Maria Saraceno brought us free lunch, a sewing circle and a neighborhood gathering place for several months of Sundays in the parking lot of a Circle K on Gulf Boulevard in Pass-A-grille. For her master’s thesis project at USF, Saraceno, an Italian-American, sought to build an outdoor community space in her own neighborhood with a plastic table, Coleman stove, pasta and some beads. She easily defended her thesis that the “plaza” and its community-building nexus are tragically missing from American cities and suburbs, by creating a new plaza on a scorching, traffic-bound little corner of asphalt. There is one beautiful, beaded tablecloth coming out of the project, and a lot of neighbors left hungry for pasta and community. -Mary Mulhern
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.