Love Lot

Prevention Point Philadelphia (PPP) and Mural Arts Philadelphia worked with artist Jacob “Chris” Hammes to completely make over a vacant lot in the heart of the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. The goal was to employ creative placemaking to transform the space into a welcoming, useful, colorful place where community members can gather and participate in services. The Love Lot, adjacent to Prevention Point’s main building on Kensington Avenue, has been used since 2021 for a range of services, including public restrooms, food and clothing distribution, medical and social services, overdose reversal trainings, art workshops, and public events. The Love Lot project was conceived to improve the vacant lot with resources, reduce the daily labor for staff working there, create opportunities for creative engagement with PPP participants and community members, and add beauty to the space to assist with the goal of harm reduction.

To portray and foster growth through the space, Hammes incorporated images of plant life and greenery painted in murals with the presence of actual plant life in a brightly colorful palette, along with plants, flowers, and raw and milled wood. To portray sunshine, the project has warm color tones denoting a warm and inviting space, as well as a circle motif with radiating, overlapping, and intersecting curved lines representing unity through depictions of wind, growth, and sunshine, as visual metaphors for hope and transformation.

“The Love Lot project was a joy to work on, enabling me to be embedded in the neighborhood of Kensington where I live and work,” said Hammes. “As an artist, I’m most often alone in the studio and usually if it fails, it’s not too serious. This space needed to be flexible and reflect the community, incorporating as many voices as possible. I’ve learned so much about how to incorporate the needs and expectations of other people into the design and trying to take advantage of this unique space was critical to this project. I had to create something that is beautiful, inspiring, and most of all useful for the people that utilize the Love Lot.”

Hammes volunteered in multiple roles at Prevention Point for two months to get to know their services, staff, participants, and needs. From there, Hammes developed and presented plans for the space, which were approved by MAP and PPP staff. Hammes and a group of assistants worked in the Love Lot for a year (taking a break during the coldest winter months) to execute the plans. Over twenty workshops were held during which PP clientele contributed to the process, helping to paint the fruit, sun, and memorial tile wall.

Love Lot is an expansive project that includes a memorial wall, hanging gardens, rolling gardens, seating made from logs, water tower/rainwater collection system, modified shipping container with solar panels (for food distribution), custom fabricated street lamps with a built in sound system, a painter’s wall to display art by Kensington artists that will rotate several times a year, several mural walls, area for public restrooms, a bulletin board and other signage, and free internet.