Nestled in the heart of downtown Fort Wayne, Ash Brokerage occupies the top three levels of the Ash Skyline Plaza. From your first step off the elevator, you’ll discover a bright, open office environment where every employee is within 50 feet of a window. It’s hard not to feel the collaborative spirit, with a three-story atrium, dining and recreation areas, and creative meeting spaces.
Designed to be environmentally friendly, the sixth floor also contains Skyline Park, the largest rooftop green space in Indiana.
Ash Skyline Plaza is more than just our national headquarters: it’s a vision come to life.
After months of planning, a press conference was held to announce plans to relocate our headquarters into a 65,000 square-foot facility located at the corner of Harrison and Berry Streets in downtown Fort Wayne. Designs will allow every employee to be within 50-feet of a window. An additional 30,000 square-foot commercial space will be located on the 6th level, below the Ash offices.
After three years of dreaming, designing and planning, Ash Brokerage officially broke ground on its new headquarters. Fort Wayne Mayor Tom Henry commended all who had been involved, stating “this project will bring momentum and enthusiasm back to our city.”
A pile of bricks was all that was left of the few buildings razed to make way for the future. Photo courtesy of Weigand Construction.
The site is cleared and ready for heavy equipment to come in and start digging the foundation for the garage.
Crews remove more than 58,000 cubic yards of dirt from the site. It took 5,300 dump truck loads, with an average of 300 loads removed daily. At one point there were 29 dump trucks on site! 145 40-foot tall beams are installed as part of the earth retention system.
The footers and foundation walls of the parking garage are formed along with more than 1,000 core pilings totaling nearly 4.7 miles in length. The south shear tower pile cap was poured in December 2014. The single pile cap which supports the south stair elevators and the tower crane consists of more than 400 cubic yards of concrete, 135 25-foot deep auger cast piles and between 60 and 70 tons of reinforcing steel.
Construction of the elevator and stairway shafts begin to rise out of the ground, layer by layer. This is the last phase before the pre-cast concrete shows up for the parking garage.
Construction of the 275-ton crane in the south elevator shaft is underway — and so are the floors of the city-owned parking garage that our building sits on top of. 1,300 pre-fabricated precast concrete structural beams, columns and deck sections are being fabricated for the project.
It may not look like much, but that little rectangle of rebar is located on top of the city-owned parking garage and is the very first piece of what will be Ash's three-story office space.
Rising out of the south elevator shaft, a huge tower crane is constructed to build the Ash offices. At 220 feet tall, we lovingly call it the Big Ash Crane. The counterweight alone weighs 45,750 pounds! And with 1,250 feet of crane cable, a horizontal boom length of 230 feet and a maximum pick load of 17,600 pounds, we think it will do the job!
The first steel beams of the Ash Brokerage office are in place on top of the parking garage. Construction of the north elevator and stairwell core is now complete. It took about 250 tons of concrete to construct the north core, whose walls stand about 125 feet above street level.
The majority of the pre-cast concrete is in place for the parking garage, as work continues with more than 100 workers on site each day.
The last pieces of pre-cast concrete for the garage were placed Friday, Aug. 7, closing off the southwest corner of the structure. The buck hoist elevator carries people and supplies to all the floors of the project. You can also see the first pieces of facade being installed on the parking garage. To date, more than 182,000 man-hours have gone into the project.
A topping-out ceremony marked the placement of the final steel beam and celebrated a job well done as construction remains on target. The beam, was signed and adorned with a small evergreen tree based on Scandinavian and Native American tradition that nothing man-made should be at the highest point of the structure. It also symbolizes continued luck and growth.
The future looks bright from the shiny new windows being installed, as crews work to enclose the building before winter. Facade work continues, with 708 exterior panels for on the parking garage alone, totaling 24,213 square feet.
The glass is installed on the iconic front of the building, as interior construction continues.
As of May 9, 2016, Skyline Garage is open for general public parking. Work continues at a frenzied pace inside to get all the desks set up and hand over occupancy to the Ash team.
After two weeks of packing, unpacking, cleaning and organizing, our Fort Wayne employees are all under the same roof again. Even though construction crews are still putting the finishing touches on the building, it feels good to be home, and we’re thrilled to be a part of downtown Fort Wayne.
Ash employees, invited guests and media joined a ribbon-cutting ceremony inside the beautiful, three-story atrium at our new headquarters in downtown Fort Wayne. The occasion happened to mark the four-year anniversary of the date CEO Tim Ash originally shared his vision for a new headquarters with employees at a Friday Morning Meeting.
