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enjoying time outdoors beneath those trees, and hear the birds singing above them. This
2
cheerful picture of a community enjoying the neighborhood together is emblematic of
the positive effects of open streets.
In her second paragraph Hendren contrasts what is now called “Riverbend Park”
with our common notion of parks. This “park” is different in a “physical, structural sense”
Argument
because city workers arrive with traffic cones to cut off traffic in the morning and remove
the cones to return the area to traffic at the end of the day. It’s simply “an open public
space transformed into a park.” This contrast, which challenges our expectations, helps
the audience begin to shift its thinking about what constitutes a public park.
Next, Hendren develops a definition of her suggested tool for improving many
aspects urban life: “temporal zoning” (par. 3). The term sounds technical, but she’s
already given us an example of how it works in her description of a “found” park in para-
graph 2. She explicitly defines the concept here as a “clock” that “turns an open street
into something else entirely — a time structure organized outside commuter efficiency or
traffic flows.” In other words, she’s suggesting we use time to create open recreational
spaces.
To support her argument for temporal zoning as she has defined it, Hendren comes
back to cause and effect in paragraphs 4 and 5, where she discusses how the
COVID-19 pandemic forced cities to revisit and redesign outdoor space. The effect of
the innovations necessitated by this emergency was that businesses and institutions
developed the ability to “reorganize our collective hours and days in ways that help
more people enjoy our cities and institutions” (par. 5). She makes these connections
explicit but also suggests that we should not go back to the way things were before
the pandemic.
In paragraph 8, Hendren takes us back to 1974, using narration to tell the story of
Isabella Halstead’s novel idea to close a section of Memorial Drive to traffic one day a
week and how she formed the Riverbend Park Trust, which is now managed by the
Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. This story provides histori-
cal background for the story of the “found” park that opens the article, but also reminds
us that “temporal zoning” is not necessarily a new idea.
Hendren gives more extended examples in paragraphs 11–14: the Smithsonian’s
early morning hours for disabled museum goers; Mexico City’s experiments with closing
streets to traffic to provide play space for children in neighborhoods that didn’t have
parks; Philadelphia’s and Chicago’s opening play streets in lieu of summer camp.
Hendren compares these examples with Riverbend Park and other ways that time has
been used as the “sculpting tool” to “make our public spaces more truly public” (par. 16).
By weaving these different methods of development together, Hendren has made a
strong, multilayered case to support her argument: not only is creating accessible public
spaces worthwhile, it’s also easy and costs us nothing. She’s defined a concrete solution
to the question of how to improve urban public spaces. Using these rhetorical tools,
she’s shown how our common notions are outdated and limiting and made a strong case
for using time to make “public spaces more truly public.”

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