Wells Street Independent: Grassroots Retail in Fort Wayne, Indiana
Michelle Niemann

“This street serves as a cultural experience for people because it’s all they’ve got . . . a tattoo parlor, a used bookstore, an army surplus, a couple dive bars, and a greasy spoon are authentic color to people who are surrounded by strip malls.”
- John Commorato, Jr.

Wells Street, which is home to approximately sixty independent businesses in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was named for William Wells, warrior, interpreter, and reputed spy, also known as Apekonit, or Wild Carrot, who was born the son of pioneers in Kentucky and died the son-in-law and close advisor of Miami chief Little Turtle. Wells was killed in 1812 on the way from Fort Dearborn in Chicago to Fort Wayne, on the trail that would become Wells Street.

Today there is not one fast-food restaurant or national chain store along the road’s two-mile stretch north from downtown to a suburban bypass, and this makes Wells Street one of the few commercial areas in Fort Wayne still dominated by locally owned shops and restaurants. Neither flashy nor quaint, these small establishments are a welcome change both from the screaming signage of the chain stores and restaurants that line Coliseum Boulevard, the bypass that bounds Wells Street on the north, and from the empty downtown to the south—an area that, in the past forty years, has been nearly cleared of retail. Suburbanization has left what John Commorato, Jr., an employee of Wells Street-anchor Hyde Brothers Booksellers, calls “a ghost town of commerce.”

In 1949, Look magazine published a profile article that named Fort Wayne “America’s Happiest Town.” These days, the superlatives you are most likely to hear about Fort Wayne are negative ones. In 2005, for example, Men’s Health magazine called Fort Wayne America’s stupidest city, ranking it 101—dead last—in its list of American cities in order of intelligence, and USA Today followed up with a profile article titled “The search for signs of intelligent life in Fort Wayne.” (John Commorato, by the way, who is also a poet, filmmaker, and the force behind many hard-hitting local art events, was photographed standing in front of the shelves at Hyde Brothers for USA Today to illustrate a letter to the editor disputing the ranking.)

While Fort Wayne’s shift from happiest to stupidest may result, in part, from a change in perception—after all, the city’s very average-ness was counted as “an essential reason” for its happiness in the Look profile—it also reflects very real changes in the city. In 1949, Martin Grumpert, author of the Look article, reported that Fort Wayne’s “per-family income is the second highest in the country.” In 2000, on the other hand, the median family income in Fort Wayne was about five thousand dollars less than the national median, according to census figures. Grumpert praised the “outstanding tradition of mechanical craftsmanship” in Fort Wayne, mentioning the presence of both small plants that manufactured high-precision tools and of corporations like General Electric and International Harvester in town. Tax abatements have helped to keep General Electric in town, but International Harvester left in 1983, and, according to a profile put together by the city of Fort Wayne and the Community Research Institute, manufacturing jobs continue to drop, with Fort Wayne’s six-county statistical area losing 11,670 jobs in production between 1990 and 2000.

Grumpert paints a picture of a homogenous, conservative, industrial town with an active community life and a thriving retail sector. Fort Wayne is the ideal American town, for him, in part because “there is no boss in Fort Wayne and no bad civic memories” and there are no “tragic crises” in the city’s past. Those assertions are only evidence of Grumpert’s myopia, however, for while Fort Wayne does not have a history of bloody labor strife, the place is no stranger to tragedy, crisis, and warfare. A typically American amnesia still reigns in Fort Wayne, where there is no general consciousness of, in nineteenth century terms, the Indian wars, Indian trade, and Indian “removal” on which the town was founded.

If you search for “Fort Wayne” in a history reference database, most of the entries that pop up are concerned with the late eighteenth century, and for good reason—at that time, before it acquired the name Fort Wayne, this settlement at the junction of three rivers played a significant role in the history of the continent. The city sits on a portage between the St. Lawrence River watershed and the Mississippi River watershed. Before railroads and canals were built, the canoe route that went overland for a scant nine miles at this spot was the best way from Quebec and Montreal to the Mississippi corridor and, finally, New Orleans. Kekionga, the Miami village that stood here, became a center of the French fur trade and was a site of conflict among the French, the British, and various Native American groups throughout the tumultous eighteenth century.

Now, however, the city’s very name, which memorializes the fort built by General “Mad” Anthony Wayne after he defeated the Miami at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, eclipses the city’s past as a key portage and trading village. While one can live in a Fort Wayne suburb with no reminders of the area’s history—and, surrounded by national chain retail, with little sense of location at all—the Bloomingdale neighborhood, which is bounded by Wells Street on the east, does show traces of the past.
Make no mistake, though—this is not a neighborhood that will soon appear in the travel section of The New York Times, or of Midwest Living, for that matter. As Joel Hyde, co-owner of Hyde Brothers Booksellers, said, “This is not the French quarter—there’s not interesting little place after interesting place.” John Commorato described the area as hovering “pre-gentrification,” to which Sam Hyde, Joel’s brother and store co-owner, added, “It’s been hovering a long time.”

