Streetsblog San Francisco

After the tremendous success of the trial sidewalk extension, or "parklet," on Divisadero in front of the Mojo Bicycle Cafe, San Francisco planners set their eyes on 22nd Street near Bartlett Street in The Mission, where they have re-purposed three parking spaces in front of Revolution Cafe, Escape from New York Pizza, and Loló Restaurant to be the city's newest public space.

"It basically acts as a relatively inexpensive way to transform parking spaces into spaces for people," said project manager Blaine Merker of Rebar, an artist collaborative best known for instigating the annual Park(ing) Day temporary parking space reclamations.

"We're taking this relatively narrow sidewalk and taking out three pretty superfluous parking spots and we're increasing the value of the streetscape by making it a place for people to hang out, to enjoy themselves and use an informal public space," Merker said.

The sixty foot linear parklet (Rebar uses the term "Walklet") is composed of pre-fabricated modular sections, each three feet wide by 6 1/2 feet deep. The module foundations are welded steel frames with bamboo decking, each affixed to the curb edge. The modules have different components, some simple flat sidewalk extensions, others with seating. One variation has seating with a planter built into it; another is a high bar 40 inches above the platform. Two modules have two bike racks each and several modules will be deep benches that allow reclining.

"The idea was to have a magic carpet of bamboo," said Merker, describing the aesthetic. "It creates a sense of prospect and refuge for people who want to inhabit the street."

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When Streetfilms Director Clarence Eckerson visited San Francisco a few months ago, he was impressed by how the city has transformed some of its streets as part of our Pavement to Parks program:

The Pavement to Parks program has launched an initiative that may someday alter the way many dense U.S. cities decide to treat the streets of their commercial strips. Taking the PARK(ing) Day concept to a more permanent, logical level, the Parklets program has begun experimenting with trial spaces allowing businesses to convert parking spaces into outdoor public spaces and cafes. 

In this great new Streetfilm, Clarence visits the P2P plazas, including the parklet in front of Mojo Bicycle Cafe, which has seen a 50 percent increase in business, and talks with some familiar faces, including Streetsblog SF Deputy Editor Matthew Roth and the Pavement to Parks manager for the Planning Department, Andres Power.

The pioneer Pavement to Parks plaza at Castro Street, 17th Street, and Market Street is about to celebrate its first birthday with a makeover that will bring it a step or two closer to permanence, though planners say this is an iterative step toward a permanent plaza and not the final design.

Andres Power, the project manager from the San Francisco Planning Department, was out getting his hands dirty over the weekend and explained to Streetsblog that this was the next step to the successful trial, one that is supposed to last until the city raises more significant money and designs a permanent plaza in the location. Power said one of the comments they heard the most from the community was the need to have larger, more permanent-feeling features that could frame the plaza and help block wind.

"A lot of people wanted more beefy structures to provide a stronger physical presence. We've listened to that and we've come up with this idea here," said Power. "The idea was to have a framing of fixed seating, inside of the planter walls at seating height and outside of the edge at leaning height."

Power said the concrete form work was completed last Wednesday and the soil and trees were delivered on Friday from Flora Grubb Nursery in the Bayview. Flora Grubb sold the two types of trees to the city at a deep discount, a Mediterranean Fan Palm and several brachychiton populneus trees, or bottle trees, which don't need much water and do well in wind.

Asked why he was moving dirt at the plaza on his day off, Power said, "I'm out here because I believe in the cause."

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Though the trial sidewalk extension "parklet" in front of Mojo Cafe has been open for just over a month, it has quickly become a community meeting place and a boon for business. The trial permit for the space lasts six months, but given the enthusiastic embrace of the parklet by the neighborhood, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that permit extended.

On Saturday, I went by and found several groups of people clustered in the sun, which was still shining on the former parking spaces at 2:30 p.m., long after the sidewalk had been cast in shadow.

At one of the tables in the sun, a group of friends enjoyed food and coffee from Mojo and gushed about the space.

"It's just a nice place to catch some sun that's not Ocean Beach and cold," said Alice Howell. "We were just talking that the community in this area is pretty tight-knit; everyone kind of knows each other. You always run into each other."

