Down on the corner

Could they please hype the downtown hotel a little more? This was almost too subtle for me:

The long-delayed construction of the Courtyard by Marriott hotel at Harrison Square officially began Monday with a groundbreaking overlooking the construction site.

Representatives of Fort Wayne city government, local lenders, civic leaders and White Lodging, the company building the hotel, gathered for the groundbreaking and expressed their enthusiasm for the project.

Deno Yiankes, president and CEO of the Investments and Development Division of White Lodging, didn't settle for mere enthusiasm. He gushed about the prospects for the hotel and Harrison Square.

“It's a great day in downtown Fort Wayne,” he said. He praised local officials and leaders in the effort to advance Harrison Square.

It is a pretty good day in one way: A new hotel downtown is much better than an embarrassing hole in the ground. And I do hope it works out. Trying to lure more out-of-town visitors seems like a better economic-development idea than just moving sports fans from one part of town to another.

But I'm skeptical. I go back a long way with that particular corner. I worked at McDonald's while I was in high school. I also worked briefly at the Jefferson Theater, just up the block one way, and spent a lot of time at the pool hall just down the block the other way on Jefferson. The lunch counter at the Greyhound station across the street was another of my haunts. The area was bustling back then, if starting to turn a little seedy around the edges. It had, above all, character, the kind that comes with the accumulated comings and goings of businesses and patrons. It had a history you could sense and appreciate.

The new corner will be something all new, sprung from the imaginations of earnest planners. It will have no accumulated character, no history. Whether it works or not will depend entirely on whether the amusements there can briefly entice people more than the amusements they can find elsewhere. They'll spend their money, and some of it will stay in Fort Wayne. I guess that's progress of some kind, but "great"? Don't think so.