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In just a short couple years, downtown Warsaw could potentially begin to be transformed into a cultural arts district that draws people from near and far.
A full house of interested people gathered at the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce Wednesday to hear a 40-minute presentation on the Downtown Warsaw Cultural Arts District Plan.
Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Rob Parker thanked the Chamber, city of Warsaw and the Main Street Warsaw Board of Directors for making the plan possible.
“It was an investment by those three organizations that we were able to hire a downtown development director, which he then put on his agenda to make this happen. So that was Terry (Sweeney) who did that,” Parker said in thanking Sweeney for his work and leadership on the plan.
A Foundation To Build On
Parker said the plan was developed with significant stakeholder engagement.
“This plan presents economic development strategies that include strategic placemaking investments, guidance for public art and investments in venues and programming that will grow our creative economy and enhance our quality of life, quality of place and quality of opportunity,” he stated. “It builds upon the Orthopaedic Industry Retention Initiative (OIRI). It’s focused on talent retention and recruitment through enhancing our community’s amenities.”
The plan is also built on the foundation of previous plans that were completed in the past few years, he indicated. “It will align with the overarching strategy to create a strategy to invest in the creative infrastructure, improve facilities, networks and support systems that sustain long-term growth, which is contained in the Northeast Indiana Regional Development Authority’s Creative Economy Plan. So we want to make sure we’re aligning with what’s in the Northeast Region. It’s very important we do that,” Parker stated.
Finally, he continued, the plan “puts us on a path for downtown to blossom into a vibrant and growing culturally-focused premiere gathering place, a place that we like to call our community’s living room.”
In doing so, Parker said they want the Indiana Arts Commission to designate it as a cultural district with all the recognition that brings to help move the plan forward.
“This is a plan. It’s not written in stone. We’re going to add things. Things might not exactly happen exactly. This gives us a structure to move forward for funding that the community can get behind us,” Parker said.
Looking Back
Before Going Forward
Sweeney, Chamber and Main Street Warsaw director of development, gave some background on the origins of the plan and how it progressed to where it’s at now.
“In the last two years or so, there have been a number of different processes that have touched downtown and helped guide what’s going to happen to downtown. And there’s a common reoccurring theme to it, is culturally focused and arts,” he said.
First there was the Hyett Palma Downtown Action Agenda in 2023, which was a refresh of a study from about 2001. It came up with a task list and a vision of what needed to be done.
Next came the Critical Connections Corridor, which was a study done in partnership with Local Initiatives Support Corporation and Brookins Institute with funding by the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Warsaw was one of three communities in the state selected to go through that process, Sweeney said.
That was followed up with a Market Demand Study, utilizing Hunden Strategic Partners. It confirmed there was sufficient market demand for a performance arts center, a conference hotel and a parking garage, he said.
All of those studies were brought into a single plan - the Main Street Warsaw 2030 Plan, which was launched in February. In that plan, “we say we want to become a cultural district. So we bring all these things forward and we say we also want to become a Designated Cultural District,” Sweeney said.
They worked with the Warsaw Redevelopment Commission to fund the study and retain Josh Lapp, principal and co-founder of Designing Local.
Sweeney said throughout the process with Designing Local, they’ve been really committed to community engagement. There’ve been focused groups, a steering committee, one-on-one interviews, phone interviews, surveys and open houses.
“In all told, there are 600 touchpoints with people giving feedback to this plan. So we feel that’s grounded in not only what some expertise, like Josh, brings, but what the community desires,” Sweeney said.
Rising to the top were bringing the community together and creating opportunities for artists, he said while going through the various results of surveys and interviews.
The Creative Economy
Suzie Light, who serves on the Warsaw Public Arts Commission and is the liaison to the Kosciusko Economic Development Corporation, said her thought about art used to be sculptures, murals and one- and two-dimensional performing arts.
“And, thankfully, Mayor Joe (Thallemer) took a team down to Indiana Arts Commission where we worked on Creative Convergence workshop. We were one of five communities selected to do that,” she said. “Get this message? Warsaw is being selected at the state level to participate in stuff that’s transformative.”
