As I gamboled effortlessly around Headwaters Park last weekend during the Fort Wayne Newspapers Three Rivers Festival, I recalled taking my daughter to the Downtown Improvement District’s Beach Blast in that general vicinity in 2007.

Actually, I lied about the gamboling and the effortlessness.

It was so hot in Headwaters Park last weekend that I could do little more than put the “drag” in “bedraggled.” But I am not lying when I tell you that I felt wistful about that parking-lot-based “beach party,” and this made me curious about DID, which has pulled a seeming disappearing act on the downtown scene this summer.

A few days later, I looked at the DID website and found no reference to upcoming events with such familiar names as BuskerFest, Beach Blast, IslandFest, Downtown Mardi Gras, Friemann Family Thursdays or International Blast.

The only event being actively touted on the site is Lunch on the Square, which involves live music performed in the courtyard of One Summit Square every Thursday.

So I called Tena Woenker, DID’s new marketing director, to find out what is going on. She said that part of the problem is that the website hasn’t been updated in a while due to changeovers in staff.

BuskerFest, she said, is being folded into Taste of the Arts, which happens Aug. 27 – Arts United Center being the usual focal point for that event. It will be a much more modest affair, with an emphasis on local performers rather than on those that tour nationally.

Most of the buskers will perform on a stage in Freimann Square, she said, although some performers will ply their trades and talents on foot around the fountain.

Downtown Mardi Gras is gone for the time being, the victim of a major radio sponsor deciding to go in another direction, Woenker said. International Blast could return, she says, depending on what the owners of J.K. O’Donnell’s decide to do.

Woenker says DID is starting to plan such fall events as “Drop Your Avant Garde,” “Fright Night” and “Holiday Fest.” It may debut a new winter festival early next year as well, she says.

But DID is generally looking to “(let) other organizations take the lead” on downtown events, Woenker said.

“Instead of putting on major events,” she said, “we have started looking at ways we can help other organizations (do so).”

Woenker said it is a better use of DID’s talent pool and resources to provide various kinds of backup for organizations that have the desire and the means to put on downtown events, but do not perhaps have all the pieces of the puzzle in place, pieces the DID will be able to provide.

Taste of the Arts, which now combines three previously existing events, provides a model for how Woenker believes more events will be presented in the future. “Lots more collaboration,” she said.

“The only thing I can follow up on,” wrote DID president Richard Davis in an email, “is that the approach which (Woenker) outlined, affords us the opportunity to identify (for each year and season) and support a larger number and wider variety of downtown events with our resources.”

Davis wrote that the current strategy is designed to help DID both serve downtown businesses and shepherd downtown events more effectively.

“Since I’ve been here,” he wrote, “the emphasis has been on the DID’s producing recurring events that small businesses (especially restaurants/food services) could take advantage of, if they stayed open and chose to participate. Lunch on the Square is one such event; Drop Your Avant Garde is another.”

Also, Woenker said, DID wants to spend more time and effort alerting people to under-reported aspects of the downtown art and culture scene – for example, the fact that many museums and other attractions have their own gift shops.

When Clinton Street closes in 2012 for a six-month bridge replacement and road alignment project, DID plans to be at the forefront of letting people know about alternate routes through town, Woenker said.

This is all well and good, I guess, but it’s hard not to feel a slight sense of disappointment, specifically about BuskerFest and generally about what appears to be a shift of focus at the Downtown Improvement District (although Woenker said she would not characterize it that way).

The whole point of having a BuskerFest, it seems to me, is to create the temporary impression that the streets of downtown Fort Wayne are hopping with creative life and vitality. Rooting BuskerFest in a fairly tight geographical area (an area with a stage but no actual streets) is something like painting landscapes in a basement.

And what will be accomplished by scaling down an event that had just begun to build a lot of interesting steam?

I find it difficult to believe that many of the people who were specifically drawn to what made BuskerFest unique will migrate over to the Taste of the Arts to partake of the watered-down version. But I am no better at prognosticating these things than anyone else is.

Perhaps DID’s decision to let others lead the way in creating and maintaining big, splashy summer happenings will lead to more and better events, as Davis believes. But it’s hard not to feel a little nostalgic for the days when DID seemed to take a more active role in finding fresh reasons for people to get excited about downtown.