The Melrose Ped/Bike Committee is pleased to join Mayor Paul Brodeur, DPW Director Elena Proakis-Ellis, and the City’s Office of Planning & Community Development in celebrating the installation of the first modular wooden on-street parklet funded through the city’s “Shared Streets and Spaces” grant.
In the City’s 2017 Master Plan, “Melrose Forward,” recommendations were issued for increasing commercial foot traffic in our business districts. One of those recommendations was developing a program for the use of parklets. The Ped/Bike Committee was able to serve as technical support both during the grant writing process, and also afterward, in coordinating volunteer efforts to both design and build the parklets. We are thrilled to have helped the city achieve this important master plan goal, which our members fully support. These parklets, like so many other aspects of our community, would not be possible without an incredible array of volunteers. Rather than using off-the-shelf materials like jersey barriers or fencing, the city agreed that a modern wooden design would fit better with the look and feel of Melrose. To accomplish this, we turned to the incredibly talented local architect Emily Lammert who, alongside Ped/Bike Chair Jonah Chiarenza, developed a “modular” design which could be deployed in a broad array of sizes. After the DPW procured materials using grant funding, we needed to assemble a team to actually follow the design and built them, and our community came through in a huge way. On behalf of the entire city, the Committee would like to thank the following residents for all the time, thought, energy, and hard work they put into building this first set of parklet modules from scratch:
Ryan Bagwell, Cindy Chabot, Chris Dinan, Jennifer Johnson, Jeremy Garczynski, Craig Molway, Dan Krechmer, Joe Nerden, Maddie Nerden, Deven Erickson, Krista Poulin, Sean Allen, Caitlin Beatty, Alex Schmidt, Finn McSweeney, Ryan Williams, John Abdulla, and Bruce Herrmann.
The design of these parklets will support the display of public art, and we look forward to supporting the city and the local art community in developing a program for this. The parklets can also hold planter boxes or other seasonally-appropriate decorations. There are still many more modules to be built, which will replace all of the remaining orange “placeholder parklets” — if you, or anyone you know, would like to be involved in the next build, please reach out to us and stay tuned for dates!
Finally, and most importantly, these parklets belong to the community – please go enjoy them. They are open for public use and not associated with any particular business. We all understand how critical supporting one another, and our small business community, is during these trying times. But for many of our shops and restaurants, things will get harder, not easier, this winter. The city has recently extended restaurants’ abilities to serve outdoors, in accordance with Governor Baker’s order on outdoor dining. Not every business has outdoor space to use. This is why the state offered the grant program in the first place, and why these parklets are so important to our community. The Dutch have a saying: there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. Even as the temperatures drop, bundle up and get out there. The city has not yet figured out exactly how long these parklets will stay up. In many respects, it’s snowfall dependent, but the more we use these parklets and make them our own, the more successful they will be.
We look forward to seeing you out there!
Here are some photos from our epic construction weekend:
