07/20/2026
Lutheran Park is for sale
Welcome to the South Fort Wayne page, a new community-focused effort dedicated to strengthening our neighborhoods, preserving important community assets, and ensuring that South Fort Wayne has a meaningful voice in decisions affecting its future.
One issue deserves our immediate attention: the future of Lutheran Park and Gardens on Fairfield Avenue.
The property was once the site of Lutheran Hospital. In 2004, The Lutheran Foundation transformed more than 12 acres into a passive community park featuring walking paths, gardens, open green space, meditation areas, and other amenities. The $800,000 project was developed with input from the surrounding neighborhood associations. At the groundbreaking, the Foundation told residents: “We listened to you, our neighbors.”
In June 2025, The Lutheran Foundation gifted the park property to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne. At the time, the gift was publicly described as a lasting legacy that would benefit young people and the broader community for generations. The Lutheran Foundation also explained that it had previously declined purchase offers because of concerns about how the property might be developed.
Today, a 9.49-acre tract at 3140 Fairfield Avenue is listed for $1.3 million as a “Rare Urban Development Opportunity.” The listing promotes the property for potential multifamily, affordable housing, senior housing, mixed-use, commercial, institutional, or community-oriented development.
Development can strengthen a neighborhood, but this is not simply vacant land. It is green space intentionally created for the community, with community input, and maintained as a park for more than two decades.
This is not about attacking organizations that have done important work in Fort Wayne. It is about asking reasonable questions:
What changed? What will happen to the park? Were preservation alternatives considered? And how will the surrounding neighborhoods have a voice before this community asset is permanently lost?
Please follow this page, share this post, and invite your neighbors to join the conversation. If Lutheran Park and Gardens matters to you, tell us what the park has meant to you or what you believe should happen next.
South Fort Wayne deserves investment. It also deserves a voice in what happens to the places created for its community.
Fairfield Neighborhood
Historic South Wayne Neighborhood Association
Historic 07 District - Fort Wayne
