The following program on PBS Fort Wayne is made possible in part by The Auer Foundation, The Ian and Mimi Roland Foundation, Waterfield Foundation, Headwaters Park Alliance.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

Where yesterday flowed a friendly river, today floods, unmindful of its banks, unheeding manmade obstacles.

The swollen river throws it's made against man and his works.

For generations Fort Wayne exhibited the uncanny trait of forgetfulness with regards to its dangerous flooding conditions.

Common sense says we've exasperated the problem.

Councilman Moses Don't worry, we don't have floods here.

Of all the states, none has been harder hit this week than Indiana.

And nowhere has the flooding been worse than in Fort Wayne.

It's far worse than people can imagine.

The cars are covered, houses are half full.

You see ice floes going in and out of the doorways, people trying to get safe, some of the things out in boats.

It's a terrible, terrible situation.

Without you being out here today, without you caring about your neighbors and willing to put your backbone and your muscle into getting this job done.

And I want you to know how much the city appreciates it.

And everybody here appreciates it.

Fort Wayne made quite an impression on me.

I want you to know that those young people, those volunteers out in that dyke passing those sandbags, if this wouldn't make any American confident of the future of our country, to see those young people volunteer.

They've been there since early morning and it was coming evening then.

I went away inspired, it was great.

The roots of Headwaters Park can be traced back to the early 1900s.

The notion of building a park had long been planned and denied at the confluence of the Saint Joseph St Mary's and Maumee Rivers in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

The ultimate idea of the park was to beautify the city, embraces rivers and lessen the destruction of floods that plagued the area for centuries.

Right here at the confluence and I'm facing North.

The Saint Joe River comes from the north.

The Saint Mary's comes in from the southwest and they combine right here to form the Maumee And what's very critical about the Maumee is on its own.

The Maumee River Basin watershed is the single largest contributor to the entire Great Lakes system.

The Maumee goes into Lake Erie, Lake Erie has more fish species than the other lakes combined.

More marine business than the other Great Lakes combined.

So the health of Lake Erie is very indicative of the health of the other Great Lakes.

Situated near this confluence was a thumb shaped area of wet, marshy, flood prone land.

Although this land was not well-suited for building structures, it became extremely valuable to trappers, traders, missionaries and explorers crossing the area.

Going back to the earliest periods of our written history, we know that the dominant Native American group in this region, the Miami, selected the area that would become Fort Wayne for their central fortress, Kekionga, because of the three rivers, the Saint Joseph, Saint Mary's and Maumee, and the priceless nine mile portage to the southwest, connecting the confluence with the Wabash River Watershed through the Little Wabash River down the Mississippi and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico.

This was one of the most valuable pieces of real estate from the 16 all the way until the late 1800s, as the shortest overland round between the Saint Lawrence Seaway and the Gulf of Mexico.

The Miami, in fact, garnered nearly $10,000 per day throughout the 1700s and early 1800s.

Leasing quarters and carriers for trappers, traders, missionaries and explorers wishing to cross the area of the portage during periods of heavy flood could shrink to nothing.

There was no overland travel required to cross it, but during periods of heavy drought, the portage could lengthen to as much as 25 miles.

I think that early settlers were mindful of low areas, were mindful of where it would flood the age of families being strong and tight.

I think they would share, oh, you know, back when whatever it flooded here.

And so you're going to build your house.

You don't want to do it here.

You want to stay back.

I think there was a lot of a lot of common sense then.

I think as the community began to grow, pressures came that we want to we want to use, you know, every area that we can.

Eventually, the value of developing flood prone land trumped practicality.

All across the country.

Native Americans established villages along rivers.

European colonists built homes along streams that provided water, power, waste disposal and commercial links.

Succeeding generations continued to settle along America's waterways, risking periodic floods for the opportunity and convenience that came with easy access to water.

The earliest known flood and the Three Rivers area happened in February of 1790, which caused significant damage to the small Indian village.

Since 1823, major flooding was tracked at an average of every five years between March and December.

During the years before, any significant flood protection was designed in Fort Wayne.

The average flood level was 14 feet.

As the city built up along the rivers in the early 1900s, engineers then designed dikes to protect riverside neighborhoods and businesses.

By the 1920s, floods became more frequent and flood levels increased to an average of nearly 20 feet.

The most devastating flood on record in Fort Wayne was the flood of 1913, where the Maumee River rose overnight from 7 to 26 feet.

15,000 people had to leave their homes and six people died.

This tragedy intensified the need to safeguard the city, which resulted in a number of flood control improvements, such as building a series of flood protection walls around several neighborhoods.

Floods do serve a purpose.

They replenish soils, recharge groundwater and maintain wetlands.

They become a problem only when space that streams needed for their own natural flood patterns are congested by manmade structures.

