Going With the Flow: Placemaking Along a Corridor

In urban neighborhoods and small towns across the region, stories have been lost. But in one urban corridor in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the creative community is using technology to reclaim its past. Fort Wayne has followed a similar trajectory as other mid-sized cities in the Rust Belt. Boom, bust, and renewal for some, but not all. The Fairfield Corridor (41°03'18.3"N 85°08'41.3"W) has had its share of highs and lows as one of the city’s mixed use urban corridors. It’s a collection of small homes, shops, restaurants, churches, schools, and more. The Fairfield Corridor SoundWalk, an immersive sound experience featuring augmented reality, takes a closer look at this corridor’s history and hopes to give the people of the neighborhoods along it a greater sense of community.

Kurt Roembke standing outside the former Humpty Dumpty Drive-In. Photo by Tim Zink.

App developer and musician Kurt Roembke has been involved in numerous creative projects since emerging in the city’s creative community after studying classical guitar and audio recording in college. Roembke meshes his musical expertise with local history, culture, technology, and community into one experience. The Fairfield Corridor is the third location in the city for SoundWalk, which launched two previous experiences in 2017 and 2020. “I was just like, ‘Oh, it'd be cool if you could make music that was mapped to the location you're walking through, and then adapt to it,’” Roembke said. “You have added meaning to a public space.” 

Fort Wayne’s Fairfield Corridor
The Fairfield Corridor stretches along Fairfield Avenue, from downtown Fort Wayne through the 46807 ZIP code (or “the ‘07,” as locals refer to it). Once home to prominent employers such as the Packard Piano Company (1871-1930) and the old Lutheran Hospital (1904-1992), this mixed-use commercial and residential corridor is now home to Wunderkammer Company.

Dan Swartz is the founder of Wunderkammer, a contemporary art gallery located in a former market and restaurant site built in 1903. Swartz, then in his mid-20s, purchased the building in 2012 and has since transformed both the inside and outside into a local cultural hub. “Our vision statement is just ‘New ideas, new community,’” Swartz said. “We just tried to make it as broad as possible. If you're doing cool stuff and you like helping people, then we want to help you out.”

Cornelia Schulz. Photo by Tim Zink.

To Swartz, the SoundWalk platform seemed like a perfect project for the Fairfield Corridor. Wunderkammer commissioned the piece after it was suggested by Cornelia Schulz, the gallery’s neighborhood liaison and a resident of the nearby Creighton-Home Neighborhood since 2007. “There's not like, ‘an end user’ in a ticket sale, or whatever,” Swartz said. “We want people to care about the history of this space.” Schulz loved Roembke’s two prior SoundWalk experiences, “Voices of the Myaamiaki” and “McCulloch Park by Metavari.” This prompted her to pitch the Fairfield Corridor idea to Roembke. “SoundWalk is just to remember just this little part of the city and all of the things that have already been lost,” Schulz said.

The neighborhood suffered significant economic losses after Lutheran Hospital moved to a suburban location in 1992. The site has since been turned into a park by the Lutheran Foundation. A portion of the hospital’s story is featured prominently in the app, along with stories about the Packard Piano Company, the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In, and more. 

“There was a lot of loss of employment,” Schulz said. “And definitely a lot of disinvestment from the city, which we're fighting to get some of that investment back.” She hopes the Fairfield Corridor SoundWalk gives the community a chance to reexamine the public and historical spaces along the corridor. “Through that experience, people think a little bit more about placemaking,” Schulz said. “To hear those voices of people that lived here in the past will give them even more sense of place.”

Can an app make people feel more at home? It sounds lofty, but it’s part of numerous efforts to connect people together in the ‘07.

Fairfield Corridor SoundWalk logo

Taking a deep look
Initially, Roembke was apprehensive about doing another location for the SoundWalk platform after struggling to attract support from local organizations and sponsors in the past. “I was afraid I'd be trying to build something I don't want to build, and trying to grow into something I didn't want to grow into,” he said. 

Fortunately, Schulz and Swartz were all for taking a deep look at the Fairfield Corridor. Roembke was given the creative freedom to model elements of the app after the deep mapping work of American travel writer William Least Heat-Moon (“PrairyErth”). “A deep map is an interesting angle on placemaking,” Roembke said. "There is no limit to what you'll talk about.”

Through deep mapping, the Fairfield Corridor SoundWalk explores how people used the land along the corridor during different time periods. The app collects crowdsourced and researched stories exploring what it was like living there and why the land was formed like it is. “That's what I loved about this project. It allows you to layer different times on one space,”  Swartz said. “The cool part about an old part of town is that it has literally lived a bunch of lifetimes.”

