Seattle Makes a Pac-Man Pop-Up Park

Seattleites who are kicked outdoors by the parents/significant other for playing too much Xbox can still get some sweet video-game action, thanks to a new street maze that sucks people into the ghost-infested universe of “Pac-Man.”

The city painted the horizontal mural as part of its Pavement to Parks initiative, which the city says uses “short-term strategies to deliver new public spaces that will serve as front yards, playgrounds, social spaces, and active zones.” Several asphalt deserts throughout the city have been given new life with a splash of art and public furniture. As my curmudgeonly colleague Feargus Sullivan has observed, such efforts to render urban spaces playable are an increasingly popular, low-cost way to activate wasted spaces (or, depending on your perspective, provide “cutesy distractions from real urban problems”). But it’s hard not to argue that this Capitol Hill intersection has been markedly improved with some paint and ‘80s whimsy. Here it is before the transformation: