Amy Watenmaker did not expect to make a detour down Third Street when she visited Los Altos last week. The Sunnyvale resident had lunch at Rick’s Cafe and was planning to run errands with her 5-year-old son, Ilan.
“We just met our friends here,” Watenmaker said.
She spoke with other parents on the Third Street Green while Ilan stood on a play structure with several children he had met just minutes before.
It is the type of interaction that Robin Abrams, chairwoman of the Third Street Green Steering Committee, was hoping to see through the course of August at the downtown pop-up park.
“Things were active, and the place was activated,” Abrams said. “We built community downtown.”
The Third Street Green took a hiatus in 2015 and returned Aug. 4-28 with several goals. The city of Los Altos collaborated with Los Altos Forward and other community groups to encourage physical activity and spending at downtown businesses. There was unscheduled time, when people like Amy and Ilan could meet with friends, as well as planned programming.
Abrams pointed to an Aug. 12 performance by Bug Horn Rex as a particularly successful night on the Green.
“We had a higher turnout than we thought,” she said. “There were people sitting, people dancing, people on their wheelchairs” all throughout the sidewalk.
The mix of people – and the mix of motions – is encouraging to Sandra Winter, director of the Wellness Living Laboratory at Stanford University. She has collaborated with the city to investigate the health and social impacts of pop-up parks like the Third Street Green.
“There is this sense that having pop-up parks can help increase peoples’ physical activity,” Winter said.
Keeping track of the fun
Winter asked her summer interns and laboratory staff to keep track of the age, gender, ethnic background and activity levels of visitors to the Green to “get a feel for how many people are using the park.”
Stanford is also conducting “intercept surveys” to see what people think of the park and whether it should become a full-time feature of Los Altos.
Winter said that during the last Third Street Green and in its previous iteration as the State Street Green, “there were not a lot of teens in the park. There were a lot of older adults and children and family groups.”
For Winter, the difficult question for politicians as well as public health officials is, “How do you make a very small space comfortable for older adults and children and teens to all share?”
The Third Street Green Steering Committee tried to attract more teenagers in 2016. Abrams said some teenagers asked for more pingpong in the future, adding that she was “really glad to be able to reach that demographic.”
Winter’s colleague Abby King, director of Stanford’s Healthy Aging Research and Technological Solutions Laboratory, promotes physical activity in communities, primarily among older adults.
Winter focuses on the park as community space. Both researchers are working with Jennifer Quinn, Los Altos’ director of economic development, to determine whether more people lounging on the Green led to more money spent downtown.
“They asked us if we’d be interested and we could add this data to the data we provided before,” Winter said. “It’s a mutually-agreeable understanding.”
Quinn hopes to use sales-tax data to determine whether there’s any change in historical revenue patterns downtown. The Stanford researchers noted that it was “difficult” as third parties to get sales data “in a way the businesses felt comfortable with.”
Making the Green
While it is too soon to draw any conclusions, Winter said “the amount of people who visit the park indicates that this is definitely something that is appealing to the community.”
Abrams said the steering committee will identify three potential Los Altos locations for the park next year.
“Part of the reason for that is to learn how to use a park and where should it be,” she said.
Abrams acknowledged parking concerns.
“We also know that sometimes (a park) is helpful to merchants and sometimes it is not,” she said.
Sylvia Komrosky, general manager of Rick’s Cafe, said the Third Street Green “hasn’t really changed our customer base.”
The Stanford researchers are not collecting business data in 2016. Winter said that is because there are only the two businesses on the corner of State and Third streets, which would not lead to reliable data.
At the center of Winter’s research is the question of whether the environments in which people live affect their decisions.
“Around here,” she said, “we are very lucky and have a beautiful environment.”
