Parking Day is coming up this Sunday, and an event at Wilburn Street Tavern will showcase how a pandemic-born initiative could be used to make Nashville a more pleasant place for everyone.
So-called parklets — such as sidewalk extensions used to provide additional space, or parking spaces used for outdoor dining seating — are familiar to anyone who’s lived in a city with a dense urban core, like San Francisco or New York City. In Europe, even in less bustling and dense cities, it’s common to stop at a cafe for lunch and be seated outside on the sidewalk, or even in the street. Parklets can take many different forms, and in a city like Nashville, where their usage is few and far between, it could take time for people to grow accustomed to them. This Sunday on Wilburn Street in East Nashville, residents will get to see what an evening out in the denser future of Nashville could look like.
“A lot of us, for safety reasons, were really pushing ourselves to congregate in outdoor spaces during the pandemic peak,” says Councilmember Sean Parker, whose District 6 is home to Wilburn Street Tavern. “And I think that a lot of us were kind of like, ‘Well, this is actually kind of nice.’”
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, local governments around the country were trying to find ways to financially stimulate restaurants — incentivizing to-go orders, allowing alcohol to get packed up to go. But one of the most lasting ideas might be the utilization of parklets.
Parklets got people back to in-person dining in a way that was deemed safer than eating inside a crowded restaurant, and Nashville was one of the cities that took advantage of parklets. Parker, working with East Nashville business owners and Metro staff, began work on legislation to allow restaurants to implement sidewalk cafes on an emergency basis.
But what was once a temporary pandemic measure has since become a more permanent option for Nashville.
“We’re no longer tied to this kind of temporary pandemic-peak moment,” says Parker. “That means that businesses can be more comfortable making investments in these installations.”
With the help of Nashville Department of Transportation director Diana Alarcon, Parker was able to pass legislation to permit restaurants to install permanent parklets. That means restaurants and bars like Wilburn Street Tavern can now invest more resources in making their parklets pleasant places for people to spend their time and money.
“If you think you might have your permit not renewed in six months, maybe you’ll go buy some plastic tables and stick them out there,” says Parker. “Maybe you’ll get an umbrella or two, but you’re not going to go and build these more complicated installations.”
Parker says there are a number of things businesses need to consider when trying to get a permit for a permanent parklet: the design, context of the space and whether it will obstruct the public right-of-way, to name a few. But he hopes businesses will be incentivized to make use of this tool and provide their patrons with outdoor areas to congregate.
The Wilburn Street Tavern parklet will be the first taste of what those more complicated installations could look like. Nashville’s nonprofit Civic Design Center hosted a competition to see which design firm could come up with the best plan. The winner of that competition, along with the fully designed and constructed parklet — which will be covered and feature permanent seating along with a number of other unique design features — will be unveiled on Sunday, at a ribbon-cutting event co-hosted by the Civic Design Center and NDOT.
Design experts and stakeholders see the Wilburn parklet as the model for how this new tool in the city’s belt could be used to reclaim areas often taken up by cars. But there are lots of options available to businesses in regard to parklets, and chances are Wilburn Street Tavern will not be the only one to take advantage of them.
“I think a lot of folks are just not aware of the possibilities and the opportunities here,” says Parker. “So I think Parking Day’s a really cool event to showcase that.”
