Popping up on Spring Street in Los Angeles (seen here), and other cities like, San Francisco, Long Beach and Boston, Parklets are often built, as these are, with donated material, time and labor and are coordinated by neighborhood groups and city agencies.

Parklets in downtown Los Angeles were surrounded by redwood planters filled with beautiful landscaping and include safety planters and a wheel stop, a long bar-top with stools, an exercise bike, swing seats, and even a foosball table.

Landscape contractors can help revitalize downtown areas such as downtown Los Angeles' Spring Street, by installing parklets. Parklets are repurposed metered parking spaces bringing a mini-park with seating, planting, and communal, public spaces to urban, downtown areas first introduced in San Francisco's Pavement to Parks program.

A large and symbiotic team worked seamlessly together to bring the project from concept to completion in under 6 months time for a $0 budget with all parties donating 100 percent of both labor and materials.

A loyal customer, Pinnacle Landscape, brought TheGoodPlant into the fold fairly early in the planning stages. Pinnacle Landscape's director of business development, Tom Carns spoke with Andy Millar from Hensel Phelps Construction about doing public outreach work. He mentioned the parklets and it sounded like a perfect opportunity to give something back to the city of Los Angeles.

Principal at The Good Plant, John Beth, met with Pinnacle's director of construction, Kyle Johnson and landscape architect, Antonio Lopez, to choose the plant palette. They took into account drought tolerance and the ability for the plant material to stand up to the rigors of downtown urban life while giving everything a current, modern feel.

This project was a major collaborative effort amongst many individuals and organizations from Valerie Watson of Los Angeles Department of Transportation and Patti Berman of Downtown LA Neighborhood Council to councilman Jose Huicar and his staff along with several local designers, photographers and public relations firms. With projects like this, there's a fair amount of red tape that goes along with doing construction work on a busy L.A. city street.

All in all, the project went smoothly and was, for the most part, headache-free. Working on a busy street can be somewhat challenging with cars whizzing by and pedestrians everywhere. Close quarters made parking and staging issues interesting.???(R)???AE'?N????e'?N,A+Something that we had only a cursory part of, but found fascinating was the coordination of so many design elements in such a small space and what that entailed after the fact: On a project like this, a phenomenal number of city agencies are involved and many permits are pulled. It was an amazingly well coordinated effort.