Fort Wayne, Indiana was home to a massive 1.2 million square foot GE Electric Works that chugged along from the dawning days of the 20th Century until it closed up shop in 2015.
Fort Wayne visionaries have been busy rebirthing the old manufacturing plant into a multi-use facility that includes corporate offices with Do it Best as an anchor, a trendy Union Street Market, co-work spaces and residential housing encompassing more than 720,000 square-feet of the old plant.
To discover the rest of the story come along and join Electric Work’s Katy Silliman, Director of Experience and Kevan Biggs of Biggs Development.
Biggs is leading the re-use charge, creating inviting co-work, and incubator start-up spaces, artist lofts, corporate offices and so much more. Biggs also takes us on an illuminating walking tour of the re-birthed GE Electric Works.
The roots of the Electric Works date from 1883 with the founding of the Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Light Company that morphed into a major General Electric motor manufacturing plant in the dawning days of the 20th Century. During the height of WWII, General Electric employed 30 percent of Fort Wayne’s entire workforce.
In 2015, GE closed the campus and for five years, 39 acres with eighteen historic buildings.
More than 1.2 million square feet of space in the heart of Fort Wayne sat vacant until 2017 when RTM Ventures acquired the property and commenced a trend-setting mixed-use development plan that was rechristened the Electric Works.
You are invited to subscribe to the seven-time Lowell Thomas Award-winning travel podcast, Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer, featured on the NPR Podcast Directory, Apple Podcast, and more than twenty other podcast hosting sites including iHeartRadio and Spotify