According to Julia Meek, a Hyde Brothers employee, visual artist, and host of a local public radio show, the neighborhood “is one of the best preserved—not because it got all the way ruined and then got fancified or gentrified—it just has always been this little working neighborhood . . . I always admired the integrity of this neighborhood because it just kept on going.” Though property values are not shooting up, on Wells Street local, independent businesses do survive near the core of a mid-sized, post-industrial Midwestern city whose residential areas, commercial centers, and retail dollars have all spun out to the city’s suburban ring.

The Hyde brothers bought their building when the neighborhood was, as Sam said, “at its nadir,” and put three years of “sweat equity” into it before opening their doors in 1992. When they first looked at the building, it was for sale for about thirty-five thousand, but they later bought it for about half that at auction. “I was surprised it didn’t go higher,” said Sam. “Of course, with the ceiling dripping as the auction went on . . .”
Though the Hyde brothers have never replaced the carpet that was there, soaking wet, when they bought the place, their well-stocked used bookstore has attracted a sizeable following of regular customers, mostly through word of mouth and the attention of the local press. When asked what he enjoys most about working at the bookstore, John Commorato said, “Honestly, I really admire the Hyde brothers as business owners and bosses. They’ve created something of a cultural center from the ground up.”

This begins with their employees. As Julia explains, the store “truly is a cooperative, we all get paid the same, and as nice as the market can bear—that’s the brothers, that’s all of us.” John calls the pay “a living wage for this city’s economy,” and not surprisingly, the store’s employees are quite loyal. Tasha Bushnell, another of the four Hyde Brothers employees, said that she and John Commorato started at the same time about six years ago, and “they’re still the newbies” at the store.
Hyde Brothers Booksellers also has a wide spectrum of regular customers. Some of them come often enough that, according to John, they “prefer dealing with one employee over another. Tasha might love somebody that I can’t stand, and vice-versa . . . my typical customer seems to be early to mid-20s, male, beat-oriented in terms of reading choices, indie-rocker . . . and I tend to know them through other avenues as well, art projects, music projects, that kind of thing . . . Sam Hyde has people that love dealing with him, salt of the earth customers, he’ll look at anybody’s books, he doesn’t get flustered by stupid questions, he’s real everyman. Joel does well with certain sellers of scarcer materials, rare materials. He likes to scour the auctions. Julia Meek has fans both of her as a worker in the shop and of her different projects.”
Because Hyde Brothers is what Sam calls a “recycling business,” their customers are also their suppliers. While I was interviewing Sam, a regular showed up with fifteen boxes of books for him to look through and select from; Hyde Brothers offers cash for books, or double the cash amount in credit. Some regulars come to buy books, some to trade books, some to sell books for cash, and others for the social connections that John mentioned: “We’re kind of like a bar for people who don’t drink . . . for a lot of academics, intellectuals, both formal intellectuals, teachers, writers, journalists, and armchair intellectuals, this is as close to an urban book environment as they’re going to get.”

Besides serving as an informal meeting place for Fort Wayne’s literary and artistic crowd, the store also makes a particular effort to benefit the wider community. Julia Meek cleans through the shelves for duplicate books that she makes sure the store donates to Fort Wayne’s Literacy Alliance. Even in its retail capacity, the store helps to improve literacy in Fort Wayne. According to Julia, “we have a couple of regular customers who don’t read well themselves, but they’re sort of sent in from their family or their community to get books for other people that are almost always remedial, and Sam and I always are the ones that deal with them so that they can have the right books to take back.”

Having the right books is, of course, the key in this business. The Hyde brothers began acquiring stock before they bought their building; Julia remembers hauling boxes of books into the rental properties that they used for storage. Before they opened the store, Joel did field research, combining stops at bookstores with travel for his job. According to Sam, Joel “measured a couple of stores—what percentage of their stock was science—did some fairly careful analysis that way. That’s basically where we started—with his percentages.” Religion and mysteries are the areas that have grown the most in response to demand. “As our local crowd came in, we found out that the pastors in town were some of our most ardent supporters. They don’t have bad habits, they just read—and then they retire, or depart for the next world, and leave huge collections of books, and that’s probably the area of the store that expanded the most,” said Sam.

The Hyde brothers began by building a strong regular customer base, and though the online used book market has taken a toll on their business, they still rely on their regulars and on in-store sales. As Sam said, “there really isn’t much of an advantage to doing anything but creating a close relationship with your customers so you can call them and occassionally say, hey, I think you might like this book.” But they also list their rarest books online with abebooks.com. According to Julia, who posts the book descriptions, between five and ten percent of their stock is listed on the internet at any given time.

Internet sales make up twenty-five percent of the store’s income, but, according to Sam, the overall effect that internet selling has on their business is still negative: “The prices we can ask for our best stock have gone up, but the things we are selling on the middle and low end have been brutally savaged by the availability of amateurs . . . A lot of people who five years ago would never think of selling things on the internet, are doing it. That means the books are starting to dry up.” Joel worries that “now when people buy used books for the first time, they probably buy them on the internet. They don’t have to come into a used book store—and when they don’t have to come in, they may never.”