The years between 1829 and 1832 marked the beginning of Fort Wayne's transition from a small village to a bustling town, which became an important center of commerce and transportation.

The Wabash and Erie Canal came on the scene in 1832, bringing with it droves of immigrants.

The first leg of the canal was completed in 1843 and anchored at the south end of what is now Headwaters Park.

The progress of the 1850s and 60s rendered the canal obsolete, and it was filled to make way for a new railway connecting many cities in the Midwest.

This progress brought with it even more citizens and entrepreneurs eager to build new businesses.

Many of these eager entrepreneurs turned a blind eye to the fact that valuable real estate of the thumb area was mostly marshland.

Yet by the 1850s, grain and lumber mills, blacksmiths and brick and tile makers dotted the landscape of what is now the southern portion of Headwaters Park.

The decades of the latter 19th century Fort Wayne's population tripled in number.

During its peak, we were gaining over 1000 residents per month.

This explosion created thousands of coal burning homes and over 200 factories, choking the air with pollution and strangling its waterways with waste.

Although casual dumping had been a mainstay of the Fort Wayne experience for many generations in the latter half of the 19th century, the use of our rivers as the community landfills was dangerously narrowing its waterways.

We even have some accounts of whole structures being demolished and simply thrown into the rivers as waste.

Naturally, this population boom brought with it more homes and businesses, which created more household and commercial wastewater.

Wastewater that had no organized containment at the time.

This contaminated water not only increased the likelihood of floods, it was becoming a public health concern.

To address this problem, city engineers started by building ditches and then progressed to a more substantial solution, underground sewer systems, which became basic necessities for most American cities by the mid 1850s.

However, these new sewer systems were still a rarity in most towns until the 1860s or after.

Some didn't have them until much later.

The sewer lines did alleviate a number of flooding problems in Fort Wayne and ease some public health concerns.

But the streets surfaces posed another problem.

Mud and water runoff.

Wood planking was used to cover the muddy streets, but they tended to rot and come loose.

As an alternative, the use of bricks, wooden planks and gravel became more widespread in the 1880s.

Although these paving systems helped to clean up the streets somewhat.

They did little to lessen continuing drainage problems in places like the thumb.

Meanwhile, all of this overcrowding and pollution led to the belief that American cities were unhealthy environments.

At the turn of the century, a movement known as "City Beautiful" emerged as a remedy to these municipal problems.

As a result, the Fort Wayne Civic Improvement Association was born, and this nationwide "City Beautiful" movement was expressed locally through the efforts of Charles Mulford Robinson and nationally known architect George Kessler.

In 1893, Ebenezer Howard wrote a book called The Garden Cities of Tomorrow, which heralded this whole new idea of building beautiful cities for people to live.

The quality of life became a fundamental political tool, and off the back of the Garden City, tomorrow came The "City Beautiful" movement in the United States.

But what's interesting about this, it was the women's suffragette movement that actually ignited this whole consciousness about building great parks and great cities, because they were the ones focused on raising the children and the family and keeping it and keeping it alive as a great ideal.

The men were busy making money manufacturing and doing all their stuff, harrumphing or jumping around the gang.

But the women were the ones that started to invite people to get together to talk about the quality of life for the cities.

So advances in education, health care, social services and parks and gardens, the quality of the physical environment were all championed by the women's movement in the early part of the 20th century.

Charles Robinson came to Fort Wayne in 1909 and his plan for the beautification of Fort Wayne, published in that year, provided recommendations on nearly every aspect of "City Beautiful".

But he dedicated a large part of his report to the beautification of Fort Wayne's Parks and River Ways.

The Parks Department, which had been founded in 1905, found that its champion, David Foster, appropriately called the father of Fort Wayne's Parks system.

Foster led these early, crucial years and set, in course, a number of developments that we would see all the way to the present day.

And although we've seen many changes in the art of bringing nature into the city, our parks have remained the most vibrant and popular shared piece of our community's cultural consciousness.

George F Kessler arrived in Fort Wayne in 1911 under the auspices of the Parks Department.

He was charged with creating the first major comprehensive plan for the development of the urban environment in Fort Wayne.

Published in spring of 1912, his plan for the community's Park and Boulevard system stands as one of the most important documents in tracing our community's development from the frontier town of Fort Wayne's past to the community that we have today.

And this was before the profession of landscape architect had been defined.

So landscape architects at that time were actually doing city planning on the ground.

And George Kessler was brilliant at that.

He came to Fort Wayne and he saw that there were there was a confluence of Three Rivers, and he made that the centerpiece of his plan.

So George Kessler's plan is about the rivers and it's about the rivers and it's about the rivers.

When you look on a map, you'll see boulevards as well.

But the boulevards are are secondary to the rivers.

Aside from the Park and Boulevard system as a whole Kessler Only designed three specific sites in Fort Wayne: Foster Park, the Thieme Drive Overlook and the never realized Three Rivers Park.