At that workshop, Light said they learned things about the creative economy in Indiana. It generates more in economic resources than agriculture. The creative economy encompasses graphic artists, jewelry makers, craft beer brewers, soap makers, performing arts, videographers, photographers “and it is huge in Indiana,” she stated.
“So, it’s the crossroads of creativity, culture and commerce. ... It’s the creative economy. It includes the traditional not-for-profit that we normally think of, the Wagon Wheel. But it also incorporates art galleries,” Light said. “... It matters because it enhances the quality of life and it’s a significant part of our state and our local economy. Arts and culture production added $9.3 billion to Indiana’s economy. Census data shows in the 2023 Census, Kosciusko County has a significant creative economy spanning 26 industries, 283 businesses and a workforce of 4,415 people with a total earnings of $12.6 million annually. And these statistics are coming from the Indiana Arts Commission.”
Warsaw has 14% higher concentration of its workforce that are employed as art, design, entertainment occupations than the national average, she continued.
“Eighty-eight percent of local government leaders and 96% of tourism and community foundations’ leaders agree that arts and culture represented economic development opportunity. The vibrancy of community arts, culture and public spaces plays a decisive role in attracting and retaining talent,” Light said.
The Lilly Endowment has granted the Indiana Economic Development Corporation funding for arts and culture, and, hopefully, she said, the Warsaw plan will align with what’s developed at the regional level.
“The overarching strategy in our plan is to invest in creative infrastructure including facilities, networks and support systems to sustain long-term growth,” Light said, emphasizing that they need to keep an eye on sustainability. “But we can’t implement it all on our own, so we have creative partners. So strategic partnerships are for the successful implementation of our plan. It can’t be achieved just by Main Street, or just by the city of Warsaw. We’re going to need to leverage mission, expertise, resources and audiences of the existing organizations and, most effectively implement the plans that are outline.”
The Plan Details
Lapp presented the details of the plan in about 20 minutes.
Check out the full plan online at https://www.warsawcdc.org/downtown-warsaw-cultural-district-plan/
“So we have this vision here, and really, the vision is about delivering a vibrant arts scene in Warsaw through placemaking and strategic investments, and assuring that arts and culture are part of the economic engine of downtown Warsaw and the county. Really, downtown Warsaw is the hub for that within Kosciusko County and beyond,” he said.
Enriching the quality of life really goes back to the economic argument of talent and retention, Lapp reiterated. “All these things come together, but having a place where people want to live, that’s the basis of what we’re trying to do here. So some of that is through the arts, some of that is through more creative placemaking, art-adjacent things that you’ll see, but ultimately it’s all about creating a place that’s vibrant, that you all want to live in, that other people want to live in and that we get to have great art experiences.”
He went through some of the projects that they think could happen, each falling into one of three “buckets.” The first was transformative, really big projects, mostly infrastructure, of a scale that would necessitated some outside funding.
Incremental projects are more about making a big impact on a smaller budget that may be able to be completed more quickly.
The third type is “amplify” projects that are more about programming. “Some of them aren’t actually a ‘program,’ but it’s just ways to activate space and doing that differently than the other projects, which might be more about infrastructure changes,” Lapp said.
Along with that, he said they established a series of goals to make sure all the projects in the final plan align with those goals. The goals include establishing downtown Warsaw as a regional hub for arts and culture, cultivating a thriving and sustainable economy, and having a dynamic downtown environment.
A lot of the projects naturally align along a series of corridors and really help build on some of the connectivity in other planning processes and other projects already happening.
Toward the end, Lapp touched on how the projects should be funding. “We have a whole suite of ideas of how to fund some of these projects. Some of them being local, some of them being outside of Warsaw and maybe outside of Indiana. And, really, just thinking about how we can create consistent funding, but also ... let’s think about how we can go after all funding opportunities for making Warsaw a more vibrant and art-focused community,” he said.
Asked about a timeline for the projects to become a reality, Lapp said he thought about half of them are implementable in a very short timeline. There isn’t a hard-and-fast rule about how many projects end up happening, but “it’s always something good to revisit this type of thing every 10 years or so.”
