Park(ing) Day turns public car spaces into community parks in downtown Eugene

Lexi Peters was walking by Perugino coffee shop in downtown Eugene Saturday, Sept. 19, when she stopped to paint on a canvas perched on an easel in a parking space. 

The art project was part of Park(ing) Day, a worldwide event that involves creatively converting public parking spaces into small parks and places for art, play and enjoyment, according to the city of Eugene, which put out a call for entries to host a space.

“I’m an artist, and I decided, you know, I haven’t had a brush in my hands in a long time, and it just seemed like a really fun thing to do,” said Peters, a 50-year-old Eugene resident. 

Local artist Erick Wonderly Varela was inviting “children and children at heart” to contribute to the paint-by-numbers canvas.

“We are here for Park(ing) day, and essentially taking some parking space to reimagine what these parking spaces could look like if they were used as parks, if they were used for outdoor seating, and if they were used generally as outdoor community spaces rather than just being parking spaces,” Wonderly Varela said.

The canvas featured a frog and a raccoon, characters from the artwork Wonderly Varela created for Walktober, a month-long series of community walking events organized by the Lane Council of Governments.  

“I often find that art is a great way to connect with folks in the community, and especially whenever folks feel invited to participate in a public art project, they often feel more a part of the overall community,” Wonderly Varela said.

Saturday was the 20th anniversary of Park(ing) Day, which was started in San Francisco by a design firm called Rebar that converted a parking space into a miniature park for a day. Eugene has participated off and on since about 2014, said Caswell Attegrene, who works in the city’s transportation department. 

“We here in Eugene, as a community, just have so much creativity, and so this is a really fun event to kind of highlight what people are doing and various talents that people have,” she said.

The city provides the parking spaces and participants bring their own materials for the five-hour event.

“What I love about it is that it is taking a space that we pass by every day, or maybe we put our car in, and watching it transform into some place where people are gathering, where people are chatting and talking to one another,” Attegrene said. “Everyone walking by, of course, stops and is like, ‘What’s this? What’s going on here?’”

She said it creates an unexpected interactive dynamic. 

“Those interactions, it creates, kind of, instant community when you have that curiosity and engagement,” Attegrene said. “It’s really a beautiful thing to watch.”

Tables and chairs were also placed in parking spaces for people to enjoy food and drinks from Perugino. Eugene resident Rachel Anne Collins played a piano set up outside. 

Two blocks away, in the parking spaces in front of Portal Tea, lawn chairs were set up for a community craft circle. Eugene resident Anchen Texter taught participants how to use small cardboard looms to weave fabric scraps into mandalas. 

“It often sparks something in people seeing something like this,” she said. “I’ve had people come by and say, ‘Oh, my grandmother used to do this,’ or ‘How do you do this? I couldn’t possibly.’ You show them, and then it changes their mind about things.”