"For me personally, this has been one of my favorite projects of my career." That's Melanie Carney, executive vice president and general manager of the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum, describing a mural project that has nothing to do with basketball, hockey, or concerts. On the morning of September 23, forty Amp Lab students stood on the arena's 200 Level Concourse and watched four murals they'd spent weeks researching and painting get unveiled to the public for the first time.
The students, all juniors and seniors from the Electric Works-based school, didn't just paint. They researched the building's seventy-four years of history first, then wrote a poem together, "Time Always Loops, a Circle Always Returns," and pulled their four mural titles straight from it: "Echoes in Foundation" for history, "History's Score" for sports, "Notes in Air" for music, and "Poppies Praise" for veterans. One mural shows a hockey player facing a figure in military fatigues, a visual meant to mark the shift between wartime and ordinary life for a soldier.
That project is a small, specific signal of something larger happening on Parnell Avenue this fall. The Coliseum is in the middle of resetting what it means to the neighborhood around it, and this season is the first one where that reset is visible on the calendar itself. A few miles up Dupont Road, Salomon Farm Park is doing the opposite: running the same shape of fall it has run for years, adding almost nothing, and needing to explain almost nothing.
Where the Team That Used to Fill This Building Went
For sixteen seasons, from 2007 to 2023, the Fort Wayne Mad Ants played their home games at the Coliseum, developing NBA talent like Dahntay Jones and Khris Middleton along the way. In 2023 the franchise relocated to Indianapolis and became the Indiana Mad Ants. In 2025 it moved again, this time to Noblesville, where it now plays as the Noblesville Boom out of Riverview Health Arena at Innovation Mile.
The building didn't get a new tenant to replace that gap. It got a different kind of programming altogether, one built around an anniversary rather than a franchise.
A 75th Season Fills the Same Building
The Coliseum opened in 1952, and Komets hockey has been played there every season since, which makes 2026-27 the franchise's 75th consecutive season in the building. The Komets open that season at home on Saturday, October 17, against rival Toledo.
The scheduling itself tells a small story of correction. Fort Wayne opened the 2025-26 season with eleven consecutive road games before playing a single home date. This season flips that pattern hard: the Komets play four of their first five regular-season games at the Coliseum. Whatever drove last year's brutal road-heavy start, this year's front office built the opposite problem on purpose.
Late October brings a genuine homestand. The Wheeling Nailers, who rejoin the Central Division after two seasons up north, play their first game against Fort Wayne on Friday, October 30. The very next night, Halloween, the Komets host Toledo with an on-ice costume parade built into the promotional calendar. A few weeks later, the Bob Chase Memorial Game against the Cincinnati Cyclones lands on Thursday, November 26, continuing a Thanksgiving tradition named for the team's longtime radio voice.
None of that is happening in isolation. The arena's concert and entertainment calendar is stacked into the same stretch of weeks:
- Jon Pardi played the Coliseum on September 24
- PBR's Challenger Series comes through October 3
- "Weird Al" Yankovic's Bigger & Weirder tour stops October 15, two days before the Komets' home opener
- Purdue Fort Wayne's Mastodons play an exhibition against the Purdue Boilermakers on October 22
Anyone tracking a single weekend on Parnell Avenue this fall is watching a building trying on several identities at once: hockey heritage, national touring acts, college basketball, and now, murals designed by teenagers who spent a semester learning the venue's own past well enough to paint it.
Up Dupont Road, Nothing Needed a Relaunch
Salomon Farm Park sits at 817 W Dupont Road on the northern edge of Fort Wayne, reachable from the Dupont Road exit off I-69. The park exists because Chris and Maxine Salomon donated the land in 1996, an idea the couple and their daughter Lynn had reportedly discussed for roughly twenty years before it happened. It's open daily from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. with no admission fee, and general access to the grounds and farm animals hasn't changed since it opened.
The park has grown, but slowly and without ceremony. The Wolf Family Learning Center went up between 2000 and 2001. The Historic Salomon Family Homestead was dedicated in 2019. A covered bridge followed in 2020. A North Garden rental space was added in 2024. Each addition happened on its own timeline, without a mural project or an anniversary campaign attached to it.
September brings a sunflower field into bloom on the property, a detail Visit Fort Wayne's own fall guide points visitors toward every year. The park's Wednesday farmers market runs from 4 to 7 p.m. across June through September, which means its weekly run for the year is wrapping up within days of this writing rather than continuing into the fall the way the Coliseum's calendar does.
The Fall Harvest Festival is the park's marquee fall weekend, and its exact dates move by a week or so from year to year: it landed in late September in 2023, September 27-28 in 2024, and October 10-11 the year after that. Whenever the weekend falls, the shape doesn't change. Friday runs shorter, Saturday runs longer, parking is five dollars a vehicle with free parking for buses, and the same mix of wagon rides, a children's maze, wheat threshing, corn shredding, saw mill demonstrations, a Saturday-only Frisbee Dogs show, a tractor parade, and pony rides fills both days. The Salomon Farmers' Market sets up alongside the festival itself, selling produce and baked goods from local vendors on the same grounds.
Outside festival season, Salomon Farm also runs Wild Walkers, an adult hiking group that meets the second and fourth Friday of every month, rotating through a different natural area in the region each time with carpooling offered when it's needed.
Two Calendars, Same Zip Code
NE Fort Wayne residents get both of these things within a few miles of each other this fall. One is a 13,000-seat arena mid-reinvention, its identity now split across hockey nostalgia, national touring acts, college exhibition games, and a mural project painted by high schoolers who had to research the building's own past to know what to paint. The other is a working farm park whose next addition will probably be another modest building, not a rebrand.
Neither one is trying to be the other. That's what actually defines the neighborhood's fall this year: a venue that spent September explaining itself in paint, a few miles from a park that has never needed to explain itself at all.
If you're tracking what's changing on Parnell Avenue or what's stayed the same up Dupont Road, The Lynn Reecer Team would love to hear what you're noticing this season. Start the Conversation.
