We left Detroit for Fort Wayne sometime after 5 p.m. Tuesday, and after dealing with traffic and a gas stop, rolled into downtown around 8 p.m., well into full darkness. We were headed for the Bradley Hotel, new since we pulled up stakes in 2005. And even though it stands five floors and covers nearly a full block, Alan managed to miss the turn. (His navigator may have steered him wrong, but doesn’t remember.)

Around a couple of equally flummoxing blocks, we managed to find the valet lane and unload. “I don’t recognize the place,” Alan said. I pointed out Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island, cattycorner to the hotel. Didn’t help very much.

Which is to say that downtown has undergone a transformation, which this Homecoming event was intended to show off. The Fort Wayne Chamber invited about two dozen expats and partners, including our friends the Byrnes (former president of Parkview Hospital), Cosette Simon (first woman mayor, for 10 days, a long story), Zach Klein (co-founder of College Humor, Vimeo, Dwell, more), a former congresswoman, a sculptor, many others. And us. It was two days of showing off the city and hinting that investment in local startups would be welcome. Wining, dining, climbing on and off a bus and being encouraged to take a gift bag.

The short version of the itinerary: Touring the under-construction expansion of the Arts United Center, touring the Landing and Promenade Park, dinner at a fancy new restaurant, touring the fancy new restaurant owner’s even fancier new arts center, hearing his story (Sweetwater) followed by that of another local business success (Vera Bradley), meeting the mayor, touring the newly renovated G.E. plant (rechristened Electric Works in adaptive reuse), more business success stories, wrapping up with an evening at Parkview Field, the new(ish) downtown minor-league baseball stadium. The season’s over, but it’s enough of an event hub that we didn’t feel like we were in an empty space; there was a yoga class for roughly 100 taking place in left field.

The mood was friendly, which is to say, not really journalistic. I asked questions, but they were polite ones. Honestly, I wasn’t in a mood to challenge anyone over TIF funding. The results speak for themselves. When we left, downtown Fort Wayne was a wasteland. It isn’t anymore. There are hundreds of new apartments, people walking dogs everywhere, too many new restaurants to count. The out-migration has stopped, and young families are getting the message that it’s a place where housing is still cheap enough that you might be able to buy your own. The parks are beautiful. The rivers are finally getting the attention they deserve.

Does the city still have problems? Of course it does. But it also has an unmistakable shine. It doesn’t look like a place young people flee as soon as they collect their diploma.

Take Pearl Street. The whole time I lived there, it was known for a dirty bookstore, a strip club and gay cruising. A large industrial bakery covered several blocks. The fancy restaurant we ate at Tuesday night is on the ground floor of The Pearl, a new mixed-use building that faces it. Across the street is the Pearl Street Arts Center, both developed by the Sweetwater founder with some of the $1.5 billion he collected for selling a 75 percent stake in the company. He now owns the whole bakery building; the arts center is in part of it. They offer free or sliding-scale music lessons for every Fort Wayne Community Schools student who wants one. There are recording studios and performance spaces therein, all state-of-the-art.

We had coffee at the corner of Pearl and Harrison the first afternoon, and I flashed back to the last time I was in that particular doorway, sometime in the ’80s: There was a ferocious windstorm in progress, and the roof of a nearby building was coming apart in the gusts. A bunch of us had gone to lunch nearby, and the roofing material was flying through the air, some of it large enough to hurt a person. We crouched in that doorway, laughing, before running to a somewhat safer street to walk home on.

As I said, the city still has problems, and none are unique. Homelessness, racism, poverty the usual. But it’s a much nicer place to visit than it once was.

Of course, the graybeards at my old newspaper were opposed to all of this:

Should we give up on “downtown” as a concept whose time has come and gone, admit that trying to keep it on life support is a futile effort?

…As I write this, city officials are getting ready to celebrate the opening of a mixed-use facility they have engineered out of an abandoned General Electric facility downtown. I have been in and around that area for all my Fort Wayne time, and for the life of me I can’t see it succeeding. It’s a depressed area that will still look like a depressed area, so how often are people going to be thrilled about going there to shop or have a bite to eat?

The guy who wrote this was a near-agoraphobic, went to the same few restaurants year after year, and is dead now. Honestly, I don’t know how well Electric Works is really doing; it was beautiful, yes, but suspiciously depopulated when we visited. But I know what an abandoned factory looks like, living as I do in the world capital of them. And I salute the city for trying to turn this one around:

That same writer also disapproved of the new baseball stadium, because it replaced a “perfectly good one” out on charmless, ugly Coliseum Boulevard. The new one was built with TIF money, but it belongs to the city and is universally acknowledged to be the catalyst that started the turnaround.

Some people just don’t like change. I hope I’m never one of them.

Some more pix:

I ate breakfast every day at the place I used to take Kate after a library visit. Cindy’s Diner — the very best.

And now we’re back. What happened in our absence, other than the mad king’s ravings? FWIW, I don’t think the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk sent those texts. But that’s just me. And more will be revealed.