Parklets on Pleasant

Do you know about Pleasant St? Pleasant St is a direct link between Washington Park and Findlay Market. You can literally see one of them from the other over the 5 blocks it spans. We use it all the time and its a relaxing stress free bike ride between the two places. Not that you have to ride a bike, Pleasant is a one lane narrow street and the cars that do use it are traveling at very low speeds. I have been hearing scuttlebutt since the beginning of summer about somehow making this link more official, or trying to highlight it somehow. Well it turns out that somehow is UC's Metrolab. If you remember last year UC Metrolab created some amazing placemaking structures for Walnut Hill's Five Alley Popup and now they've turned that attention to the community to Pleasant St. The students who make up UC Metrolab have created a series of Parklets and while Pleasant St was closed to traffic a couple weekends ago, debuted them to the neighborhood.

What is a parklet? A parklet is designed to provide a public place for passersby to relax and enjoy the atmosphere of the city around them, in places where the existing sidewalk width is not large enough to accommodate vibrant street life activities.

Judging by the people crowding around each one I'd say they were successful. But knowing how UC's Metrolab operates this won't be the end of the process, they'll fine tune the designs over the course of the summer before they have a finished product. The end game of this is to combine all these units into one big super parklet. Once the permits from the city are approved this will happen, hopefully before the end of the summer. I talked with Michael Zaretsky, the professor/activist heading up the Metrolab, about some of the challenges, one of the biggest I feel is pedestrians vs. Liberty. A person needs to traverse seven lanes of traffic to get from one side to the other. Seven lanes is a huge psychological barrier that needs to be crossed. Mr Zaretsky assured me the traffic department was aware of the issue and was working on solutions. But he said, it probably won't happen soon.
Anther cool tie in to making Pleasant more, ah pleasant is The Field of Greens, a wiffle ball field sponsored by People’s Liberty. Every time I've gone past there have been neighborhood kids in there having a blast.
The flashy new bars and restaurants are cool, sure. But it is these placemaking and community building that make a neighborhood.












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