Friends and neighbors spar against each other on permanent chess tables underneath a tree canopy in Downtown West Palm Beach — on the weekends, players of all ages smash timers and move 32 chess pieces around 64 squares and trash talk their way into friendships.
As the local population grows, people are getting to know their neighbors — thanks to a successful community engagement program aimed at repurposing public spaces, like sidewalks, parking lots and alleyways between buildings.
West Palm Street Chess founder Joshua Pariente Koehler told WLRN that the Fern Street Chess Park, between Fern Street and Dixie Highway, is going strong nearly two years after it opened. It’s considered a natural "third place,” a public area where people gather away from their home and workplace.
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"While certainly church is the most common and respected third place, in a church you have a pastor, you have a preacher,” Koehler said. “In the chess park, we're all part of the congregation."
It was Koehler who convinced Raphael Clemente, executive director of the West Palm Beach Downtown Development Authority — a special-taxing agency known for improving public spaces in the downtown area.
Sherryl Muriente, the DDA’s Public Realm Director who's in charge of designing public areas that foster community, said there's a lot more people now than when the program first started in 2017. Since then, the number of residents in the downtown area has doubled to about 10,000 people — the city, overall, has a population of 117,000.
Koehler says the weekly chess matches had quickly turned into a 200+ social member club that spawned into the nonprofit he co-founded, Street Chess Coalition, which through community outreach maintains chess activities in West Palm Beach and Lake Worth Beach.
"In these spaces, a lot of times the interaction is not necessarily the moving of the chess piece but a lot of it is just the smiling, the talking, the getting to know people,” Koehler said. “Where are you from? How did you guys meet?” he said.
Fern Street Chess Park in West Palm Beach opened on National Chess Day in October of 2022. The park landed on the cover of American Chess Magazine.
Every day, from sunrise to sunset, players from various ages, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds bond and share their stories. According to the DDA’s Public Realm dashboard, on average more than 500 people per hour are observed in the downtown area. That number jumps to nearly 1,000 per hour during the weekend.
That's a lot of foot traffic for businesses and an even larger opportunity for genuine chance encounters among people relaxing at repurposed parks.
Muriente, the city's first-ever public realm czar, has been extending sidewalks and taking over parking spots and turning them into parklets, mini-street parks that often morph into spontaneous gathering places for the community.
“When you’re connecting with others in these casual conversations, these places can become like a home away from home,” Muriente said. “And so it is an unknown space at first, but it becomes a familiar place with familiar people.”
Muriente uses a creative design approach known as “placemaking,” which leverages art installations, live programming and other initiatives to make public areas more attractive for everyday people.
"Think of placemaking as the process of either creating or improving public spaces in a way that it reflects the needs of those who use it or the desires of the people that are inhabiting the space,” she said. “The community engagement piece is the key, so it could be led by them or it could be initiated by them.”
Celine Adrian lives near downtown with her husband and two young sons, one of whom played chess alongside the adults. Adrian is originally from Italy and she said a third place reminds her of a piazza, a dense public square that’s accessible to everyone.
"It is extremely important to be able to have a place to go where it is not around drinking or spending money or things that are not only consumeristic and materialistic,” Adrian said.
She said many people are excited to be around it and often take ownership of a public area that doesn’t obscure “the community building of just sharing and chatting and being together.”
Players and officials say the demand for active public spaces started during the early stage of the pandemic and it never really let up, increasing the appetite for social bonding outside.
“They need to be maintained and not by the city, not by the government only, but by ourselves,” Adrian said. “And the first thing I did when I arrived here, I took some paper towels and cleaned up the tables and picked up some garbage around. And we all have to give to those spaces to make them exist and enjoy them.”
Stuart Bagatell, a 40-year-old physician, said playing chess and bird watching is a “great treat.” He likes to “smell the coffee and just get away for a little while.”
After winning his match, chess player Corey Parker, a local entrepreneur, told WLRN that he was specifically in search of a chess community after having trouble finding one. He plays every Sunday morning.
“So I found a couple barbers that played and I was going around with them playing for a little while at the barbershop at different times but then those guys moved on,” Parker said. “And that's when I was looking for other places to play chess and that's when I found it.”
The park brings people together and sparks fun conversations because “chess is an honest game,” he said.