This was arguably the most important component of his plan, as he recognized that the confluence was the strongest adhesive to bind the system back to the rivers and into a beautiful home.

The vision of Robinson and Kessler was contagious amongst many leaders and citizens in Fort Wayne.

However, the momentum of the "City Beautiful" movement was stalled by unforeseen circumstances after the only known joint presentation of Robinson and Kessler, during which point he praised the Parks Department for their very efficient application of his plans and yet scolded the city for failing to pass a $200,000 bond which would have provided for the purchase and beautification of all of the river ways within and beyond the city limits.

The Great Flood of 1913 struck.

This was the first of three external tragedies that severely hindered Parks Department in the early 20th century, the flood of 1913, World War One and the Great Depression.

Even though Kessler's designs were hindered, there were many champions of his plan.

One in particular was Robert B Hanna, who at the time was a consultant to the City Plan Commission.

In 1929, he published a vision for a great River Park.

Central to his vision was a downtown Central park located in the city's thumb, which sustained Kessler's Three Rivers Park theme.

The land needed for the Three Rivers Park was eventually purchased, but not exactly for the purpose of the park, delaying its progress yet again.

The circumstances of the time dictated a different priority within the city budget.

During the 1920s, a wave of new waterworks construction swept across the nation in response to the demand for cleaner water.

Subsequently, plans for a new water treatment plant in Fort Wayne were drawn and implemented in the late 1920s and eventually Roosevelt's New Deal initiative providing jobs and income for unemployed Americans, was gaining popularity.

City practical was of higher importance than "City Beautiful".

If the old name of Roosevelt makes the old heart proud, you take this message straight from the president and give a man a job.

Although the land needed for the construction of Three Rivers Park was acquired by the city in 1920, esthetics was trumped by utilitarian needs.

As the Great Depression called for, the construction of the water filtration plant that we have today.

The reason that the water filtration plant is so neat, it was actually designed to function in harmony with a future park developed around the confluence.

After the 13 flood, there were some serious efforts at trying to safeguard the community.

And then as the community began to burst at the seams through the thirties, Mayor Hosey just did phenomenal things.

The water treatment plant, the sewage treatment plant, the dam on the Maumee, in the dam on the Saint Joe.

I mean, all of those were tremendous public works projects and incorporated into both of those dams were power generating opportunities.

And also the idea of we may have an opportunity to get a little bit better handle on flooding.

There were four major floods from 1908 to 1943, mostly caused by a combination of snow, ice and unusually heavy rainfall.

Regardless of this flood pattern, many businesses continued to thrive in the thumb area through the early 1900s.

Allen County's first jail was built there in 1849.

The 1930s saw the rise of chanty towns and Hoovervilles all over the country.

The most prominent one in Fort Wayne was located in the thumb area where Headwaters Park would later find its home.

By 1930.

All existing buildings were demolished and League Park, Fort Wayne's prized baseball diamond, was destroyed by fire.

This area had such a diverse amount of activity.

The first circus came to town here in the 1850s.

This was a place for public hangings in the 1870s and 1880s.

It was the Chanty Town or the Hoovervilles, as they called it back during the Depression, when folks brought in shacks, built shacks, brought in wagons, whatever they could find, you know, to live in.

People built campfires down here.

They they had to survive as best they could around the river.

Where we're sitting now was the home of the National Guard Armory that was built around 1930 and was running until the early 1990s.

This was also the site of the last public execution in Fort Wayne.

The 1883 hanging of Sam McDonald, which was witnessed by 250 residents.

It did transform from the public hangings, the circus, the Chanty town to a major center of business and commerce for a young Fort Wayne, Indiana, of 100 years ago.

The economic activity of the 1940s and fifties led to the resurgence of the thumb with the widening of Clinton Street and elevation of the railroad.

More fill dirt had been brought in over the years, and soon the area was dotted with service stations, car dealers and retail businesses.

By 1960, nearly all 30 acres of the thumb was home to a business or parking lot.

Sometimes progress can create high costs.

However, with the addition of so much concrete and asphalt in this area, the problem of draining excess water from the St Mary's River was becoming even more challenging.

Devastating floods once again hit Fort Wayne from the 1950s through 1991.

Fort Wayne and Allen County were declared federal disaster areas in 1959, 1981 and 1982.

Damage to residential properties, businesses and inventory grew to millions of dollars.

Yet after each flood, the city was rebuilt, causing it to be dubbed the city that saved itself.

After the 1913 flood, attempts to dredge the rivers began and some floodwalls and dams were constructed.

These efforts were likely sufficient for that time, but more significant plans were necessary to address more serious flooding problems.

Plans that would not be carried out until the early 1980s.

Three major strategies were introduced and completed over the next two decades.

