A new pop-up park in Hyattsville’s Arts District will open Saturday with live music and a sidewalk sale from local businesses.

Located at 4505 Hamilton Street, just south of the Yes! Organic parking lot just off the Trolley Trail, The Spot is a new community gathering space set up on unused city-owned property.

Starting at 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 31, local shops and businesses will be out on site including Green Owl Design, BackStage Store, CAMPspace, Bianca and Jean, AMarket Pop-up, Wills Decorating, Love Yoga and Love Your Roots Salon. Then, from 6 to 8 p.m., The Experience Band & Show will give a live performance.

Artists Isak Shah and Darren Soto will be also be onsite creating one of the Route 1 corridor’s first Black Lives Matter murals along a bare brick wall facing The Spot.

Like the park, the event is being organized by Bronwyn King and Krissi Humbard with the SoHy Co-op, a nonprofit group which helps support local businesses. The park was made possible through the help of Maryland Milestones, which has been helping the co-op secure funding to upgrade the area and get it ready for use.

Living Canopies also lent its to support to the new pop-up park through the donation of a $2,400 living canopy which shades over one of the picnic tables at The Spot. The canopy is made of purple sweet potato vine, star jasmine, Carolina jessamine, grape, Boston Ivy and Virginia creeper. Founder Dave Tiley, a professor at the University of Maryland who invented the “living umbrella” in 2015, told the Hyattsville Wire the canopy includes a solar-powered automatic watering system.

Other sponsors include Wills Decorating, Artist & Craftsman Supply in Hyattsville, Rankin Upholstery, TW Perry, Green Owl Design and the Home Depot. Organizers and volunteers have been working almost daily to prepare the empty lots for use.

For future events at The Spot, organizers say they hope to bring food trucks, more live music and other vendors.

The city of Hyattsville, which has given the co-op permission to use the lots, eventually plans to put public parking lots at the site of The Spot.

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