NYE Street Life

New Years is one night out of the year when it feels normal to party in the street. 

When there is a good reason to, we can easily adapt to the spaces and furniture we find there.  In this case, the trunk of a car made a great table to toast over and may have felt reminiscent of a tail-gate (but in this case with Champagne, not the Champagne of Beers). 

Left overs from the best view of NYE fireworks in the city.

Here was the good reason for the occasion:

Celebrating Marriage Equality in Washington State! oh, and 2013.

As obscure as it may seem, there is actually a movement to encourage partying in the street. City Planners might call it expanding the inhabitable public realm into the parking zone.  Parking Day leads the movement, and some cities, such as San Francisco, have installed permanent sidewalk extensions to enhance peoples' experience of the public realm.

Award-winning Powell Street Promenade designed by Berkeley Professor and Landscape Architect Walter Hood. Learn more about this project.

Advocates of Parking Day might say you shouldn't NEED a reason to hang out in the street, but would salute those NYE partiers who used their public space to its fullest potential.