My Experience Hosting a "Play Street"

For years, I have wanted to close my street to cars and have a block party.

It’s something one of the neighboring streets by me does. In fact, I learned that in the past, almost every street in Cleveland would do this at least once during the summer. Think of the social capital and trust that built! The sense of community!! Gah.

My street, though, is/was sort of a “collector” street or whatever. Moderate traffic, some cut through. And so my neighbors were basically a little hesitant when I brought this up in the last. It took me YEARS to get the credibility I needed in my neighborhood where, finally, this year we were able to go ahead and attempt it.

Shout out to one of my neighbors who was just like, “we should go for it.”

My idea was to do a “Kids Bike Parade” on the Fourth of July. The Fourth of July is very fun in my neighborhood. It is basically an illegal fireworks extravaganza. Which can get aggravating but if you just go with it has its charms.

During the day though, we don’t have a parade or anything. It felt a tiny bit lonely some years. With my bike parade suggestion, I was basically copying a tradition from a cute street I knew about in Cleveland Heights. I am the “president” of a neighborhood based group whose whole mission is hosting free events for families, so I have some experiencing organizing small events.

Anyway, my city, Cleveland, recently updated its rules around this. It used to be to have a block party, you had to pay two cops overtime to stand around the whole time. A couple years ago, during police reform, they got rid of that rule. Now all you need is a $75 permit and your city councilperson’s permission.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve done this. Two times in prior years, my little organization hosted a “play street” on this weird side street that has almost no houses fronting it. Those were successful also.

Anyway, this year, it happened. I got permission to close my own street, just for two hours. We only closed a very short section. It was just as awesome as I hoped.

In my book I’m working on, about making more room for children in public space, Play Streets are a key strategy advanced by one of the main “heroes,” a British mom and activist. Her name is Alice Ferguson.

For this event, I followed her playbook. When Alice’s group, Playing Out, hosts these, and they’ve hosted LOTS of them, they simply have two volunteers posted near each end of the street closure. They politely help direct through traffic around the block. Residents that need to leave the block or enter it in a car, for work or whatever, can do so, they are just escorted at a slow speed. (We did that once and the person was very cool about it.)

Anyway, the event was a big success. One thing we did that was fun and critical, I think, was we added water. Neighbors were able to just stretch hoses from their house to hook up a sprinkler. Another neighbor just happened to have a hose attachment and key for a fire hydrant, so we made use of that as well. It was July after all. But we lucked out with very good weather and we’re blessed with a lot of tall shady trees.

We sat a kiddie pool full of water in the middle of the street. Which was good for the very young kids.

For people behind the paywall I’ll share a few more photos.