Broadway
The 1913 city hall still has an opry house upstairs
At 428 Broadway the town put its offices, its jail, its firemen, and a theater in one brick building. The brick is still there.
By 1920 New Haven had already decided it was a city in everything but the paperwork. The paperwork caught up in 1963. The building caught up earlier. In 1913 the town raised a city hall at 428 Broadway for the offices, the jail, and the fire department, and put an opry house on the second floor.
Indiana’s architectural survey has called the building outstanding for what it still is: itself. The streets of that era were praised, the electric current came from Fort Wayne, and the water pressure was kept high enough for the volunteer firemen. Two handle factories, Schnitker and Son and Sperry Manufacturing, turned out wood for axes, hatchets, and spades. The lumber yard kept the rest.
Broadway is still the sentence the town writes about itself. The seal at the top of this paper, with its locomotive and its crossing, is a shorter version of the same sentence. The long version is a brick block with a theater upstairs, where the town once sat in the same building as its jail and did not find that strange.