Chicago Pop-Up Park

Many of you might have heard of pop-up park iniatives such as Park(ing) Day, which involves the transformation of urban parking spots into little pop-up parks. Joe Baldwin, founder of arts advocate organization Noisivelvet, must have thought that this can be done better. In conjunction with the Altgeld Sawyer Corner Farm, he turned nearly an entire Logan Square street block into a 3,000 square feet urban park for four hours. On the website of Time Out Chicago, Baldwin explains which preparations had to be made to get the job done. The funny thing is that his intervention was totally legal thanks to a Block Party Permit.

“The night before the event, the company dropped off several pallets full of turf squares. (…) Shortly after 8 am, about a dozen volunteers began tiling the road with sod. While the Block Party Permit allowed Baldwin and company to ask neighbors to move their cars off the street, the city doesn’t enforce the policy. Participants simply landscaped around parked vehicles, which Baldwin says, ‘added to the surreal feeling of a park on the street’.”

Click here for more pictures of the pop-up park.