Over Labor Day, I drove to Idaho to retrieve my car, and last Friday someone stole it from where I had parked it while house-sitting in the Oakland hills. My car was an old Toyota van, and according to the police (since it didn’t have a club), a thief could practically blow on the locks, stick a screwdriver in the ignition, and take it for their own. I spent the next evening venturing into West Oakland before I realized that this wasn’t Law & Order, I wasn’t packing, and my self-appointed gig as detective just wasn’t safe on such crime-ridden streets. Once I had given my police report, I worked through my attachment to what was the coolest van I had ever driven, complete with a bed in the back and an inverter to run power. Then I recalled how I had prided myself earlier in the year for being a non-car owner, and how in a flash, I was back where I had started, slipping on my carbon-neutral slippers to walk more kindly on the earth.
Earlier in the day, I had visited with artists, activists, and conscious hipsters here in San Francisco to see how one could imprint their green mark on the city. It was the annual PARK(ing) Day, where people gathered between two parking meters, in these streets and those in forty-seven cities around the world, to exhibit and ponder the question: what would happen to the concrete jungle if it gave way for more grass?
Organized by Rebar, a collective of artists, designers, and activists, who take elements of the cultural world and remix them into new concepts, with support from Public Architecture and The Trust for Public Land, parking spaces were transformed into makeshift art installments, sod-laid parks for socializing, and other green innovative designs, all nestled between the traffic and the curb.
In front of San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) sat two artists, Leah Korican and Mary Marsh, who took garbage and repurposed it to make sculptured flowers—orange and yellow plastic buds of beauty, spun from hand size solar panels on wooden stems.