The Maumee River Widening Project, higher flood protection walls, and finally, Headwaters Park.

One of the challenges in the late at this time, 87-88, was that there were a lot of different plans on the table.

Some folks were pushing for something they called the Trier Ditch interceptor, basically cutting a ditch or expanding a ditch between some of the rivers to help handle the overflow.

When there was a heavy flood event, you know, so that was one idea.

I still remember we had a meeting of, I guess, the state Budget committee in Fort Wayne and the commissioner's office were talking about we need some state support for this.

And one of the state representatives said, you know, it was your own fault that you built your city so close to these rivers.

We don't.

We're not going to pay another penny to help you out.

And, you know, that's a guy that was speaker of the House.

So you had to listen to him.

But, you know, I pointed out that we started on the reverse because it was a U.S. Army fort protecting all the people in north eastern northern Indiana.

And, you know, the state definitely had some responsibility here.

And the catch with all of these plans is first of all, you need to get Army Corps of Engineers approval for them or they wouldn't let anything happen.

And then, of course, you once you got the approval, you had to figure out how you were going to pay, at least for the local share of all these projects.

The weather forecast for Fort Wayne was not good.

A big news story.

While all of these flood control efforts were being negotiated, an event of epic proportions took place that would amplify their importance to the community.

In March of 1982, Mayor Win Moses and his staff were preparing to deal with the perfect storm.

While the ground was still frozen, temperatures were unusually warm and several days of heavy rain was predicted.

It was obvious that Fort Wayne was in for another flood event.

We had a little bit of warning, but nobody ever thought it would get this bad.

No, not this bad.

But it is this bad.

More than $20 million in property damage and still rising.

An estimated 400 homes flooded.

9000 people evacuated, many of them to Red Cross shelters like this one.

You never anticipate a tragedy like it's always going to happen to the other guy.

You read about it in the newspaper.

It's never going to happen to you.

But when it hits you, man, there's something else to think about.

The flooding was not altogether unexpected.

It was the extent of it that caught Fort Wayne off guard.

What happened here was caused by a number of things, but primarily it was the record snowfall this winter that was followed by a sudden warming trend last week, which caused the three rivers, which meet right here in the middle of town, the three rivers to thaw very rapidly and all at once.

The impact was too much for riverbanks and some sections of town which flooded within hours.

The flood, the likes of which we haven't seen since 1913.

Although the record of the 1913 flood still holds, with the rivers rising to more than 26 feet.

The 1982 flood was recorded as the second worst in Fort Wayne, with rivers cresting at 25.9 feet.

It had become increasingly clear that development in the floodplain was unwise and something new had to be done.

After the flood of 82, it was imperative that we do something.

But even before that, in early 1980, we began to figure out how to handle this piece of land because we knew it was was flood prone.

We didn't realize it was going to be as underwater as it ended up.

But and it was also a terrible entrance to the downtown.

I mean, it just the the buildings were rundown and people didn't want to invest in those types of areas.

The businesses that were there were always mad at whoever was mayor because occasionally water would seep into their basements or their or come up to the edge of their buildings.

And there wasn't a way to stop that other than building a dike around the the entire river area.

And that wasn't very appealing esthetically.

So what do we do with that?

And we don't try to reinvent the wheel here.

We look around what other communities have done, and it just made a lot of sense to give that area, which sometimes is referred to as the thumb, give it back to the rivers, put something in there that can sustain high waters, not have a big financial hit to the community and turn it into an amenity for downtown.

And that was that was an original brainchild for Headwaters Park.

Our city experienced its first noticeable rebirth of George Kessler through the development of our ever popular Rivergreenway system.

At the center of the Greenway system was still the idea of developing the Central Park near the confluence and in the early development of Headwaters Park.

It's well known that architect Eric Kuhne referenced Kessler.

Our involvement in the park actually extends back through four administrations of mayors.

It it really began with Ivan Lebamoff who was absolutely passionately and almost tyrannical, devoted to the idea of the city being a great place to be.

We were looking out the window of the mayor's office, and he pointed down on here and said all that look at all that garbage out there.

I mean, automotive repair shops, car dealerships, you know, used parts, junk.

What can we do with that?

And I said, well, it's just cleared off and that's turned into a park.

So, I mean, the incredible thing is we stumbled on this amazing document written in 1909 by Charles Mulford Robinson for the Fort Wayne Civic Improvement Association, and it was all about bringing the "City Beautiful" movement to Fort Wayne.

Well, we showed this to Ivan and Ivan was just bouncing off the walls with joy.

So he says, okay, go design a park for me.

And so we did.

We just sat down and we banged out basically some rough ideas of the Rivergreenway coming into the center of downtown Fort Wayne.

The important thing about the initial design, it was based on the two plans that were published in 1909 and then 1912.

