Coventry Living Room Project

The Coventry Living Room Project is a community-based place-making effort. Our goal is to create a public, outdoor gathering space that strengthens the sense of community in the Coventry Village neighborhood of Cleveland Heights.

We’ve created a plan to activate Pekar Park - a small, underutilized plaza at the edge of our commercial district. Our vision is for a space that allows us to do together the things that we do each day: reading a book from the library, sharing a meal from a local restaurant, putting on a community event, and more. In concrete terms, this means a space with benches, tables, and chairs; a stage for performances; a canopy for shade; and art that matches our neighborhood's identity. We’re confident in this vision, because we didn’t come up with it alone. It’s the byproduct of the thoughts and deliberations of over two dozen people with connections to Coventry Village. This is a project that reflects those who live in our neighborhood and what they need.

Our current timeline is below:

• November 2022: Work with community members to create design principles for the project.
• December 2022: Develop design options based on those principles. 
• January 2023: Select a draft design based on community feedback.
• February-April 2023: Fundraising, permitting, and purchasing materials.
• May 2023: Build our new gathering space.
• June-October 2023: Maintain our new space for the community.
• October 2023: Take down our installation for the cold months.

We believe that neighborhoods are stronger when the people in them see, bump into, and get to know one another. But we also recognize that the heart of our neighborhood - its commercial district - lacks the type of public spaces needed to make that happen. Fundamentally, this project is about building trust, making connections, and strengthening community.