What's a Parklet?

The latest attraction in the borough isn't a new restaurant, shop or construction project. It's simply a place to take a load off.

The borough (literally) rolled out its newest amenity last Thursday: a movable public space called a parklet.

The width of two parking spaces, a parklet combines the table-and-chairs atmosphere of an outside lounge with the greenery of a high-walled planter box, and is intended to create a modern seating area in the middle of the downtown action.

Currently parked outside of Grooveground Coffee Bar on Haddon Avenue, near the corner of Woodlawn Avenue, the parklet will move every month, promises Cassandra Duffey, Collingswood Director of Community Development, bringing a new street-level seating area to a different part of the borough downtown. 
 
Collingswood resident Jason Miller, who designed the parklet, had originally submitted his idea for it to the borough as an entry in the Knight Park/Reader's Digest contest.

"I work in planning, so I keep up to dated on planning/architecture/design news, and started reading about parklets popping up a few years ago," Miller told Collingswood Patch in an e-mail.

"Most people that frequently walk around Collingswood probably notice the sidewalks are a little tight, or that they become the waiting area of several restaurants," he wrote.

"So I kind of always thought Collingswood would be a perfect place for one, even though they have typically been built in large cities or their neighborhoods."

The triangular design of the planter box on one end of the parklet was an homage to Knight Park itself, Miller wrote. According to his calculations, the parklet was introduced 120 years after the establishment of Knight Park itself.

The idea for recapturing a couple of parking spaces to make mini-seating areas sprouted up on the west coast after being formalized by the city of San Francisco, Wikipedia says. 

Miller claims that the Collingswood parklet can be a two-birds-one-stone kind of solution for pedestrian and motor vehicle traffic in the borough: parklets have been observed to increase foot traffic to areas where they're placed, while simultaneously causing drivers to slow down.

"They can give people a place to relax and enjoy the scenery without feeling like they are in the way of pedestrians, or car traffic," Miller said.

The Collingswood parklet cost around $5,000 to build, split among funds provided by the Business Improvement District (BID) and the borough itself, Duffey said.

It was constructed with the help of the borough department of public works, and Miller told Patch he intended its design to capture some of the architectural elements of the downtown Haddon Avenue business district.

"While some parklets are designed with modern artistic flair, most are very simple and focus on functionality," he wrote. "The parklet's exterior uses the design of a Victorian bay window to blend into the architecture along Haddon Ave. instead of stand out as something modern and out of place."

Fitting in is a key design element to the parklet. If it works as Miller hopes it will, then the "mobile patio"—as Mayor James Maley called it in a press release—should simply dissolve into the background of the borough. 

"Hopefully people will initially think, 'Why haven't we always had one of these?' and then soon enough just assume we always have," Miller wrote.