Historic Kennett Square invites visitors to “meet me by the tree,” a reference to a holiday pocket park created in the borough’s downtown.
The pocket park, located behind the borough’s Christmas tree on State Street, has turned a once-empty alley into an outdoor living room through the holiday season, said a Historic Kennett Square press release.
“It’s really spectacular at night,” Tara Dugan of Scout & Annie, a State Street business overlooking the tree and pocket park, said in the release.
Dugan spearheaded the project with the help of volunteers. In addition to the borough’s Christmas tree, the park features handmade benches, a “fireplace” on a brick building façade, and twinkling lights strung overhead.
“I loved the idea of doing a little living room outdoors,” Jenna Otto, a landscape architecture student at Temple University and intern at Longwood Gardens who volunteered to help design the pocket park and the Christmas tree, said in the release. “We wanted a place where people could meet and gather.”
That place, now using the hashtag #meetmebythetree, grew out of a conversation Dugan had with another merchant on a dreary day in February. “We were looking at the tree area and thought it should be a community-minded space,” she said.
Mary Hutchins, the executive director of Historic Kennett Square, broached the plan at a borough council meeting.
“The plan was to do something special around the tree,” said Leon Spencer, outgoing president of Kennett Square Borough Council. After hearing about the idea for benches, he suggested approaching the carpentry department of the Technical College High School’s Pennock’s Bridge campus, where he serves as the School to Careers specialist.
“Having the opportunity to build these benches feeds into what we are all about,” Spencer said in the release. “We are here as best we can to serve the community.”
Organizers said the project represented a community effort. Teacher Gary Schmaltz and his carpentry students created the benches in about a week and a half. Students from both the morning and afternoon sessions built them, according to Spencer.
In early fall, Otto, Dugan and Claire Murray from Historic Kennett Square met to start working on the pocket park and the tree. Otto, who is pursuing her master’s and who has a background in display design, drew the designs. She and her husband, Trevor, built the fireplace and searched for mantels at antique stores. Otto’s mother, Elana Dabkowski, also helped her daughter with the project.
Hannah Kelleher, who works at Philter’s coffee shop, helped with the A-frame chalkboard and fireplace as well, providing the “final touches,” according to Murray. Other volunteers included Joe and Sandra Mulry, and the borough’s public works staff hung the lights that provide the venue’s twinkling ceiling, the release said.
Throughout the remainder of the holidays, the pocket park will host story times for the library and mini-concerts by visiting musicians at The Flash, according to Dugan. It will also provide weary shoppers with a comfortable place to sit and relax.
The park will remain in operation until the tree is taken down in early January. “If all goes well, we’ll set it up again next year,” Dugan said.
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