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Three options for a festival street on the portion of Buffalo Street in front of the county courthouse were presented to the public during an open house Thursday evening at the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce offices.
The festival street is one of three projects that will be part of a grant application spearheaded by Main Street Warsaw (MSW) and city officials.
Another one of the projects, a gateway sculpture play park, drew concern about the park’s location near the railroad tracks and if the city needed another park.
To kick off the open house, Terry Sweeney, MSW downtown development director, explained how they got to this point.
“We launched a cultural district planning process in April of last year with the goal of becoming a Designated Cultural District recognized by the state. That was building on a number of planning processes that took place in the previous couple years,” he said. “... A lot of call for arts, performance art, visual art and, specifically, the action agenda Hyett Palma talked about a festival street, and with a goal of how do we connect Center Lake with this other part of downtown.”
The Cultural District Plan was completed back in November, and Sweeney said they are now in the implementation phase.
“That plan was in anticipation of a program through READI (Regional Economic Acceleration and Development Initiative), which is a state program. READI 2.0 includes dollars from Lilly Endowment - $65 million for arts and culture. Not only capital projects, but programming projects. And in order to qualify for those grant dollars, Lilly said each region - there’s 11 regions in the state - need to do a regional cultural development plan. Our region was the last to complete that,” he said, adding that “we started our planning process in April.”
The regional plan wasn’t completed until the same time the city completed its plan in November. A requirement of the grant was that the plans aligned.
The grant portal opened Feb. 15, with the grant application deadline April 15. Sweeney said it’s anticipated that the festival street will be part of the local grant submission, as well as converting the former church at 202 W. Main St. into a multi-use art space and the art sculpture play park on the southern end of downtown. There’s also an alley activation to improve some downtown alleys.
“So that would be our application, so that’s why we’re racing,” Sweeney said. “What we’re trying to do is get some sort of design concept that we can include in the grant. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the exact thing that this is going to be, along with cost estimates, so we can create capital stacks for the grant application.”
Josh Anderson, principal with Anderson Bohlander, which does landscaping architecture and urban design, went over the Buffalo Street Arts Trot, which is what the festival street was called in the Cultural Arts Plan. He and Sweeney said the festival street was the top vote-getter in the surveys that were done.
“After these meetings, we have three what we’re calling loose concepts. We did them by hand, laid over the top of some modeling so you can get a sense of the different designs. We’re hoping to get feedback on all three of them. Tell us which is your favorite, or maybe you don’t like everything about one but you like this about this, this about the other one and this about that and we can merge them,” Anderson explained.
He said they have a working understanding of what festival streets typically cost on a per-square-foot basis, but didn’t present any figures at the open house. He pointed out the grant process is competitive, so if Warsaw doesn’t get the grant dollars, another city will.
The Buffalo Street Arts Trot has two endpoints/gateways - at Center and Main streets - and then the middle.
“So, for today’s meetings, the three concept plans are primarily showing different arrangements of parking, that was a big concern of the existing businesses,” Anderson said.
Option A shows “nose-in” parking (headlights pointing toward the sidewalk) on the east side of Buffalo Street. Option B shows the same configuration, with the same number of parking stalls, but nose-in parking is on the west side facing the county courthouse, which allows parallel parking on the east side. Option C is parallel parking on both sides of Buffalo Street.
Anderson said Option C provides the most amount of width for outdoor seating, but wasn’t as popular due to the loss of a few parking spaces.
The designs allowed for more outdoor seating, trees and performance space. Elevation of the street had to be increased.
The Village at Winona Managing Director Nick Hauck confirmed the intent of the block is to be open for traffic unless there’s an event going on and it gets shut down, like for Third Friday. Sweeney said yes, it is a functioning street with a pedestrian focus.
Currently, there’s 28 parking spaces within that 100 block of North Buffalo Street. Anderson said, “Right now, on the drawings, we’re showing 26, 23 and 20. After the discussions we had earlier, we would revise Options A and B to each have 25.” Sweeney said that’s probably the preferred configuration. Option C would probably have only 20, which Anderson said is probably why it was the least popular with the business owners.
There’s the potential of the county building a parking garage a block away at 225 N. Buffalo St.
The Buffalo Street Art Trot would help connect all the amenities downtown, including a proposal for a park on the south side of the railroad tracks, north of Peking, at Buffalo and Jefferson streets. On the east side is Buffalo Street, and on the west side is the 1st Source Bank parking lot.
Sweeney said they’re working with the Warsaw Parks and Recreation Department on the design of the park. He said surveys indicated there’s nothing to do downtown but eat and drink and there was nothing for kids to do downtown, so the park would not only be a gateway/anchor on the south side of downtown, but also would provide some community interaction.
Going over the elements of the park, Anderson said there could be a main gateway, a fence, a fully-accessible interactive piece for kids of all abilities, built-in display panels, a sensory garden, musical elements, a custom-designed picnic table, playground pieces and a story time area.
Resident Jo Paczkowski asked, “Why is there a need for that to be in that location instead of utilizing the Center Park where it’s already grass and greeny and soft and away from noise and traffic?”
Sweeney said it’s part of the Cultural Arts District Plan for downtown, and surveys said there is nothing for children and families to do in the core of downtown. There’s lots of greenspaces in Central Park, but no pocket park for downtown core and no gateway to the downtown from the south side.
Paczkowski pointed out Central Park is only two blocks away from the downtown. She said she couldn’t picture a park in that corner and it’s not a pretty site. She said she didn’t see a need for a park there.
Another woman said that with the Millworks apartments going up on West Market Street, a mom could take her children there to play and for a picnic. She said she saw the park as a necessary space for when families do go to the downtown for shopping and/or eating.
A man said downtown Warsaw needs to be more pedestrian friendly as drivers speed down Market and Center streets, especially if parents are walking their kids to the park.
Christa Brown, downtown business owner, said she would not take her child to the park because it’s next to a railroad track and some kids “freak out” with trains, which she said are not on a schedule.
Sweeney said the Parks Department would look at it as a neighborhood pocket park. There is a street between where the park, which would be gated, would be and the railroad tracks. Brown said families would have to cross the tracks to get to the park.
