Pavement to Parks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

San Francisco’s two newest Pavement to Parks plazas got an official launch ceremony this afternoon after several months of public use, along with a promise from the Mayor to build twelve more public spaces like them before the end of the year. The twelve new locations will include a new plaza at the intersection of 24th Street and Noe Street in Noe Valley and Parklets, or wooden sidewalk extensions, on Divisadero Street in Nopa, 22nd Street in the Mission, Columbus Avenue in North Beach, and Clement Street in the Richmond.

With the success of San Francisco's Pavement to Parks trial plazas, the city is about to unveil its newest plan to use its streets for something other than cars when it converts parking spaces to public space by extending sidewalks into the street with durable wood platforms.