Charles Mulford Robinson's master plan for the park, which really wasn't on Headwaters Land, but around where the Three Rivers came together.

And then George Kessler picked it up three years later and added detail to it.

So in a sense, the city had already set aside a lot of the land in anticipation of this.

So our original design was for 280 acres extending from West Main to the confluence and from Superior Street up to Lawton Park.

Actually, it extended all the way up to the Fort Wayne Children's home.

With architectural plans drawn and ready to go, the next step was to develop and fund the project as a state park.

At that point, the Headwaters State Park Alliance was organized in 1984 to expedite the project.

It was clear early on that funding would require some creative thinking and a variety of funding sources.

When the legislative bodies set up the lottery, there were infinite needs.

At the time they set this up, they saw the lottery as a revenue source.

Infinite needs there were capital improvement needs.

There were needs to retirement funds for public employees, police, firefighters, teachers.

So when they set this up, they split where the profits went to and into different areas.

And the Build Indiana fund is one of those areas and it's a concrete let's see and touch and feel type of thing.

When you give money to a retirement fund or that type of thing, you don't really see something out there when you give money to the Build Indiana Fund.

There's normally something built.

Many local agencies have applied for money from the Build Indiana Fund.

Those who have received money in Allen County are Anthony Wayne Services, Maumee River Basin Commission, the Fort Wayne International Airport and Headwaters Park received $900,000.

Build Indiana, helped us quite a bit.

And I should point out that that $900,000, along with some additional money from the general fund that will be coming in, goes to land acquisition, that along with some county money that we've received.

Thanks to the county officials, to the Community Development BLOCK grant and to the bond issue that the mayor and the city council passed on our behalf.

All of that money is in a is in a major, major section.

$7 million is going to land acquisition and relocating businesses and tearing buildings down.

Without Build Indiana, we would have had a much more difficult time because that was part of the formula to try to get some money from the state because this is partly flood control and does help the state as far as flood control and economic development and tourism is concerned.

So it was important that they, you know, help us with this.

But had they not, it would have been more of a chunk, I think out of local dollars it would have been difficult for us.

Fundraising in those times, people were thinking more about jobs and the recession and how to get kids treated well and educated well, and to get them to put bricks and mortar into a Headwaters Park which they weren't real sold on.

It was tough economy.

It was horrible.

Our unemployment rate here got up to 14.7%.

It didn't get that high here in the most recent recession, you know, in Allen County.

So, yeah, it was a very, very to the public sector spent a lot of money recovering from floods, fighting them and recovering huge amounts of money that hit the city budget very hard for several years.

But we wanted to be sure that we had ways to do it when when it became possible, began to put together ideas.

Citizens came in, said, we need to work on it.

It was necessary not just for floods, but in order to make us a world class town.

Regardless of the circumstances, at the time, the alliance felt they had a solid plan for a state park and they were eager to rally support.

Oh, about once a month I end up going to speak to a neighborhood association or to some other group or or more often to a chamber of commerce to try to raise funds.

Eric Kuhne was was a big help in that, and he was quite a show person.

And so in we'd go and I'd give my pitch and, and then he'd lay it out and it just looked like it was going to be the the next Disney World with we're from Fort Wayne, practically.

He said.

This is a project that the city people, city leaders have been talking about doing for years and never done it.

And he said he had a vision that had us building out the park.

Finally, after all these years of inaction and for some reason, immediately I said this is a really good idea.

The team worked with the editor of the News Sentinel to promote and build excitement for this new park design.

Initially, the name was the City Lights State Park in honor of the City Light and Power Works.

But just before promotions were released, it was suggested that the name be changed.

When says, I don't know what you're going to call it, but you got to change the name.

And so I said, I got it.

He says, Why?

I said, We're just going to call the Headwaters State Park is the headwaters of the Maumee River.

And it locates located where the Saint Mary's, the Saint Joe River, come together.

And that's what we call it.

And he goes, Perfect.

When the state decided not to build a park in northeast Indiana, the State Park Alliance folded in 1986.

In 1987, the Headwaters Park Commission was formed to oversee development of a city park.

Headwaters Park.

Mayor Win Moses appointed the first board members before leaving office, and when Mayor Paul Helmke took office, he appointed several others.

When I first heard about Headwaters, it was always Headwaters State Park with the idea Indianapolis was able to get a White River State park.

We should be able to get a Headwaters State park here.

Catch is the state, never put that money in.

We had all sorts of great plans drawn, though Eric Kuhne and others were involved in the design process.

And I think we're trying to excite the community about the potential that this could be something that wasn't just flood control.

This was going to be a jewel in the heart of the community.

It soon became clear that being a state park wasn't going to work.

The state, I think, didn't want any more parks or didn't want one up here in the middle of the of the urban part of Fort Wayne.

And so we decided the we would be a local park then, and we can be just as effective.

