(Pic: Gothamist)
Being intractable fogies, we tend to look a bit skeptically on events that involve flamboyantly “creative” uses of public space. That’s just a matter taste though. We were even kind of “meh” about the idea of hanging millions of dollars worth of orange fabric in NYC’s Cental Park a few years ago, and pretty much everyone else seemed to adore it.
But as these things go Park(ing) Day is not so bad. The idea, hatched in SF in 2005, is to claim parking spaces for a day and transform them into miniature parks. This is happening in 500 different places and ways across the country today. Mainly in big crowded liberal-leaning cities, but also in some more far-flung locales. There are even a few in what Sarah Palin called “Real America.”
Beneath all the flair, fortunately, there is a worthy point. To hark back to David Byrne’s Wall Street Journal op-ed about an imaginary perfect city, parking is “dead real estate.” It’s a practical necessity to have some quantity of it available, of course, but in denser cities, towns, and neighborhoods, it’s a less than ideal investment.
Anyway, here’s a small gallery of Park(ing) Day pics, mostly from today’s action across the country. We’ll try to duck out of the office for a few minutes and check out one near us, here in Manhattan. We don’t plan on frolicking on the sod patches or donning a funny hat, but we might take a picture or two and add them to this post, if there’s anything to look at. For more on Park(ing) Day and finding “parks” near you, go here.
A temporary park in Washington DC today. (Pic: NBC)
More pics after the jump.
