It’s almost upon us! Back in early August, we told you about PARKing day, the now yearly event where people across the country put the “park” in “parking space”, reclaiming them as mini-landscaped art projects. At least one Wallingford group, including Nancy “Lorax” Merrill and Stuart “Folkstore” Herrick, has taken up the banner and will be greening up a spot just north of 42nd and Latona Thackery this Friday, September 18th. Lester Goldstein has written up this proclamation:
PROCLAMATION
Whereas reliable estimates suggest that at least 30% of Seattle’s land area is devoted to automobile use (roadways, highways, parking lots, driveways, garages, car dealerships, etc.) and that only 12% of the city’s area is devoted to parks, perhaps half of which is dedicated to recreation (golf courses, playgrounds, ball fields, etc.), leaving, therefore, only about 6% of our urban environment as pastoral and arboreal places to escape the pressures and frenzy of city existence and
Whereas most city dwellers accept that cities were not created to accommodate the needs of motor vehicles at the expense of the well-being of humans, surely not to the extent of yielding 5 times as much space to motor vehicle as to genuine parks,
Therefore, in that spirit, we hereby declare that creation of this
It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (living) Tree Museum (with chickens)
is a small, but significant, step in the human reclamation of our terrain towards the goal of making public space more suitable for the parking of people than of cars.
See this map of the PARKing Day spots around the city. Unpaving Paradise, which is setting up a large park on Capitol Hill at Summit and Pine, will have volunteers taking pictures of all the parks in the city. At 6:00pm, their panel of judges will give out awards, which Nancy, Stuart, Lester and crew will certainly win because their spot will have frickin’ chickens. Chickens, people, chickens!
Update: I had the address wrong. Nancy notes it’s “just north of Thackeray and 42nd in the 4200 block, east side of the street, listen for the clucks.”