Studio One Eleven

When is a parking space not a parking space? When it's a park, of course. Last week, Southern California's first "parklet" opened quietly in Long Beach, recasting that space between the painted lines as -- yes -- a tiny rectangle of curb-adjacent public space.

It's not as suicidal as it sounds. In San Francisco, there are now 23 such parklets; the Chronicle's architectural critic John King recently reviewed 22 of them.

These are the spawn of Park(ing) Day, an initiative that since 2005 has led groups all over the world to convert metered parking spaces into public space for a day in September. In San Francisco it was deemed a winning concept year-round, and in 2010 the city opened its first semipermanent park-where-cars-used-to-park.

This concept has since rippled across the country, but Long Beach's new parklet is the first in Southern California, claims its designer, Studio One Eleven's Michael Bohn. "Someone tried to take credit in San Diego, but it's a curb extension," he says.