Jacqueline Kook and her 5-year-old daughter, Francesca Cabrera, were on their way to the playground when they came across a reading cart and obstacle course in the middle of Amsterdam Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Two and a half hours later, Francesca was happily sprawled on the tarmac next to a chalk drawing of two of her favorite cartoon characters, Bluey and Bingo.
“I can’t pull her away,” says Mrs. Kook, 42, who lives in Harlem. “It’s the beauty of New York City when you come across something colorful and fun — and a surprise.”
The play zone was the work of Street lab, a nonprofit that was already expanding its family-friendly pop-ups across the city as the pandemic sparked a hunger for more inviting outdoor spaces. The experiences come and go in one day, sometimes in just a few hours.
“Everything we do is designed to be pop-up — here today, gone tomorrow,” said Leslie Davol, 53, the executive director of Street Lab, which produced 353 pop-ups in the city last year, more than double that of the number. had in 2019.
The pop-ups borrow from an urban tradition of using streets and other public spaces for temporary (and sometimes unapproved) activities, such as turning roadside parking lots into “parklets.” Mike Lydonsaid an urban planner. The improvised spaces are meant to encourage social interaction.
Short-term actions can ultimately catalyze long-term change, an approach Mr. Lydon described as “tactical urbanism.” In New York City, guerrilla gardeners who threw “seed bombs” on vacant lots in the early 1970s helped lay the foundations for early community gardens. Times Square’s pedestrian plazas grew out of an experiment by city officials and business leaders over Memorial Day weekend in 2009 to close off a portion of Broadway to traffic and traffic. hundreds of folding garden chairs.
Mr Lydon said Street Lab’s programming “brings people into these spaces – especially young people – to animate them and show them the possibilities, reinforcing the idea that streets can be used in all sorts of different ways.”
Ms. Davol started Street Lab in New York in 2011 with her husband, Sam Davol, who plays the cello in The Magnetic Fields, a popular indie pop band. The couple and their two children had just moved back to the city from Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood, where they had lived for several years, and were first inspired to organize cultural activities in public spaces. They had put up a screen on a vacant lot opposite their apartment and were making a Chinese-language film series. They had turned an empty storefront into a library run by volunteers.
The Davols, who met in high school, raised $20,000 on Kickstarter and used it to create a portable “reading room.” They enlisted their architect friends, Eric Hoeweler and Meejin Yoon, who is now dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University, to design and build a bookcase of white cubes that stack into a tower. Called the “UNI— for an institution in the urban neighborhood — the cubes each contain books on a different theme, such as art, music or nature.
In 2011, on the 10th anniversary of September 11, the UNI was founded at a farmers’ market below Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in lower Manhattan. People crowded around the 6-foot-tall tower. Some Kickstarter backers arrived with book donations.
While the UNI was a hit, it wasn’t easy to move or set up. As demand increased, it was reduced to a reading cart on wheels, Ms. Davol said.
Today, the Davols work out of an office on the Brooklyn waterfront, just north of Red Hook. They have a full-time staff of six, along with up to 30 part-time employees who help with the pop-ups. Street Lab, which has a budget of just under $1 million a year, is funded primarily through city and state grants and city agency contracts.
A small fleet of 10 trolleys is available for use as portable reading rooms and for other programs, including an urban wildlife station that comes with microscopes, binoculars, and a stuffed red-tailed hawk. A no-touch obstacle course and chalk art station were added during the pandemic lockdown.
Street Lab’s turnkey activities have become a mainstay of the city’s so-called open streets, where traffic is prohibited or restricted at certain hours. While the pandemic initiative, which began in 2020, has been made permanent, the city’s network of open streets shrank by about two-thirds, to a total of 28 miles, last year. Community and business groups have struggled to run and maintain them, and opposition has grown from some residents, who find it more difficult to drive, find parking and get deliveries. (City officials are still assessing open street applications this year, but expect to authorize a similar number).
Street Lab works with city officials to help expand open streets to low-income and minority communities, including Brownsville, Brooklyn and the South Bronx. Ydanis Rodriguez, the city’s transportation commissioner, said the group helped officials “achieve a critical goal of making public space more equitable, meeting New Yorkers where they are and bringing them together on pedestrianized streets.”
Last year, six pop-ups popped up in Queens on Barton Avenue, an open street run by the Asian American Federation which is popular with Korean and Chinese families in the Murray Hill neighborhood. Children drew stars, planets and flowers with chalk, leaving heartwarming messages that lifted people’s spirits, said Ahyoung Kim, the federation’s director of economic empowerment.
Street Lab has also been involved in the outdoor dining movement, creating modular wooden tables that can be linked together to form shapes a larger, continuous table that is easily packed. Funded by a grant from the city’s Department of Small Business Services, the table was trialled on several open streets, including at a pizza party in Staten Island, a community potluck in Queens, and a sewing studio in Brooklyn. Street Lab makes four more.
Another project in the making, and also supported with city funding, is a “equipment library”, which lends carts, tables, benches, books and other materials, all free of charge, to business improvement districts and community groups. Street Lab also sells its pop-up kits to libraries, park managers and municipal authorities in dozens of cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Newcastle, Australia.
On a recent morning, before Francesca, the 5-year-old, had discovered the Amsterdam Avenue pop-up, half a dozen would-be Street Lab employees had quickly unpacked the bookcase, crammed about 200 books onto the shelves, and placed benches next to it, as well as an obstacle course and chalk area, between West 106th and West 107th Streets.
Curious passers-by came to watch. “This is a great opportunity for us to expand our repertoire of what we offer,” said Peter Arndtsen, the district manager of the Columbus Amsterdam Business Improvement District, which spends about $50,000 a year on open street programs and services.
But as dusk fell, it was time to go. The bookcase and activities were packed and loaded onto a truck until next time.
“We are part of an ecosystem,” Ms. Davol said. “We work with hundreds of groups. They all have this wonderful vision of community in their neighborhood and we want to support it and be a part of it.”