Elevation DC: #parkingdaydc turns ~20 street parking spaces into mini-parks for the day
PARK(ing) Day has come and gone another year. As always, Elevation DC managing editor Rachel Kaufman CaBiked to as many spots as possible while the parklets were up.
PARK(ing) Day is a decade-old event where groups of people turn a street parking space into a mini park (or “parklet”). Maybe it’s just a bit of grass and a chair, maybe it’s a game of cornhole or a park bench. (One category of “things that go in parks but that we haven’t seen in parklets”: statues. Let’s have a giant statue in a parklet next year, please.)
On Friday, pieces of asphalt around the District were cordoned off and transformed into oases — or at least, that was the idea. These mini parks, called parklets, were set up as part of PARK(ing) Day, the stated mission of which is to “call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat.”
Four pop-up mini parks will be unveiled in NoMa Friday, Sept. 19, as part of Park(ing) Day, a global event in which metered parking spaces are transformed into temporary public parks.
Four organizations are creating mini parks:
D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray has earmarked $490,000 to help develop a network of public parks in NoMa and pledged the support of the District’s planning department to oversee the next stage in the process.
With the funds, the planning department could soon issue a request for proposals to firms to come up with design plans for miniparks throughout the Northeast D.C. business district. The District will be working closely with the NoMa Business Improvement District, which came up with a $50 million parks plan earlier this year that will serve as a blueprint for the planning department’s efforts.
Developers and planners of the District’s NoMa neighborhood, behind Union Station, are enjoying an incredible wave of construction but have long wrung their hands over the area’s lack of green space.
Officials from the District government and the NoMa Business Improvement District have looked for ways of accumulating enough land to build a large central park. But with so much of the neighborhood already pegged for development, the BID’s new president, Robin-Eve Jasper, decided to push for a network of smaller places for public gatherings, dog walks, relaxation, playgrounds and limited recreation.
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