Eureka murals get phone-based audio tour, boosting accessibility

QR codes beside 24 Eureka murals now do more than identify the art. They open a phone-based audio tour that adds narration, written context and a mapped route, giving people a reason to move through Old Town, Downtown and other business corridors while learning the stories behind the city’s walls.

The Eureka Street Art Festival launched the audio component at a June 5 event at Clark Plaza, and the route now links 32 murals and pieces of public art by 29 different artists. The full tour stretches about 1.5 miles, with each segment running roughly 3 to 6 minutes and total listening time landing near 1 hour and 45 minutes. It is not sequential, so visitors can follow it in any order rather than commit to a fixed path.

Organizers said accessibility was part of the plan from the beginning. The added audio makes the murals easier to experience for visually impaired residents, people with limited mobility and anyone who wants more than a quick look at wall text. Jenna Catsos, who organizes the Eureka Street Art Festival, said the feature had been on the wish list for a long time, and a grant from the Eureka Cultural Arts District helped make it possible.

The narration comes from Tom Wheeler, who runs the Arcata-based environmental nonprofit EPIC and hosts local radio shows. Wheeler has been involved with the festival since the beginning and is married to Catsos. His role helps turn the route into something closer to a citywide interpretive walk than a static set of murals, with audio filling in the artist background and the stories that signage alone can miss.

The 24 works were selected because they sit within the Eureka Cultural Arts District, show a range of artists and styles and tell engaging stories. That matters in Eureka, where the mural landscape has already become one of the city’s most visible public art draws. The festival ran for seven years, from 2018 through 2024, and says it added more than 100 murals and pieces of public art. Visit Eureka says the festival produced more than 50 large-scale murals from 2018 to 2023, with concentrations in Old Town Eureka, Downtown Eureka, the Bridge District and Henderson Center.

The new audio layer gives that existing art network a practical downtown-use function. People can drive to the locations, but they still have to get out and scan each QR code, and the festival recommends experiencing the tour on foot. That design pushes more lingering, more block-to-block movement and more contact with nearby businesses, which could make the tour a useful model for other place-based tourism efforts in Humboldt County.