opened
his record store in 1960. He was beloved in the community and always treated people well. His store was known as a source for hard-to-find
45s. Smoky died in 2006.

If you enjoy sitting back and browsing photo collections on the internet, this may
not be your kind of place.

A short digression down some nearby streets:

Back to Wells Street:

State and Wells, the northernmost limit of our walking excursion for today. State Street is a
major east-west thouroughfare on the north side of what was Fort Wayne before sprawl.

Here, we'll turn around and head back toward the river.

Huffman Street - the cut down the center of the street is where the streetcar tracks used to run prior to 1947. It flares out toward where I was
standing, because the tracks turned both north and south where they connected with the Wells Street line, behind me.

Jack & Johnny's has been closed for a long time. They used to do a booming
business at lunchtime. I remember them as being famous locally for their
cheeseburgers, probably one of the all-time most gratifying gastronomical
experiences of my life. So good it was hard to not eat more than one per
month, but I feared more than that might send me to an early grave.

Commerce Drive once led to an interurban freight terminal; five interurban lines once radiated from Fort Wayne, and they used city streetcar
tracks to access the downtown terminal and various freight customers that they served, usually at night after the streetcars shut down or ran
less-frequent service. The interurbans also interchanged with the various steam railroads to deliver carload freight within the city, like coal for
industrial boilers, grain for breweries, and chemicals for the city waterworks.

Charis House, a women's and children's shelter, is building a new, larger facility to replace an older, smaller one on the edge of the Central
Business District.

Work is being done here. There's a new sidewalk, and yesterday I saw scaffolding.

Never a dull moment. I was prowling the former Fourth Street railroad yard not far away, when I heard sirens. As I approached I could see smoke, but by the time I got here there was nothing to see
except firefighters mostly stowing their gear.

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