Page 4 - Community Building

People-friendly space with plenty of outdoor park benches - Photo from Project for Public Space

When it comes to open spaces, just creating an area with a "build it and they will come" approach doesn't always work. According to experts, it takes a combination of the right people, plenty of outdoor park benches, strategically placed sidewalks, empty trash cans, secure bike racks and a whole lot more.

How many times have you walked through an open public area that was somehow just not right and not inviting? Or how many times have you visited a location and thought, gee, it would be nice if there was some way to hang out here but right now there is no comfortable way to do that?

According to researchers at Project for Public Spaces, there are actually quite a few factors that go into making an open space attractive and welcoming for the public to use. They created a checklist of items after studying thousands of public spaces, not just in the U.S., but around the world.

As you can imagine,

To add variety to the holidays, take the opportunity to take the family outside and visit local parks

The holidays are a time when families and people gather to exchange gifts, sit down together for a meal and just take time to be together.

But after all the presents are opened, the meals are consumed and everyone is caught up with everybody else, one of the best things you can do with family and friends is get outside!

Go for a walk together. Visit a park. Toss a football or kick a soccer ball. Ride your new bikes.

Mother Nature gives us the best gift of all - the great outdoors. Blue skies and green grass all wrapped up in a giant package of fresh air.

Sure, we know, it's the Age of Technology. But you can bring your new tablets, iPhones, and hand-held game consoles with you. Sit on a park bench or a picnic table and play, take photos or create videos.

The main thing is to just get out of the house. It breaks up the day, it gives people some elbow room and it lets children burn off all

Commercial planters easily add curb appeal to apartment

Why is curb appeal so important to renters? How much impact could commercial planters filled with colorful flowers or a shiny, clean park bench have on a prospective tenant? How can you spruce up the outside look of your apartment complex without blowing up your budget?

After all, curb appeal is basically a first impression, the first image a renter receives about your property. And we all know how important first impressions are from our interaction over the years with fellow humans.

Let's start with the psychology. The reason why first impressions are so critical is because our brains gather an incredible mass of information when trying to make a decision. Because there is such a complex amount of data processing going on, the brain looks for shortcuts.

This has evolutionary implications clear back to when people first become humans. With dangerous creatures and other calamities out there in the environment, people had to digest

Source: Heartland Habitat for Humanit

The first Thanksgiving held in America back in 1621 was held on wooden picnic tables and in a show of support and thanks, The Park Catalog has donated 400 wooden planks to the Heartland Habitat for Humanity in Kansas City, KS.

If you are not familiar with the charity, Habitat for Humanity is an amazing organization. It was created in 1976 by Millard and Linda Fuller and its purpose is to eliminate substandard housing, homelessness and basically provide places for people to live.

As we gather around the dinner table this Thursday, many of us may take for granted that roof over our heads. But an adequate home is something a large part of the world's population does not get to enjoy. There are an estimated 2 billion people who live in slum housing and more than 100 million are homeless. That's Habitat for Humanity's mission, to create "a world where everyone has a decent place to live."

Habitat largely depends on donated materials, such as our wooden picnic

Courtesy of League of American Bicyclist

A bike parking rack takes up less space and is becoming a preferred part of the urban landscape as research shows more people choose to ride their bikes to work instead of drive their cars.

The League of American Bicyclists issued a report recently indicating that from 2000 to 2011, bicycle commuting in bike-friendly communities skyrocketed by 80%.

Here's a breakdown of some of the cities with the highest growth in bike commuters. These city dwellers prefer to leave their mode of transportation in a space-saving parking bike rack instead of their car in a space-wasting garage:

Those are tremendous increases. What are transportation planners doing right in these cities that the rest of the country is not? They're creating more bike lanes and adding more public bike racks. In general, just making it easier to pedal than drive.

That's amazing. More people

When you sell park picnic tables, park benches, bicycle racks, aluminum bleachers and commercial trash cans to a niche market of site facility managers it's no easy accomplishment to be included in the distinguished company of Top 500 E-Retailer sites such as Amazon, Wal-Mart, Netflix, Staples, etc.

But The Park Catalog in Boca Raton, Fla. achieved that feat again in 2014 and has maintained this coveted accolade awarded by Internet Retailer Magazine for the past five years in a row.

First, a key element would be the breadth and depth of inventory of commercial site furnishings. Those products include everything from a park bench with a logo, to tip-n-roll bleachers, a park grill, bicycle racks made with recycled plastic and thousands of other hand-picked items.

Park Catalog recognized as Top 500 E-Retailer for Commercial Site Furnishings onlin

The Park Catalog provides commercial site furnishings

We were very fortunate to be a part of creating a new oasis in form of a new community garden called Frog Alley in Delray Beach, FL just a few blocks from where my family and I attend church at St. Paul's on South Swinton Avenue. It was at St. Paul's that I met Jeannie Fernsworth, a passionate advocate of community gardens and the grown locally movement who never misses an opportunity to share her passion for community gardens and to enlist others in her cause to build more of them in Palm Beach County.

I have been inspired by how many people and organizations came together to create this beautiful garden. The Delray Chamber of Commerce got involved and the Delray Garden Center donated labor and materials. The real champions of the project were Pablo de Real and Ashley Moore. Both worked countless hours, coordinated dozens of volunteers, managed the local permitting process and put their backs into the manual work of constructing planting beds, moving soil and more. Pablo is committed to

This is an open letter to property managers from across country.

The Park Catalog is the property managers' catalog.

The Park Catalog has been serving property managers for a long time because we know and understand the needs of both you and the properties you manage.

Property management companies and properties alike have reputations. "A dangerous parking lot," is not the reputation you want associated with your property.   We all aim to shine a positive light on public spaces, trying to promote testimonies like "Clean," "well lit," "safe" and "attractive." Site furnishings are the key to creating that positive environment and branding commercial and multi-family properties, an increasingly important factor as these markets have grown and consolidated over the past two decades.

For better or worse, the quality of your commercial site furnishings defines your property's brand, not entirely but in an outsized way relative to investment.  They are usually the first impression of your

Who would think picnic tables could be so exciting? Well we do. One of our favorite experiences as a team at The Park Catalog is getting to hear back from our customers. Sometimes we get a phone call about adjusting a product's color or size and we are happy to help, reassured by the idea that our customers feel confident enough that we can get them exactly what they need. Other times our customers have great feedback about their experiences with our online order cart, helpful staff, comprehensive selection, or high quality picnic tables.

However, the best contact we get from customers is when we get a testimonial, and especially a picture,  of smiling faces from a successful site furnishing installation. A recent installation of elongated expanded metal picnic tables left the entire office, from accounting to sales, feeling that much better about how our products and our service can help a community.

Saleswoman Carrie Georgopoulos recently shared an email testimonial that included

Welcome to The Park Blog. We're here as a community of people interested in bettering public spaces and the people who occupy them. Sometimes, that means installing a trash receptacle to encourage park visitors to help keep the field green. Sometimes it means planting a seed. And sometimes, bettering a public space means helping the people that occupy it to work  together better.

We're always learning, growing, and working together. In this blog, we hope to bring to light some of the ways our neighborhoods, parks, institutions and friends come together to better the world around us.