Howell's friend Peter Privitera, who doesn't live nearby, said he hoped to see parklets in other neighborhoods.

As I interviewed the party of friends, Adee Horn at the table next to us echoed the sentiment that there need to be more trials like this. "On a lazy Saturday, it's a great space to sit and read a book," said Horn from behind her novel.

I asked Horn if she felt danger from passing cars or disliked the traffic noise, both of which she said she didn't notice until I brought it up. As for the loss of parking that additional parklets would entail, she said she was happy the city had done something "with the human in mind as opposed to the car. You know, I have my car and it sucks when you're looking for parking and it takes a while, but this really should take precedence if you ask me."

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San Franciscans don't often spend their days contriving ways to spend more time near freeway off-ramps, especially when proximity to freeways can be a risk to your health, but the city's newest park along the I-280 exit at Sixth and Brannan Streets may make you think twice about it.

City leaders officially launched the park with an opening ceremony this afternoon, and with the success of the Pavement to Parks program, which reclaimed underused street space for public parks and plazas, the Department of Public Works and Caltrans have now embarked on a series of upgrades across the city on what we'll unofficially dub, "Off-Ramps to Parks."

"Creating beautiful, livable, vibrant, and sustainable spaces is an important part of our work, however, we cannot do it alone," said DPW Director Ed Reiskin. "These types of partnerships are critical in an era when we are seeking the most efficient way to clean and beautify the city."

On this sunny Wednesday afternoon, it appeared the demand for green space was strong -- even along a freeway off-ramp. Several groups of people lounged along the paths, and the hum of the exiting cars could almost be mistaken for the babbling of a creek (the exhaust of the cars was less mistakable, though a strong breeze and the trees helped mitigate that.) The park includes walking paths, new trees, flowers, and other landscaping upgrades like boulders, which serve as the only seating at present.

"Before, it didn't have all the greenery. All it had was a bum," said Megan Bluxome, an art student who used to live nearby, but hadn't returned to the area recently. "It looks like it's not part of the city, a very short natural walk -- right next to the freeway."

"It's an escape," she added.

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Just outside St. Phillip's Church in Noe Valley, where more than 100 people showed up last night to weigh in on the proposal to close Noe Street at 24th Street for two months to build a trial pedestrian plaza, I asked a woman to point me to the entrance to the community room.

"For or against?" she demanded.

"Neither," I said. I'm just writing a follow-up story on it for Streetsblog.

Then I got to the meeting, and Mary McFadden, a resident living at 24th and Noe and the spokesperson for those opposed to the trial, helped make up my mind immediately.

Despite the claim by Supervisor Bevan Dufty in his opening remarks that "What makes Noe Valley unique is that, going forward, we find a way to build community and do better things," plaza opponents like McFadden characterized increased public space not as an amenity, but a burden.

"For someone who's going to be there for an hour a week, it's not the same as having to live with it, live there 24/7 and live with the people, live with the noise and the garbage and the traffic jams that are sure to erupt," she said.

Not only do I find those comments antithetical to community, they seem incredibly counter-intuitive. You're getting an extension on your front yard and that's a problem?

McFadden: "Those of us who oppose this are not opposed to change. As I said, I've been here four generations, I've seen a lot of it -- good, bad. We just want change that's well thought out, well planned and contributes to the community."

And not in the way of traffic?

McFadden: "My concern about the trial is that all these measurements have to be done first before the trial. And I'm not sure how we measure the inconvenience."

That's what I thought, it's the traffic.

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While public reaction to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's Pavement to Parks plazas and parklets has been generally positive and the city is about to make the Castro trial more permanent, the proposal to close a Noe Valley street to cars and open it to pedestrians for a pilot plaza is generating quite the controversy.

Though the Mayor's Office and the San Francisco Planning Department had scouted the 24th Street business corridor with Supervisor Bevan Dufty and the Noe Valley Association, the Community Benefit District that represents merchants in the area, many residents found out their neighborhood was being considered for a plaza when they read about it in the newspaper.

"A lot of the neighbors were taken by surprise," said Matthew Fulvio, a resident living near the proposed plaza. Project opponents promptly mobilized by collecting petition signatures and making opposition signs that neighbors hung in their windows.

