Yes, you might surmise that a parklet is a small park. But to really get a visual, check out the parklets in downtown West Palm Beach.
That’s where restaurants are starting to morph parking spots and sidewalks into outdoor dining spaces, taking advantage of South Florida’s year-round subtropical climate.
Any business can apply to expand a little with a social outdoor setting — so that people can check out a menu, ponder their purchases, read, or just sit and relax — but so far it’s eateries that have taken advantage of the Parklet Grant Program put forward by the West Palm Beach Downtown Development Authority (DDA).
In fact, Avocado Grill was the first to apply and debuted the latest version of their parklet in June.
“People love to sit out there,” executive chef/owner Julien Gremaud said. “It’s by far the most demanded seating preference, even more than indoors. Especially now that the weather is not so humid. It just creates a whole new vibe, a whole new energy to the restaurant.”
How does the DDA define a parklet?
“A parklet is when we utilize a parking space and convert it into an extension of the sidewalk,” said Sherryl Muriente, the public realm director for the DDA who oversees the Parklet Program. “If the street has a curb, it would have a platform on top of a parking space. It gets surrounded by planters or a railing of some sort to kind of include it into the sidewalk area. Businesses can apply to then put tables and chairs on them for public seating or for actually expanding their restaurants on it. …
“It’s not necessarily attached to a restaurant. It could be attached to a retailer. It can be attached to any business that wants to expand an outdoor seating area in front of its space.”
For his new Sour Seed Bagels, which had a soft opening in March and a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their parklet in November, restaurateur Chris Slawson said the DDA’s program was a godsend.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this is really really amazing,’ because my particular business, I don’t have any inside seating,” Slawson said. “So to have an extension of sidewalk seating … was huge for me. It was just a really great opportunity.”
THE ORIGIN STORY
The genesis of the city’s Parklet Program stretches all the way back to 2008, and what was then called Park(ing) Day, a worldwide celebration of green, urban public spaces in which parking spots could be turned into temporary little parks — but only for one day on the third Friday of September.
Then in 2013, that idea was expanded when the DDA placed a platform over five parking spaces, with one of those spaces serving as the prototype platform to test out the future Parklet idea.
Fast-forward to 2016 when the DDA commissioned three “Street Balcony” parklet prototypes outside Field of Greens, Rocco’s Tacos and the former Le Rendez-Vous restaurant.
A study revealed that “merchants and visitors embraced the parklets for the extra sidewalk room, additional seating and the natural traffic-calming effects they introduced to the corridor,” said Muriente, leading the city to enact an ordinance. But, she added, the process was convoluted and difficult for businesses to navigate — as well as not very cost-efficient for merchants.
By 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city enacted an emergency ordinance and the DDA was able to program 10 city blocks and 45 businesses for different types of outdoor dining situations. That program was called Dining On The Spot.
“Some parklets had tents, some had planters,” Muriente said. “Every one of them was an experiment in real time. It gave us invaluable insight into what merchants actually need and what designs perform best. And with various city departments evaluating each idea for feasibility and safety, we were able to refine the program based on real-world evidence, not guesswork.”
Four years later, the city created what is now the Parklet Program based on information garnered from Dining On The Spot.
“We secured a $25,000 Knight Foundation grant that allowed us to create a Parklet Grant Program offering up to $10,000 in matching funds for downtown businesses,” Muriente said. “The goal was to help small businesses afford the design and buildout of parklets, everything from materials and labor to permits and furnishings, so they could activate the street and expand outdoor seating.”
The city’s parklet ordinance allows for two parking spaces to be used for each business, Muriente said. “If they were going to grow beyond that, they would need to get into agreements with their next-door neighbors or talk to the whole block. But in general … we found that two parking spaces was that sweet spot where it’s not too little so that they actually are able to sustain the cost of it.”
HOW IT WORKS TODAY
The Parklet Grant Program is for the downtown area, but parklets can be anywhere in the city. There are some restaurant parklet applications in the pipeline from the Northwood Village neighborhood, according to Muriente.
“I hope some other restaurants do the same because it’s just a very cool feature for downtown West Palm Beach,” Gremaud said. “Keep it going.”
Gremaud called his eatery’s parklet “very appealing.”
“The major difference is that it’s fully covered and we have fans and lights. It’s outside seating … but almost like inside seating because you are windproof and rainproof. It looks great. We’re very happy,” he added.
Through all of its incarnations, Muriente says both the city and DDA are thrilled with the response to the overall concept.
“We can see how good it is, not just for the merchants themselves, but even for the public,” she said. “It helps the streets slow down. It helps the community when they’re walking through, there’s interesting things to look at. It does bring that fascination while you’re walking and makes it very enjoyable.
“And so, funny enough, we have become the precedent for other cities to look at our program and say, ‘Maybe we could do something like that,’ which was kind of cool. It’s a very cool thing.”
