After I dropped Vincent off at the Ikasucon anime convention, I noticed there was a Fort Wayne tourism office across the street from the Hilton, where I was parked. It turns out that in the summer – when the city has more visitors – it’s open on Saturdays. I noticed outside the tourism office a booklet that Stephanie and I had perused in electronic form on the tourism bureau’s Web site. I went and talked with Pat and, among other things, she gave me a map with half a dozen walking tours around the downtown. I picked one that sent me south and east of the Hilton/convention center area, partly through what had historically been the old African-American downtown (like those in Columbus and St. Paul – mowed down by freeways – or like Frenchtown in Tallahassee). I first went by an old theater (pictured above), several old historically white churches (below), the old Central High School (below), and the site of the old railroad yards.
Next was the African-African American Historical Museum. Pat had told me about this and the woman who had founded and still curated it (reminded me of a woman I worked with in Manatee County, who had showed my history students the Family Heritage museum on the Manatee Community College campus). (That my students went to see that museum and then the Sarasota history center and treated the women who spoke to them at both sites with respect, both at the time and afterwards when reminiscing about it with me in class, persuaded me that these students were very special – and they would have liked these women too.) I figured I might try the museum Sunday, when our dog had a hair cutting appointment.
But there I was walking by it (building and flowers out front pictured above) and so I walked in and asked about bringing Frisco (who I had in my hands) in and – for only the second time ever (the first time being last week with the curator’s niece and her dog) they let a dog (and a person) in. Patty, the docent, showed me not only the artifacts of the slave trade (reminded me of the Henrietta Moore exhibit back in Louisville) and of Africa (pictured) and of local African-American sports and music figures (unlike the apparently white-dominated History Center) but also the local history room that lightning had struck two weeks earlier (damaging the room but few artifacts) (pictured).
Towards the end Frisco and I sat down and talked with Amanda, the curator (pictured below), in her early 80s, who reminisced about the black downtown, having parts of the day at the swimming pool (where the staff drained all the water out and then refilled the pool with water before whites swam in there), the good manufacturing jobs that African-Americans like her parents who came up from Alabama got in Fort Wayne, and the 1942 flood that flooded many houses in her west side neighborhood near the steel plant. The building we were in had housed the Phyllis Wheatley settlement house and then the Fort Wayne Urban League, where Ms. Amanda had been employed. She had also lived across the street.
By the time I got out of there, it was well past 3, and I was supposed to pick up Stephanie in Indianapolis at 5. I should have headed straight for my car, but I couldn’t stop myself. I jogged/walked quickly through the rest of the tour – past the site of an old African Methodist Episcopal church (pictured below) and an old house that an Underground Railroad activist had lived in and used to hide runaway slaves in the 1850s. I was more than half an hour late to pick Stephanie up.
We never did get back to any of these other official tours or to any other museums. (Tragically, I learned from Pat, the one museum on my list – the Lincoln Museum, which housed the world’s largest privately held collection of Lincoln artifacts and papers – had just closed for good two weeks earlier. Apparently, even with the Lincoln birthday anniversary – attendance was down and the Lincoln insurance company- which had subsidized the museum – has moved its HQ to Connecticut. Still I want to do lots of Lincoln tourism, and I couldn’t believe our bad luck in getting to Fort Wayne two weeks too late to see the Lincoln Museum, which I had heard about at least 10 years earlier. Perhaps the success of the Lincoln presidential library and museum, which Stephanie and I saw three summers ago in Springfield, Illinois, had eclipsed this museum. Apparently, Ford’s Theater, in D.C., which both Stephanie and I have visited, is in the running to purchase the Lincoln Museum holdings.)
But an informal host (whose Methodist church was late in my walking tour) did drive us by and show us several downtown sites. And – in the process of hunting for dinner – Stephanie, Vincent, Frisco, and I did walk north and northeast through much of the rest of the downtown. We walked the next to last night of the Three Rivers festival, past an outdoor restaurant that we decided was too crowded for Frisco, past a government building that looked old and grand enough to be a state capitol, and back to the pizza place where we ate outside, thanks to two nice staff people who had actually already put the tables up.
Just as we had decided about a Northern city that surprised us two summers ago (except that its presidential museum – Ford’s – was still open) (Grand Rapids), Fort Wayne was fun to visit, at least during the summer.
-- Perry
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