And it was very frustrating because it seemed like we'd had all these pretty pictures, all these great drawings, and everyone seemed to be happy with that.

And, you know, I kept saying, What's the next step?

And I still remember I don't know the timing exactly, but it must have been four or five years into my administration.

And I think the Downtown Rotary Club made a donation of trees for a strip along the street.

And we had the thing, you know, a dedication for that and salute the Rotary Club.

And part of me thought, this is all we're going to have for Headwaters is, you know, a one foot wide strip of trees, because that's all that had happened.

I think it was John Shoaff decided to go out and try to raise some money for trees along Clinton Street.

And so they approached the like and wanted a contribution from us.

It occurred to me that if we didn't set our sights higher than that, we're never going to get it done.

And so that led to our getting organized to do a major fund raising effort.

And we decided that the way to do it was to breakdown the project into phases.

If we didn't do that, the total was so big we wouldn't be able to accomplish it.

And we finally put together a plan that we were basically going to finance the land acquisition through local city funds, working with our redevelopment commission, other funds that we've got to acquire the land and announce that and made a big public deal out of this and said this is still got to be a multi-part partnership.

We need the county, we need the state, we need private sector.

But until it is not going to happen unless someone starts acquiring the land.

So we use city funds and city staff and city processes to finally start acquiring the land.

Then we were able to get the state to start and our state representatives did a great job start getting the state to help kick in because they saw the advantages.

They knew that we had torn down the buildings, so we knew that we had plans to to make it work.

The Headwaters Park Commission then moved on to revise the drawings based on a smaller budget.

As a result, Kuhne's plan for the park had to be scaled down.

Instead of a grand 200 acre state park, it was decided that developing the 30 acres of the thumb, which was most prone to flooding, would become top priority.

It was very clear very early on that we had bitten off more than we could chew.

And my my reluctance to kind of shrink the park down caused a bit of drama.

But John, John Shoaff knew that if we didn't make the park small, that the city simply couldn't psychologically handle it, let alone financially handle it.

So John proposed reducing it just to this area here.

The 33 acres on what we call the thumb.

And and it was the smartest thing in the world because instead of focusing on a large area, we could work on a smaller area and put so much more detail into it.

And the detail is what has made the park unique.

It was a very new concept to a lot of people, and most people were knew that this whole area was nothing but conglomeration of small businesses that would flood from time to time and come back and restore their buildings and then wait until the next flood.

So the idea of it being leveled and being made into nothing but green space was I think people had a difficult time visualizing that.

From time to time people would come and say, We can't do what Eric Kuhne wants to wants us to do.

And I would say to them, I don't expect you to do what he wants you to do.

I want you to do continuous creativity.

See if we can put it into a size and location that we're proud of in that we can afford.

Because I think we've probably got the best architect we're going to find for this field.

We can find them cheaper, we can find them.

They'll do more square and more rectangular and more triangular.

But that's not what we're looking for here.

We want something that's going to be proud of 100 years from now.

There were 30 parcels of land, about 22 businesses that were purchased.

We had a partnership with the city of Fort Wayne, the Redevelopment Commission, and the public sector dollars, which mostly came from the I&M Light Lease dollars and some federal block grants and some Build Indiana lottery dollars were pooled to purchase these 30 properties and relocate a number of these businesses that were in the floodplain.

Steve Poinsette had a had a fine car dealership here.

Some of the automotive parts was across the road and in 1982, Flood moved them a long way towards it, but they had their whole life invested in these lands and so you had to treat them properly and let them find a way to find their business in a different location.

And that takes years I mean, we literally would have three buildings up here for about three or four years, and we couldn't start until we got the last one out of the way.

Names Craig Bertram, Landscape Architect with McCrory & Associates.

I'm Kevin McCrory with McCrory and Associates, and we're the associated landscape architects of the Headwaters Park Project.

Very glad to be here.

I'm Ed Welling, a project architect with Grinsfelder Associates Architects.

I'm Tom Navin and I'm with Eric R. Kuhne & Associates, the designers of the park from New York.

So there you have it, Mel.

The crew is here.

People responsible for most of this design and implementation of Headwaters Park, Phase one.

I guess it was a ribbon cutting, but we did it with a backhoe.

And I know all the board members and elected officials and lots of people were down here because it was really very exciting that we were actually going to start this project.

So we all got our turn at the backhoe, tearing into that first building.

And it was great fun.

And I still have a picture of me on the backhoe, as I'm sure everybody else does, because it was such a thrilling moment to be able to say this is real now.

I'm Geoff Paddock.

This is Friday, September 30th, 1994.

And with me this morning is Mayor Paul Helmke, the mayor of the city of Fort Wayne.

Very honored to have some help here because the work for you, Mayor, we wouldn't be really in the midst of this project.

We're grateful to be here.

