Delle Willett | Contributor

Downtown’s new pop-up urban park was the people’s choice

En San Diego’s NewSchool of Architecture & Design, one of its core principles is teaching students to be independent, innovative, collaborative, and to engage in the local community.

Three former students — Philip Auchettl, Jason Grauten and David Lowenstein — worked as a team and went well beyond the standard schematic or strictly research-based theses during their senior project in 2012-13. They actually went out and built something, with the hopes of making a difference in the community by making a thesis project into a reality.

“They didn’t just talk about their project in theory, they lived it in practice, which is a testament to their personal drive,” said Chuck Crawford, NewSchool associate professor and graduate coordinator. “We couldn’t possibly be more proud of them.”

Two years in the making, the result of their efforts is “Quartyard” — a creative new gathering place for local residents, college students, businessmen and women, and even dog owners — located at the corner of Park Boulevard and Market Street.

It’s the first of its kind in San Diego — an innovative urban park using a former vacant lot Downtown— with a name that’s a play on the word “courtyard” due to the quarts of beer they plan to sell there.

Believing everything has a purpose and a repurpose, the three grad students turned a 30,000-square-foot, long-time vacant and blighted lot into an exciting active space with a coffee shop, food trucks, live entertainment, and a beer garden that serves over 20 types of local craft beer. Quartyard also features a 5000-square-foot dog park, the first in Downtown San Diego, serving an estimated 13,000 dogs in the area.

“It’s what the people told us they wanted,” Auchettl said. “We put up a sign that said, ‘What do you want here?’ and left some Sharpies so they could tell us. The poster was filled up in a matter of days. The community gave us lots of input with an overall constant theme — ‘somewhere to gather and socialize outdoors.’”

Australian native Auchettl, 29, is CEO of a venture the three entrepreneurs now call RAD LAB (for Research Architecture Development). They hope that Quartyard will serve as a national model for how vacant lots can be used for more than parking, and demonstrate how positive changes can quickly and economically turn an empty lot into a thriving interactive urban space.

Here in San Diego they will continue to look for new locations, not just in Downtown, but in the greater San Diego area.

“Quartyard is a model that can be taken anywhere,” Auchettl said. “If there’s a piece of property sitting and collecting vagrancy, we can get in there — we’d love to be a part of it.”

Though unique to San Diego, this is not the first urban park of this nature. Parks like Quartyard have been done for years in other parts of the world, but the creators are taking urban parks to a whole new level with shipping crates, food trucks and a dog park.

One of the challenges the team faced was that since this type of multi-use space had never been done in San Diego before, there was a substantial learning curve in the process for securing a conditional-use permit from the city. There was no box for them to check or model for them to look to for guidance.

Despite the challenges, the team looks forward to seeing their hard work come to fruition during a grand opening that will take place Saturday, March 7, from 5 – 10 p.m.

The permanent tenants at Quartyard include Best Beverage Catering, which operates the beer garden and a full bar; restaurateur Scott Slater operating a Sausage & Meat sandwich shop; and a mini version of John Bertsch’s Meshuggah Shack coffee shop.

The Quartyard is open every day of the week, closing at 10 p.m. weekdays and midnight on weekends.

Just about everything at Quartyard is repurposed, starting with the 14 full-size shipping containers on the lot. They were purchased in Long Beach, shipped to San Diego and lifted into place, where they now serve as restaurants, shops and restrooms.

Paul Basile of Basile Design customized the containers to fit the individual needs of each tenant. When it’s time to move to a new location, the vendors have the option of packing up their crate and moving with Quartyard’s RAD LAB to their next venue or going somewhere else on their own.

Also repurposed are large oil barrels as trash receptacles; dumpsters made into tree planters; a British-style phone booth is now an ATM machine; and the colorful bar tables and benches were made from old wooden fences.

Half a dozen large African Sumac trees from a local nursery are placed among the family-style tables, providing shade. The repurposed planters are wrapped with a recycled wood shelf to hold beverages and snacks. Kudos to Brennan Hubble.

Mooch Exterior Designs in North Park oversaw the outdoor furniture and landscaping.

A canopy structure inside the beer garden has an event stage and everything needed to showcase musical events and other performances. They’ve also installed a 40-square-foot prep kitchen and an event-catering station to service the catering needs of the event stage. In addition, the entire space has WiFi, a feature sure to please students and business folk alike.

Other intended uses for the Quartyard include art and fashion shows, film festivals, educational events, farmers and craft markets, as well as rotating food trucks. The RAD LAB team also hopes to feature NewSchool student work, including pop-up exhibitions.

The Quartyard was partially funded by San Diego residents through Kickstarter, a crowd sourcing campaign that generated $60,000 from nearly 3,000 donors in just 30 days.

The city will receive performance-based rent from the space, and those proceeds will be earmarked for the city’s Affordable Housing Fund.

Civic San Diego is currently looking for a developer of a high-rise residential tower for that same block. When that happens, Quartyard will pack up and move to a new site when the lot is sold. The existing lease can be extended in 12-month increments if the permanent development is not yet ready to break ground by July 2016.

“We are very grateful to Richard Seges of Civic San Diego, who’s been on board with us from the start,” Auchettl said. “Everyone there has been wonderful.”

Auchettl said he is also grateful for the NewSchool of Architecture and Design.

“The faculty pushed us to interact with the community to make this project a reality,” he said. “We were encouraged to meet with local community groups, the mayor and Civic San Diego.

“Meeting with so many different influential community members opened up a lot of doors. Without the encouragement of the NewSchool of Architecture and Design, this project would not have been possible,” Auchettl said.

“RAD LAB has inspired a new class of NewSchool of Architecture and Design students to follow in their footsteps,” Crawford said. “The whole student body is excited and motivated to actually go out and do something to improve our local neighborhood.”

Crawford said the Downtown architectural school has a group of students that are currently working on a similar project in North Park, and their graduating class is working on a proposed “parklet” for East Village.

“Not only is RAD LAB personally advising a small group of students, but we have them talk to every incoming class at NewSchool,” Crawford said.

In addition to Auchettl, RAD LAB consists of Grauten as chief creative officer, Lowenstein as chief operating officer, and Adam Jubela, who wasn’t part of the original thesis team but provided financial input and is acting as the general contractor for the site’s development work.

For more information or tickets to the grand opening, visit quartyardsd.com. To learn more about RAD LAB, visit radlabsd.com/quartyard.

—Delle Willett is a PR consultant and a freelance journalist. She does pro-bono work for organizations that empower women and work to end world hunger. Reach her at [email protected].