By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The two parking spaces in front of Joanne Farrugia and Dean Smith’s toy store in Princeton will be occupied until November by a 40-foot-long structure intended to help build community.
It’s called a Parklet, an open-air place with rooms to sit in for drinking coffee, eating lunch, playing chess sitting on tree stumps or reading a library book — all with cars passing by on Palmer Square East. Made of lumber and environmentally friendly building material, it also uses solar, wind and hydro power, including water-powered cell phone chargers.
"This is public space, and I think as a community, we’re making a decision about how we use our public space," Mayor Liz Lempert said Wednesday at an unveiling of the Parklet, the second one Princeton will have had in two years. "And obviously, parking is important. We know parking is important. But community building is important too."
Parklets are used in other cities to turn parking spaces into community spaces; Princeton had one, on Witherspoon Street, in front of Small World Coffee, in 2015. It was wildly popular, including with Smith and Farrugia, the husband-and-wife team who owns jaZams.
"We experienced the last Parklet, and Joanne and I could regularly be found, up in town, having a cup of coffee in the old Parklet, sitting and talking to folks," Smith said. "And it was just this space where community was blossoming."
The couple decided they wanted to play host to the next one. The idea was to have the Parklet, a project run by the Arts Council of Princeton, up last year in front of their store, said Maria Evans, artistic director at the organization. But there was a snag that put the Parklet on a one-year hiatus.
"We couldn’t come up with sponsors very quickly, and I think we got too late a start," she said. "And so we were kind of scrambling. And vacations were getting in the way and all this stuff."
She said she and Dean and Farruiga met at the end of last summer, with the couple saying the process should start earlier, which it did. But to play host to the Parklet, the couple had to pay the town $2,500 in a sponsorship fee to cover the cost of taking two parking meters out of use during the time the structure is up.
The Parklet was a $9,000 to $10,000 project, built with different hands, including those of Smith and Farrugia. They came to affectionately call the lab on the Princeton University campus where the Parklet was constructed as the "build site."
"I am not a carpenter," Farrugia said. "And we used all sorts of tools at the build site. So we always joked about how, we were going to the build site, and I got to use something called an impact driver. Does anyone know what that is? It’s pretty wild, it’s this large machine that looks like a machine gun."
Parklet version 2, though similar in some respects to the one from two years ago, is different from its predecessor.
Local architect Joseph Weiss, the designer, said like with other projects of his, he seeks to draw inspiration from the place and the site. In this case, the sloping street led him to design a series of what he called "cascading rooms that flow down the street, energized by kids and grownups coming to play here."