As you look around, it's hard to believe that in three weeks from tomorrow, we're going to dedicate this.

We've got a lot to get done.

You have a lot to do.

But.

Well, it did this first.

I've been down here in a few weeks and I think it's looking real good and it shows people that it is going to be a reality.

I know that the hardest thing for for me in the seven years that I've been mayor is convincing people that this was going to be a reality, not just a dream.

And yet, you know, with the commission's help with the private donors, with the help that we were able to get for the money, the state money and the local money, it's it's obvious that it's going to become a reality.

Demolition began taking these buildings down after the businesses had been purchased and folks relocated to other areas.

And we we weren't sure if we'd be able to raise all the money needed to build this park.

And so we designed it in four phases, thinking that, well, if we run out of money, let's at least get one done, then we'll go to two, three and four.

So to speak.

And of course, the first phase was perhaps a little bit more opulent and attractive in design than the others because we thought that might be the only one.

So let's make it as nice as possible.

We'll continue to work this fall in the spring until phase one is completed and we hope then begin work on phase two.

I might add that just Wednesday of this week we received a very generous pledge of $1,000,000 from Lincoln National Corporation, and that money will go towards work on phase two.

On the other side of the street, Headwaters Park consists of about 30 acres in the thumb area of the three rivers of those 30 acres, about 20 acres are now parkland that lies in the floodplain.

About ten acres include the festival plaza and parking lots that were constructed on higher ground.

What are normally rains.

You need to sculpt the land a little bit.

It can't be totally flat or the rainwater during a normal range, not going to drain off.

So there are some small hills and great variations in it which we had to accomplish or accommodate that for the drainage of the park.

They'll make sure it was all low enough.

So that would function as the flood mitigation.

The flood is demanded a different way of dealing with the the park where the festivals are going to be.

So along the edge of where the floodwaters surge over this piece of land, we built a floodwall and then the crescent terrace lifts the land up high enough that when it floods, it protects that and it's set up.

And they just set sandbags across Clinton Street so that the buildings don't get flooded.

When we start getting high water, the first thing to fill up is that grass ampitheater because it was deliberately designed to go down as a bowl until the level of the grass is only a little bit above the river level.

In fact, there's a potential boat dock down there and of course that starts to fill up and then people say, Hey, they have theirs, filling up.

And our response is, yes, it was designed to.

But you can see these Bradford trees.

Imagine every leaf on this tree being a snow white blossom so bright that when the sun it you can't even look at it.

It is the most astonishing parade of color and change of seasons that you could ever imagine.

I think Headwaters is designed to be seen first by car.

So when we planted the trees along the Clinton grade from the Clinton Street Bridge, now the Martin Luther King Street Bridge to Superior Street, it was to basically create a ceremonial route on a small scale of what the mall in London is to Buckingham Palace or the Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe down to the Tuileries Gardens.

Eric's designs were very unique and so expansive and different, particularly with what we lovingly call the space ship.

Seeing it on paper and then seeing it once it was built was just a stunner.

We wanted to create a pavilion that would function basically like a wedding chapel or a little sacred place.

The top part of this has misting jets in it, and then nighttime, the lights up there.

It looks like a witch's cauldron with this mist kind of billowing out.

The is probably still my favorite element.

Detailing and engineering of that portion was provided some of the most unique challenges.

John and the Headwaters Park Alliance said, How can we make this park feel larger?

And so the idea was was to put a path system in that you can walk in no matter where you walk, you circulate back on yourself and you can actually walk for miles in this park and not retrace your steps.

So we doubled the size of the park by these ornamental paths systems which go around, loop around and take you all the way around and back and through the park, the bridge meadow, the garden amphitheater, the small little private garden rooms.

We set up, allowed for thousands of people to use the park on a day when normally most parks would only handle a few hundred before it started seeming crowded.

I can remember the second phase being opened in September of 1996, and we kind of literally flipped a switch and the water came up.

Now they call them splash pads, but we called it an interactive fountain.

I think Eric's term is called also called the Fontenelle and it was three jets of water signifying the three rivers.

And I think it puzzled a lot of people at first, you know, what should I do with this?

And after a few days, I think people realized, well, it's to run and it's to have fun.

Parents show up here with rolls of towels and they let their kids go in there.

And for 30 minutes, sometimes longer, they get peace and quiet and the kids are babysat by this fountain and the kids get totally drenched in this stuff.

It's fantastic.

And what we wanted to do was build something that met the specifications of the Three Rivers Festival, because if we could do that, we felt we could meet the specifications of any festival, of any group that might need space downtown.

And of course, what we found out was once we built this, a lot of festivals started to spring up and now call Headwaters their home.

When I started as mayor, we would have to get a lot of extra overtime for the police officers and get volunteers because things were so spread out by centralizing the festival activities in one area, it made it a lot easier for the police department, for our public safety officials to keep an eye on things, to make sure that there were problems too much to drink, somebody, you know, stealing people's purses, whatever, breaking into cars.

You had it centralized and that made it, I think, a lot safer community venue, you know, a place to have fun.

And I think it's fair to say that with some upgrades we've made over the years, we we built a good festival center that meets their needs and that's why they keep coming back each year.

And I remember thinking to myself or saying it publicly, if we have eight events here in a summer after five years, we're a success.

Well, you know, the history where we're booked.

I remember some people asking me when we were in the process of putting it all together, Do you think anybody ever use it?

Well, the proof is in the pudding.

It's used enormously in all times a year now, with the skating program in the winter, the thought was that perhaps there could be a pool in the middle of the festival center that could be frozen over in the winter.

Unfortunately, that wasn't functional because of all the festival activities.

So what we found out after we operated this a few years was that we could actually bring in a portable rink and we could we could assemble it and we could make ice right in the middle.

And then once the season ended, we could let a thaw out.

We could disassemble it, store it for the summer season and let all these festivals come back.

Thank you all for your participation.

And thank you all for coming.

Once the Headwaters Park Commission finished the project in 1999, in fact, it was January 1st, 2000, when we stood out here at midnight and had a big celebration.

And literally at that moment, this ground was turned over to the city of Fort Wayne.

It had been developed privately, as I mentioned, through the Headwaters Park Commission.

It was turned over to the city of Fort Wayne and to the Parks Department and became one of the 85 or so parks that the city maintains.

What the city then did at that point was to turn it back in a sense, to what became the Headwaters Park Alliance, a group of us who had been involved in this project since the very beginning with the fundraising, the design, the building of it.

Now we were called forward to maintain the park and help it grow.

That combination of being a public space public park and a flood control project, the marriage of those two things make this park unique.

And so the alliance, through our relationship with the Park Board and the Parks Department, were able to give it that special attention, that its special purpose commands.

We probably could not raise that kind of money for while.

And today things were different.

We had leadership gifts from the Lincoln, which I could influence the Foellinger Foundation and English-Bonter-Mitchell.

Those three foundations participated in the, I believe each of the four phases, four and a half million of the total or about half of the private sector contributions came from those three foundations.

And that really provided the basis for the success of the project.

So it was a huge, hugely successful effort and were private and public sector working together to get something done that was in the best interests of the community.

And it was a beautiful example of what you can do if you can get everybody on the same page.

It really took a community to build the park.

I mean, the support from all over the community that got together to provide the donations and it was really a team effort and a collaboration.

And I think that because of Headwaters, the possibility and I hope the probability of riverfront development, particularly on the north side of the river, is actually going to take hold.

And then with the completion of the Martin Luther King Bridge, I think that that gives people even further determination to to do that.

The park has really elevated the identity of Fort Wayne, and it's something that the community can be very proud of, the attention that and the world class design of the park for a community, our size is something that I think people can look back on and say that, you know, that really was that really was visionary.

It's mine.

You know, I bring my I brought my son here and showed him our brick and showed him my park bench and said, You've been a part of this.

This is what your mom did.

You know, she helped with this.

So it's it's a legacy.

As far as the Zander family is concerned.

We are now building on five continents all around the world.

And one of the great joys I have is opening the portfolio and showing them Headwaters Park.

And they all to know how to do that.

And when every time I come back to Fort Wayne and walk around this park, I know that we were part a small group of us were part of a passion, a belief that we could change the world.

And we just went out and did it.

And I want my nieces and nephews and I want the next generation that's coming up to know that they too, can take on that mantle of building great cities and do things that will far out live their lives and be a gift to generations to come.

I think people would be astounded to understand that this is part of a vision that started at the beginning of the 20th century in 1912.

I think that they would be astounded to know that that there's that much continuity of thought.

I think also that people don't realize that while we're talking now about reclaiming our rivers, that those were ideas that that never went away.

They were they kind of got lost in the shuffle.

Headwaters Park is part of a continuity of vision that's lasted over 100 years and hopefully will be maintained into the next hundred years.

All right.

Now, those of you in the front, lean, lean like your.

That's it.

That's it, That's it.

That's great.

Okay, hold it.

Okay, so you guys are half of two sculptures that were designed.

This side were the sand baggers who are basically saving the city during the flood of 82.

Right.

The city that saved itself on the other side is a group of families absolutely being tossed about by the raging floodwaters.

And so their idea is to do kind of contemporary versions of classical sculptures of how this city saved itself.

So thanks to that picture, this is our next fundraising effort.

You're all going to be immortalized in bronze.

The preceding program on PBS Fort Wayne was made possible in part by The Auer foundation, the Ian and Mimi Roland Foundation, Waterfield Foundation, Headwaters Park Alliance, and viewers like you.

Thank you.