New customers are still coming into Hyde Brothers, however—and into the other stores on Wells, though the shape of the street has changed in the past thirteen years. A nearby drugstore closed soon after Hyde Brothers opened. A Harley-Davidson repair shop across the street relocated to the northern suburbs and was replaced by a panaderia. Freeman Jewelers, just up the street, also moved to a new suburban location north of the city; its former building is still sitting empty. The hardware store closed, and a discount grocery store now occupies its space. Of the change on the street, Joel says, “I would call it decline, because the operations on this street that made the most money were clearly the Harley shop and the jewelry store, and they’re all gone. Not that they employed any more people or probably paid them more than we do, but they did a bigger gross . . . And I don’t think it’s good for a neighborhood to lose a hardware store, a drugstore—those are anchors for residential people—they don’t just bring business into the neighborhood but they keep people living in the neighborhood.”

The street still has more commercial activity than any downtown corner, however. As Joel put it, “Up until the 1970s, the downtown was a thoroughly alive area, and then things started to go to hell, ever since then.” Indeed, the residential shift that began with post-war suburban expansion turned downtown from a bustling retail center anchored by Wolf and Dessauer, a locally owned department store, into a crowd of bleak office buildings and parking lots. There are a few store-fronts scattered among the blank walls—a bar here, a cafe there, a cigar store, a gift shop—as well as a few national chains, most of them fast-food restaurants, but nothing that could be termed a “commercial center.”

Since 2000, Mayor Graham Richards has initiated a series of development projects aimed at revitalizing downtown Fort Wayne. These include the recently completed expansion of the convention center and the expansion of the main branch of the Allen County Public Library that is currently underway. Building a stadium downtown is a key element in the latest plan, “BlueprintPlus,” prepared for the city by ACP Visioning & Planning in the fall of 2005, and the proposal is under serious consideration.

The Hyde brothers are skeptical about how much city planning efforts like this will do for Fort Wayne. As Joel put it, “Somehow they’re going to have to attract a group of small businesses to move back into the downtown area, and I don’t know if they can do that just by building monuments.” In his opinion, city planners “don’t really have a stake. They’re not sitting here trying to make a go of it—they’re looking at it from the outside saying, well, what can we do—what you can do would be get more people like us to do something with you, but you aren’t asking really.”

My conversations with people involved in the downtown revitalization plans seem to confirm Joel’s impression. Sharon Feasel, director of Fort Wayne’s Redevelopment Department, was enthusiatic about what she called “the Wells Street Corridor” and other commercial areas near downtown: “They are thriving retail districts that we want to support. They have their own unique character . . . we want to support them, not compete with them.” When I asked her how the city’s efforts will support these neighborhoods, however, she said that the redevelopment of downtown will make it a “model” for other areas of the city—which seems a little backwards, since Wells Street and neighborhoods like it have retail, while downtown does not.

Dan Carmody, the new president of the Downtown Improvement District, plans to approach successful businesses in the metro area and ask them to consider a downtown location. Carmody says he already has a few in mind, but doesn’t want to name them yet. Plucking the best businesses from other areas of Fort Wayne might result in a more attractive downtown, but it hardly seems the most cooperative strategy for revitalization.

While city planners puzzle over the chicken-and-egg problem of enticing people to once again live and shop downtown, the Hyde brothers will continue to sell books, earn a living, and run a store that serves as a cultural center for local communities near the core of this post-industrial Midwestern city.

Bibliography

ACP-Visioning & Planning Ltd. “BlueprintPlus: Downtown Fort Wayne Charrette Final Report and Action Plan.” Prepared for the City of Fort Wayne. October 14, 2005. PDF document accessible from
http://www.cityoffortwayne.org/ Date accessed: January 21, 2006.

Ankenbruck, John. Twentieth Century History of Fort Wayne. United States Bicentennial Edition. Fort Wayne, IN: Twentieth Century Historical Fort Wayne, Inc., 1975.

Arata, Anna. “ ‘Dumbest city’ label overlooks smart facts about Fort Wayne.” Letter to the editor. USA Today. January 26, 2005.

Community Partnerships, Inc., The City of Fort Wayne, and The Community Research Institute. “Allen County Profile.” http://www.allencountyprofile.org/ Date accessed: January 21, 2006.

“Fort Wayne city, Indiana – Fact Sheet – Census 2000 Demographic Profile Highlights.” American FactFinder. U.S. Census Bureau. http://factfinder.census.gov/ Date accessed: January 21, 2006.

Goins, Liesa. “Is Your City Stupid?” Men’s Health, Vol. 20, Issue 1, January/February 2005, p. 78.

Grumpert, Martin. “America’s Happiest Town: Fort Wayne.” Look. Vol. 13, No. 18. August 30, 1949, p. 23 forward.

Poinsatte, Charles R. Fort Wayne during the Canal Era, 1828-1855: A Study of a Western Community in the Middle Period of American History. Indiana Historical Bureau, 1969.

“Wells, William.” Tucker, Spencer C., gen. ed. Encyclopedia of American Military History, vol. 3. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2003. American History Online. www.fofweb.com.