Collecting stories
Both lifelong residents and newcomers to the area contributed stories and ideas to the project. These stories narrated by locals highlight everything from the notable to the overlooked. In addition, Roembke has been recording the first-person stories of as many people as he can. Through this process, Roembke hopes to understand who they are, why they are in the area, and what the area means to them.

Schulz emphasized the importance of capturing the stories of the area’s oldest residents. As more pass away, the opportunities to preserve these stories becomes even more difficult. “It was almost impossible to get these older folks to contribute to the SoundWalk by telling their story,” Schulz said. “People are a bit distrustful, I think.”

Crowdsourcing continues today for future updates to the Fairfield Corridor SoundWalk. The SoundWalk website and app both have forms for submitting story ideas. It comes down to raising awareness that the app exists and why it’s important. “It'd be great to walk around there all the time, because then you could just talk to random people who obviously have experiences being here,” Roembke said. 

One of the biggest historical finds was in Roembke’s former home on Fairfield Avenue, which at one time served as an unofficial bed and breakfast for visitors at the old Lutheran Hospital. “There was a woman living there who was kind of lonely and just wanted to enjoy the company of people,” Roembke said. “That's such a cool yet human story.” Once again, through storytelling, a simple house along an urban corridor becomes something a little more.

Discovering overlooked history
Building off of his experiences with the 2017 “Voices of the Myaamiaki” SoundWalk, Roembke’s goal is to include often overlooked history from the area’s Native American people. “There are people here that have a deep connection to the land, but that culture was effectively pushed under the rug,” Roembke said. “That fused with SoundWalk in a way that felt right to me.” 

Roembke would like to see more local support for artistic projects that focus on deeper and more impactful subject matter. “It's always so focused on a monetary goal, to the point where you can't do anything,” Roembke said. “Artists have to put up with pleasing all these organizations so that they can make their money.”

“It kills anything that's going to be interesting or useful to the actual people because everything gets filtered,” Roembke said. "These are things we should talk about, if you want to reconcile with what it is to live in Fort Wayne."

Struggles expanding the platform
Roembke has had numerous discussions about expanding the SoundWalk platform to additional Fort Wayne locations over the years. Unlike the current three locations, those efforts were largely unsuccessful.

Kurt Roembke in front of Wunderkammer. Photo by Tim Zink.

“Every single person wanted to tell me how it could be like this really cool thing if I did this instead, or if I added this or if I tried to make it more like this,” Roembke said. “The times it's been the roughest for me with SoundWalk was just when I'm listening to people who are like, ‘We could give you money, but you have to do these types of things.’”

Roembke has wrestled with the pressure to scale-up and commercialize the app while balancing multiple jobs and side projects. “When it got the most toxic for me was when I was really seeing a light, and I was like, ‘Oh, like if I just do this thing, and I can get this person interested, then I'll make it and I can live my life just doing this,’” Roembke said. “I'd be on the phone with someone I could not believe I was talking to.” Fortunately, Roembke’s experience with the Fairfield Corridor SoundWalk has been more positive. The project received a $3,000 grant from Indiana Humanities, which was matched by Wunderkammer Co. “Indiana Humanities is actually fun to work with,” Swartz said. “It's like, ‘play with it. Figure out how it can incorporate history or how it can engage your community in a different way.” 

Future of the Fairfield Corridor SoundWalk
In addition to periodic updates to the Fairfield Corridor SoundWalk, the hope is to expand the project and cover a greater geographic area, highlighting even more of Fairfield Avenue. For example, Roembke had a voice actor dramatize stories from some 1920s nursing school yearbooks from Lutheran Hospital that he came across while researching. “One of the nursing students was talking about forming the Tired Club and who belongs in it and the activities they do,” Roembke said. “It's all just like a joke about how exhausted nurses are all the time.” Roembke hopes stories like this will add an extra layer of abstraction to the history of the space.  “A lot of people will just assume a dryness to past generations,” Roembke said. “And then you're like, ‘Oh yeah, they were real people.’” 

Currently, the app covers about a half mile of the corridor. “It doesn't connect the '07 to downtown. It kind of stopped short,” Swartz said. “You could, theoretically in the future somewhere, start downtown and go on a mural walk or a public art walk, down Fairfield to our property and back up.”

“The entire way, you’d be listening to a soundtrack of the history of the community.”