Drop a coin in the meter and enjoy the park
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
John King
Any day of the week, the 500 block of Mission Street offers two good public spaces in which to kick back and relax: 101 Second St.'s jewel-box-like enclosed corner atrium, and a cozy, bamboo-lined plaza at 560 Mission St.
Thursday afternoon, when the sun was high and the winds were calm, another choice appeared briefly like a mirage: a 20-foot-long and 10-foot-wide patch of sod with two wooden benches and a potted European hornbeam that filled a parking space in front of an empty lot.
And what the green spot lacked in design nuance it made up for in novelty -- two hours later it was gone, wheeled away by bicyclists pedaling off with their portable landscape to transform another patch of asphalt.
"We want to get the public to rethink the way streets are used," explained John Bela of Rebar, which bills itself as "a collaborative group of creators, designers and activists." "Why not interpret a parking space as something that can be leased short term and used as a legitimate extension of open space?"
All of which made for good fun and a mild case of sunburn. But is also makes a point about what constitutes good public space in a city. Size doesn't matter; the important thing is to craft something that people can cherish -- and more often than not, the snug spots are the ones that work best.
Rebar is a free-form art collective with provocative notions about design's role in society. The members also have day jobs, since you don't pay the rent by unrolling sod in a parking space near First and Mission streets for two hours, as they did in November as an exercise in guerrilla greenery.
This year, instead of hit-and-run high jinks, there was a full day of choreographed events. Not only did Rebar cart its miniature landscape to five locations -- helped by young volunteers clad in black logoed Rebar T-shirts -- Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and Mayor Gavin Newsom donated their city parking spaces to the cause. There was financial support from the Trust for Public Land, and several design firms chimed in with park-ettes of their own.
Around the corner from where I caught up with Rebar, for instance, BAR Architects converted two spaces outside their Howard Street office into a "bioswale" -- a collage of fluffy sod, redwood mulch, gallon pots of drought-tolerant shrubs and paving stones plucked at random from the firm's stash of material samples. One of the new employees, Will Spurzem, read about the plan on a blog and easily persuaded leaders of the 85-member firm to join in.
Nearby at Second and Folsom streets, landscape architect Elizabeth Boults unrolled the most theatrical concept I saw: Equinoctial Point Park, "a celebration of night and day" (what, you didn't know the autumn equinox was last week?).
The space was sliced at a diagonal; one side featured sod and a yellow bench and artificial sunflowers, while the other had a black bench, dark pebbles (actually doormats from Bed Bath & Beyond) and a line of potato vines -- a member of the nightshade family.
"I heard about the idea and I was all over it," laughed Boults, who saw a flyer at the UC Extension office, where she teaches a landscape architecture course. "I had anxiety about it all last night, but I haven't been hassled at all. And I haven't put any quarters in the meter, either. People who stop to look do it instead."
The flyer for the event strikes a pose of rhetorical provocation, saying the goal is to "reprogram the urban surface." What was really going on, though, was environmental performance art.
And that's OK -- because the sod-in demonstrated a more lasting truth about what can make urban parks thrive.
Too often, success in open space is measured in acreage: the bigger the park or plaza, the better. Officials and interest groups want something they can boast about, or stand in front of on opening day.
But what we really need -- especially in dense downtowns -- are bits of the landscape that we can make our own. The places we remember are the ones we return to whenever we can, or the ones that we recommend to friends who are looking for a place to rendezvous. They're also the ones that feel like common ground, secure and attractive but also a place where the unexpected can occur.
In other words, what counts isn't landscape design so much as the initial intent. If the creators genuinely want a place where people want to be -- as opposed to something that looks good from a window, or something that keeps something else from getting built -- the rest will fall into place.
A patch of well-tended grass helps. Comfortable benches, along with a few chairs you can maneuver at will.
Add some shade from a tree and the sound of running water and a location with plenty of passers-by. Voila. It's human-scaled urbanity in the middle of the big bad city.
That's all it takes. Parking meters are optional.
Place appears on Tuesdays. E-mail John King, a big fan of William H. Whyte's "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces," at
jking@sfchronicle.com.