As a result of the opposition, Fulvio said he and his neighbors got a meeting with the city ahead of the first official public meeting this Thursday. At that meeting in early March, Fulvio and other neighbors spoke with Noe Valley Association's Deborah Nieman and the Planning Department's Pavement to Parks project manager Andres Power, to outline their concerns.

Fulvio said that the closure of the street to traffic was a worry, but not nearly as big an issue as the impact the plaza would have on deliveries, the impact on trash collection, general sanitation, and the noise generated by those using the plaza.

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San Franciscans, like residents of most big cities, are in a continuous process of reshaping public spaces. There are pilot programs for new ways to use Market Street, for pocket parks in areas covered with underutilized asphalt, for Sunday Streets closures, for opening sidewalks to “green sewers,” and even some tentative efforts to launch more public art and/or urban agriculture in empty lots. All of these experiments are welcome departures from the long-simmering biases favoring the total unquestioned domination of private automobiles over public space.

Behind most of the experiments are deeper ideas of an improved life, what some people are quick to dismiss as “utopian.” The anti-utopians apparently consider change impractical or threatening, or have accepted the close-minded meme of the past few decades that any kind of “social engineering,” or public planning to improve human interaction, is inherently totalitarian. This mentality is rooted in a presumption that the way things are is always good enough, or that even if they aren’t, humans are so inherently corrupt or power-mad that any effort to improve things can only make it worse. The dark chapters of mid-20th century totalitarianism (now being regularly conflated to the present by Murdoch’s pompous blowhards) are somehow supposed to be examples of why trying to make life better is impossible. The American Way of Life, with all its poverty, racism, militaristic imperialism, shallow materialism, et al, is somehow the best we can hope for, and anyone who doesn’t accept that at face value is at best a dupe of some future dictator.

For those of us concerned with transit planning, or urban planning more broadly, this politico-cultural baggage comes with the territory. It shapes the discussion before it starts, and so a lot of folks have learned to think small, so as not to fan the flames of fear.

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With scores of people crowding the sidewalk and taking up one lane of traffic on Divisadero in front of Mojo Bicycle Cafe, Mayor Gavin Newsom, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and city department heads heralded a new "parklet" sidewalk extension as a piece of a growing trend of re-purposing street space for people instead of cars. The new trial parklet was built into the space formerly occupied by two parked vehicles, providing several hundred square feet of public space and benches, tables, planters and bike racks.

"This is a change in philosophy and how we think of the public rights-of-way," said Department of Public Works Director Ed Reiskin, who noted that approximately 25 percent of the public space in San Francisco is taken up by streets.

"There's an extraordinary amount of the public realm that is not park space, that's actually in the public rights-of-way, that's actually the streets," said Reiskin. "Unfortunately most of it is covered with concrete and asphalt and it was designed for cars and not for people."

The Mojo Cafe parklet is the first of several forthcoming parklets, which are technically part of the Pavement to Parks initiative spearheaded by Mayor Newsom. Though the projects are pilots, they have proven very successful and have quieted some of the early critics in neighborhoods where they've been implemented.

Newsom prefaced his remarks by assuring those critical of the parklet that Divisadero and the North of Panhandle neighborhood had not in fact lost any parking because an old bus stop that was removed nearby is now parking for two cars.

"This is all about taking the narrative of the 25 percent of our land mass that [is] streets, and begin to take a little bit of that back and open that up for the community and create a framework where there is a stronger community connection, a stronger sense of place and a better community environment as well," said Newsom.

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With the official unveiling of the new Mojo Cafe "parklet" coming early next week, RG Architecture's crew (with volunteers from the SF Great Streets Project) scrambled to complete the wooden sidewalk extension with enough time to work out any kinks before Mayor Gavin Newsom heralds the innovation with a crowd of media and elected officials standing on it.

Riyad Ghannam, principal of RG Architecture, said they hoped to have the project completed by today, though there were always wrinkles to iron out upon installation that weren't anticipated in the drawing room. Ghannam's excited crew split time between building the project and answering questions of curious passers-by, who uniformly gave the project their approval.

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