Pop-up parks in parking lots hit sweet spot
I spent a couple hours Friday in a parking spot on Queen St. W.
I wasn’t inside a car though. I was sitting on a bubblegum-pink plastic Muskoka chair inside a wooden crate rimmed with a fun house mirror.
You can see why so many people peeked their heads inside during lunch.
“What is it?” the two punks carrying a 1980s-style boom box asked. My answer: “It’s a park.” Unless you are reading this in California, you likely didn’t know that Friday was International Park(ing) Day. It started seven years ago when a few designers in San Francisco got fed up with all the space in the city’s central core reserved for empty cars. So they slipped their coins into a meter, unfurled some sod, hauled in one of those antique metal benches and a planter sprouting a tree and sat down for two hours, until their time was up.
Activists around North America have been doing the same thing for years on Car Free Day. They call them meter parties, and they usu- ally pull out a couch and settle in to pour some tea and provide some street theatre. But for some reason, the San Francisco event went viral. The next year, there were 47 popup parks taking up parking spaces around the world. Last year, there were 975 in 162 cities. You can flick through the photos and see people from Brisbane and New York City and Amsterdam digging into parking-spot beaches, hosting parkingspot yoga classes, sitting in parking-spot succulent gardens.
It’s such a simple subversive idea: If you can reserve space for your empty car, why can’t you book it for other things?
Like your hats or your bird cages or your friends’ wedding reception?
According to Andrew Chiu, one of three downtown designers behind the Queen St. parking park, all the metered parking spaces in this city patched together add up to 66 Yonge-Dundas squares. We are big on our cars in this city. The last time Toronto celebrated Park(ing) Day, it didn’t go so well. Three years ago, Chad Wolfond hired an artist to put an installation in the parking spot outside his art gallery in Forest Hill Village. While he paid the meter, she put down sod, Muskoka chairs made from hockey sticks, some hockeystick trees. A nearby barber started to give cuts there, and kids stopped in for lemonade on their way home from school. But one grumpy neighbour called the police. “It’s funny how the loudest person could shut something down, while so many people loved it,” Wolfond said over the phone. This time, Chiu and his partners got a $90 special-event permit and $200 worth of insurance and all the boring things you need to have official fun in this city. And it was fun. Not as much fun as dashing naked down the street during a blizzard or sneaking into a party uninvited. But there was a fragrant dash of forbidden in the air that made people stop and smile and strike up conversations with strangers. A convenience store owner told me reporters in Korea are so powerful, they go into politics. A high school principal talked in French about his desire to return to Varanasi, India. Liendam Daf rolled into the space on her scooter and introduced us all to her dog, Lucky. My empty steel-grey Toyota has never inspired new friendships. The mirror rimming the top of the crate wasn’t straight across. It followed the rise of a BMW 6 se- ries. When you looked at the space, it was like you were looking through a cellophane car. The acrylic mirror lined the inside too, where there was a surprise waiting for park-goers — dozens of balloons held in place by a grate roof. The sight caused a group of girls in school uniforms to gasp with glee.
That alone was worth the parking fee.
One last snatch of inspiration: Since International Park(ing) Day launched in San Francisco, more than 30 parking spots there have been converted semi-permanently into parks. Catherine Porter’s column usually runs Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca