What it Takes to Build a Parklet

Written By Veronica Foster

By Veronica Foster, Communications + Advocacy Manager

7 min read Read more about how the Civic Design Center took Nashville’s annual PARK(ing) Day from advocacy to reality with a Parklet Design Competition and a partnership with the Nashville Department of Transportation.

Gone are the days where all Nashvillians care more about parking than they do about pedestrian space. With pedestrian death counts on the rise caused by poorly designed streets, people are demanding change. Nashvillians want to see better crosswalks with shorter crossing distances, more sidewalks, protected bike lanes, and maybe even dedicated transit lanes that they see when visiting other cities. They are demanding that we reclaim more of our streets from cars for the sake of safety, but safety and joy can go hand-in hand. Parklets are one great solution. Parklets are spaces reclaimed from street parking to be used as public benches, art installations, and more, but they are most widely used as patio space for cafes, bars, and restaurants. They can beautify a streetscape, shorten a crossing distance, and add more street activity that drivers need to pay attention to, organically slowing their speeds. The idea of parklets first came to Nashville through PARK(ing) Day over a decade ago.

PARK(ing) Day as Advocacy

The iconic PARK(ing) Day demonstration (2012)

From the outside, PARK(ing) Day may have just looked like a fun excuse to create pop-up parks that the community could enjoy in a festival-like display of design talent, but for the Design Center it has always been about advocacy. The original PARK(ing) Day, which our former Design Director, Ron Yearwood, brought to Nashville in 2012, was iconic. The photo of the pop-up park created by Hawkins Partners displayed in a parking space on Broadway is widely used to represent the idea that we can celebrate our streets as pedestrian public space. It also actively demonstrates how those pop-up installations helped pave the way for Lower Broadway’s sidewalks to be expanded, replacing street parking.

Parklet install adjacent to Church Street Park doubles as a library (2019)

A few years later, when Church Street Park was at risk of being developed into a massive high-rise, the Civic Design Center used PARK(ing) Day as an excuse to activate the park and the surrounding parking spaces with pop-up parks. This demonstrated that Church Street Park was worth saving. In 2021, the park received minor aesthetic upgrades and it now has a robust activation schedule of events.

During Covid-19, expanding our outdoor space became necessary, so a temporary legislation was passed that made it easier for businesses to apply for sidewalk cafe permits, which could also be used for parklets. This was finally the opening to prove the value of parklets and give Nashville the opportunity keep parklets for much longer than 1-day. In 2021, 2 businesses tried out a parklet pilot with us, going through an outdated sidewalk cafe permit process, then finally revealing longterm parklets on PARK(ing) Day. Thereafter, Council Member Sean Parker wrote and sponsored the legislation that would create a permanent permitting process for both sidewalk cafes and parklets. The bill passed Metro Council in 2022 with flying colors.

We worked alongside Nashville Department of Transportation (NDOT) to address some of the hiccups discovered with the longterm parklet pilot, and they created an amazing Parklet Permit Manual this year with an online application, an internal review committee, and a robust checklist. It felt like a natural evolution of PARK(ing) Day to inspire people to go through the new permit process and create a parklet for their businesses or communities. That’s how we arrived at the Parklet Design Competition.

Good Design: Seeing is Believing

In Nashville, parklets aren’t just for 1 day of the year anymore, so we approached NDOT with the idea to work alongside their department to help usher in the first permanent parklet’s success. In order to make this possible, we knew we would have to step back from facilitating pop-up parks for PARK(ing) Day, but facilitating the first permanent parklet felt like the culmination of over a decade of advocacy. If we were going to be the first, we also wanted to show Nashville that while parklets can just be a table and chairs, they can also exemplify Nashville’s excellent design talent. To do that, we were going to have to find a designer to create the parklet and a builder to bring that design to life.

Assembling the Team

Hoar Construction volunteers during the parklet building process

First, we asked ourselves: who would be interested in donating time and materials to build a permanent parklet? There are always several construction companies who participate in PARK(ing) Day, but this would probably be a bit of a bigger commitment. We reached out to our Board Member, Philip Shepard, who recently offered to support us with a volunteer project through his company, Hoar Construction. We approached him with a big ask: Could Hoar donate materials, project management, time and labor to build the structure, and also do all of that in just one month? He ran it up the flag pole and we couldn’t be more grateful that they committed to this project.

Wilburn Street Tavern team on PARK(ing) Day in the completed parklet

When it came to approaching a business about implementing this parklet idea for them, we wanted to make sure it was someone who understood the commitment and the value. They would have to go through the permit process with us and then maintain the parklet for at least a year following its creation and hopefully much longer. Council Member Parker always used his local haunt, Wilburn Street Tavern, as an example for a neighborhood bar with a simple parklet that functioned well. We approached Wilburn Street Tavern owner, Teresa Mason, whose temporary Covid-19 sidewalk cafe permit was soon to expire. We asked her if we could give her a parklet, and her response was immediately enthusiastic. With our contractor and our business partner, this just left us to recruit a designer.

Review committee rating the design submissions

To retain the spirit of PARK(ing) Day, we launched a design competition that recruited local talent to submit their ideas for a parklet that would be unique to Wilburn Street Tavern. We had some requirements for design elements that Teresa wanted to see as well as the standard requirements in the Parklet Permit Manual. We assembled a review committee that would rate each submission based on design quality, permit feasibility, buildability, materiality, and whether or not it represented Wilburn Street Tavern. All identifying information was removed for the review committee, and ultimately the winner was selected after an intensive 3-hour session.

When I revealed the winning submission’s identity, the room burst into laughter. The winning design was submitted by Ron Yearwood of Barge Design Solutions. You may remember him as our former Design Director, huge parklet advocate and the founder of PARK(ing) Day Nashville. Ron has clearly established himself as a parklet design expert, and we hope that more designers in town will strive to design parklets with this perfect balance of creativity and buildability. It was a pleasure to work with his whole team who created the design, including Alex Penel.

Ron Yearwood on a volunteer day staining the parklet

Barge Design Solutions team on a volunteer day painting the parklet

From Vision to Permit

During the process, we created a checklist based on the one on NDOT’s website, demonstrating some roles and responsibilities of each player. While it is fairly easy to submit the digital application, the steps that come afterwards may sound like a foreign language to folks who don’t work in the planning or design industries. Some business owners who can’t afford a designer might throw in the towel after learning that they need to provide a site plan just to start the process. That’s why we have partnered with NDOT to be a liaison between applicants and the department. Applicants can use our beta “Parklet Design Creator” to receive a basic site plan and elevation that will get the ball rolling. We can also help connect applicants to neighborhood groups and stakeholders in order to adequately involve the surrounding community.

CAD drawing by Barge Design Solutions representing the parklet dimensions

While a basic site plan might receive preliminary approval to proceed with construction, a contractor will require detailed specifications of the structure. For applicants who have higher budgets and more complex design ideas, we highly encourage them to seek a design team. Following the Parklet Design Competition, we now have a list of professionals who are well-versed in parklet designs to share. In Barge Design Solutions’s case, they not only donated their design, but they also contributed additional time to help refine the CAD drawings for construction specifications as well as time to stain and paint the parklet when it was finally built.

NDOT was an excellent liaison between various Metro departments that had never dealt with a true parklet before, especially the newer guidelines, which offer much more creative flexibility than the original sidewalk cafe permit. Together, we realized that some departments needed to be approached who weren’t originally included in the interdepartmental review committee. Wilburn’s parklet site is located adjacent to a Nashville Electric Service utility pole, and we realized that there weren’t established guidelines on buffer from aboveground power. As a bar, Wilburn also needed to apply for a brand new Beer Permit since the service area would be expanded by the parklet. The Beer Board also requires several departments to inspect the site that are also included in review of the Parklet Permit, so NDOT had to address these redundancies.

While there were some roadblocks, we collectively learned a great deal about what it takes to facilitate a fully built, permitted parklet from start to finish. It was extremely valuable to go through the whole process so we can consult with applicants effectively and reclaim more public space across Nashville.

The Big Reveal

Throughout the whole construction process, we posted teasers on social media, but we didn’t reveal the winner of the Design Competition or the actual design until PARK(ing) Day. See the winning design submission and read their narrative on the Parklet Design Competition page. We hosted a Block Party to celebrate the parklet’s official ribbon cutting ceremony and enjoy the street as public space for people. Wilburn Street Tavern served its very first drinks in the parklet, Bad Luck Burger Club served food, and there were several lawn games as well as a DIY tabletop parklet station!

Parklet ribbon cutting with the Barge Design Solutions team

Resources

Interested in applying for your own parklet permit? Check out the following resources.

Interested in seeing the press we received for PARK(ing) Day and the big reveal?

Veronica Foster
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