Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Imagine uniquely designed and artistically crafted benches and other seating elements in public areas downtown Warsaw.
Or a library literary and arts festival at the Warsaw Community Public Library, or temporary light projections and installations onto significant historic buildings and existing murals downtown.
Those are just three of the 26 draft ideas presented at an open house Tuesday afternoon at the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce office as part of Main Street Warsaw and Warsaw Public Arts Commission Downtown Cultural Arts District planning process. For two hours, the public could stop in, look over the ideas, ask questions and give feedback.
Joshua Lapp, co-founder and principal of Designing Local, explained, “We generated 26 different project ideas and the idea really is for those to be further vetted by the community, and we’re looking to get feedback on how they should be prioritized, and ‘some of them are okay if they stay, go, get further developed.’ And then we also are asking folks about the categories that they think they should fit in, so our approach is really thinking about different project types or sizes.”
Designing Local, a national leader in urban planning and design, arts and cultural district planning, was retained to lead the process.
Lapp said there are transformative, incremental and amplified categories because some of the ideas are more programmatic while some are truly physical. Transformative are large-scale projects designed to have a significant and lasting impact on the community. Incremental are smaller-scale, adaptable interventions that can be implemented in phases to build momentum over time. Amplify are projects designed to enhance and leverage existing community assets and events, amplifying their impact.
Programmatic ideas would include events such as the literary arts festival in collaboration with the library. The physical would include public art or a festival street.
“So some of the ideas are kind of big infrastructure things,” he said. “Another one that is rising to the top is, we called it the first art space, so it’s the First Community Church, which is owned by the county.”
The former church’s sanctuary space doesn’t have a lot of programming within it, and there’s offices in the back, but otherwise the building isn’t used that much.
“So, looking at really transforming that whole space into a potential art space that could accomplish a lot of things. So it could be performance space, it could be kind of a commissary or ghost kitchen or a demonstration kitchen or all of the above. An incubator in the basement. And then art spaces and programming in the back,” he suggested.
The downtown area being looked at as a Cultural Arts District includes a vacant lot next to the railroad tracks to the south, the Millworks development (formerly the site of the old Owen’s Supermarket) at Market and Columbia to the west, Center Lake to the north and the library to the east.
“Effectively, that core area of commercial buildings in downtown, nothing really in the residential area,” Lapp said. “The key thing, too, is connecting Center Lake with the courthouse square. That is how we were thinking about it.”
In a meeting earlier Tuesday, he said they heard from businesses on South Buffalo Street that they, too, wanted to have a connection.
“Think about downtown as a whole as more of a destination, so maybe you come for a performance at an art space, you go to dinner and then after dinner, what do you do? You go take a walk, go have an ice cream and watch the sunset at the lake,” Lapp said, noting that in other places they would think about that as a unified experience.
The walkability of the district would be closely intertwined with the art aspect of it.
“I think it is probably more about the walkability because that’s really what we’re aiming for, is to use the art as a tool to help connect places. So it is both about the art itself” and the walkability, he said. “... In this instance, for most of the projects, the art is serving a purpose of doing something else.”
The more reasons you give people to walk from one place to another, the more likely that they’ll do it, Lapp said when asked about the effect weather would have on the district and ideas.
“I think, some of the things that we showed here - the lighting along Buffalo Street, for instance, or the Buffalo Trot kind of idea, I actually think that’s more appealing in winter when you need a little something,” he said.
In December, when the lights are coming on around 4:30 p.m. because it gets darker sooner, he said he thinks that encourages people even more to go out and see the light display.
Terry Sweeney, Main Street Warsaw director of development, said, “I think one of the things that the plan will do, that we hope, is help people connect dots so that these aren’t individual projects that happen in a vacuum, but there will be a reason that not only is there a function to the art, but a function of what we’re doing and why. I think it’s important to remember that down at the lake, the city’s intent to have a new development in the not-too-distant future along Buffalo Street, that will be connected through art and lighting, connected to the (parking) garage that soon will be built. And so, how do we make those connection points physically and create places of interest?”
Lapp said part of the reason why Designing Local wanted to come back to Warsaw at this point was because the plan for the Cultural Arts District is not finalized yet.
“So we wanted to get feedback on all these ideas, and then we’re taking that feedback back. We’re going to integrate it all and flush out our ideas and finalize them over the next month. We’re aiming to be done toward the end of October,” he said.
A survey provides an opportunity for the public to say where each idea fits and give specific feedback. It can be found at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/X23M2TS
Sweeney provided background on how it all came about.
“We launched the (2030 Downtown Warsaw Strategic) Plan in February. And that assimilated previous plans into one plan,” he said. “All of those really called for art should be centered here, what does art look like. And then in the actual 2030 Plan, we said we wanted to become a certified Cultural Arts District. So how do we put this on a hopper and come with actionable items? And that’s when we retained Designing Local through the RFP process, and that kicked off in April.”
The deadline was planned for June when the READI 2.0 portal would be opened with grant dollars from the Lilly Endowment and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC). That process slowed down because they required each region to do a strategic plan for the region, Sweeney stated, and at the time the Northeast Region (of which Kosciusko County is a part) lost all of its staff. The region obtained a consultant in July, but aren’t supposed to finish their plan until the end of October.
“We want to make sure that we’re mirroring some aspects and talking in the same language because they’ll make the decision likely for whenever we decide to make an application for READI, so we want to make sure they align because Lilly said, ‘No, you need to work together as an 11-county region,’” Sweeney said.
The portal probably now won’t open until January, he said, because other regions haven’t completed their plans either. There is plenty of work ahead locally, too, including website updating, destination marketing and branding.
For more information on the planning process, visit warsawartsplan.com.
