Urbanism Field Trip – Bastille on Bishop in Oak Cliff
July 15, 2010 at 3:55 pm | Architecture & Urban Design | Tags: Bicycling, events, peer cities, urban design
Here’s a detour from Fort Worth coverage – took a field trip to the Bastille Day street festival in Oak Cliff’s Bishop Arts District to see how they did with a real, close-the-street-and-have-a-party street festival type event. It seems planners were expecting around 300 people to come, but more like 1,000 showed up. It was popular, in other words.
Bishop was closed for a couple of blocks in the heart of the district. One portion was lined with tents for the mussel cooking competition that would be held later in the evening. There were also wine-related events, and of course the many and varied merchants of the Bishop Arts District were participating as well.
At this end of the street, parking for bicycles and scooters was set up:
There were plenty of both, especially bikes (which spilled out across the rest of the Bishop Arts District as the parking area filled up).
The event was filled with, as our friends at Walkable DFW pointed out, Texans doing exactly what some people would have you believe Texans would never do – walking, riding bikes, socializing, and playing in an urban public setting, even when it’s hot.
Build spaces for people, and watch as people come from all over to use them thanks to our shortage of great places designed around human beings.
Outside of the core festival area, the sidewalks were bustling with life.
In the second half of the festival area, the street had been taken over by games. One end held a biggie-sized chess board, while the rest of the space featured a dirt bocce ball field.
Bikes & bocce ball – always a fun combination for photos.
Crowds were impressive, and I’m betting the businesses were loving it – they were all packed.
Lovely cruisers parked at the other end of the street.
The view down the festival.
The always-tasty Eno’s was packed to the rafters with activity.
It was an impressive showing, and a big congratulations go to Oak Cliff organizers and activists for creating such a wonderful street festival.
It’s definitely the sort of thing we’d love to see in Fort Worth more often – more intimate and grassroots than the events around here tend to be. The Bishop Arts District is a great example of a maturing Urban Village, with a variety of housing and retail destinations in a human-scaled, human-oriented form.