Signature Inn Fort Wayne, IN - Location #2

aerial view courtesy of Bing Maps

map graphic courtesy of signature-inns.com at archive.org

Signature Inn's second location opened in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1982.  It consists of 102 rooms, making it a little smaller than average, compared to the rest of the hotels.  The design of this building would more or less set the stage for how the subsequent locations would look.  The vertical ridge at the peak of the roof covers the entire peak and the ell looks like it belongs with the building instead of looking like an afterthought.

While many other hotels in the chain were re-branded as Jameson Inns in 2006, this is one of the few that kept the Signature Inn name throughout the Jameson days.  The hotel was sold off in August 2007 and became an Econo Lodge (comments on tripadvisor.com confirm this).  It was somewhere between 2008 and 2010 that the hotel became a Quality Inn, which it still is today.

overview of the hotel

The most obvious change to the building from its Signature Inn days is the color.  The building has a metal roof and the same metal cladding extended to down below the second floor windows.  That had been removed in the building's remodel and lights were added to the exterior wall.

In getting photos of this hotel, I was in a race against the clock.  I had left Itasca, IL around 4:00 PM (Eastern; 3 PM their time) and was trying to get the South Bend, Elkhart, and Fort Wayne locations before darkness fell.  I was "lucky" enough to get stuck in some slow-moving Chicago-area traffic, which ate up about an hour of my time.  I hit South Bend around 7 PM and Elkhart 40 minutes later.  It was around 9:15 by the time I rolled into the parking lot here and even though the sun was pretty well down, I had just enough light to take some decent photos.  There was a van parked in the canopy when I arrived; after taking a few shots and then talking to my wife on the phone, I noticed it was loading up getting ready to leave.  In that 15 minutes, the sun sank down even further and I was able to snap a few nighttime shots before heading for home.

sources for this post include the Allen County, Indiana, auditor's website, signature-inns.com archived at archive.org, and imagery found through Bing Maps.

Photographs not accredited in their captions were taken by me.  These and additional photos can be found here: Formerly Signature Inn by Ryan on Flickr