2025 Joan Shaw Herman Award Honors Street Lab Creators Leslie Taylor Davol ’87 and Sam Davol ’88
What happens when design sensibility meets community engagement? The experiences Street Lab offers highlight the possibilities: pop-up public reading rooms, building stations, writing areas, and street-chalking activities; portable urban nature exhibits and community tables; summer cooling stations and open-air art studios. Founded by Leslie Taylor Davol ’87 and Sam Davol ’88, the nonprofit organization is transforming the street-level environment of New York City—one block and one face-to-face interaction at a time. On April 28, Concord Academy presented the Davols with the 2025 Joan Shaw Herman Award for Distinguished Service for their commitment to activating public spaces and improving lives in low-income urban neighborhoods.
Leslie and Sam, who met as CA students and are married, spent most of April 28 at CA when they accepted the honor. Before presenting at an assembly, they connected with Head of School Henry Fairfax and chatted with students and faculty at a luncheon. They also spoke with students in Chris Rowe and Jessica Cloutier-Plasse’s architectural engineering class, answering questions about their role as producers in a process of design and deployment that brings community visions to life.
Whether it’s a rollable kiosk that expands from a road case or a sturdy but lightweight bench that folds like origami, each type of pop-up Street Lab produces is custom-built, stylish, easily packable, modular for ease of repair, and durable. They all get used again and again. “Architects sometimes focus on making installations that are quite big but then get torn down or thrown away, and that breaks my heart,” Sam told the class. “We prefer designs that can be reused and improved over time. We’ve stuck with some designs for more than 10 years, and even as we keep changing them, nothing really gets thrown away—physically, or an idea.”
The neighbor-to-neighbor scale of their pop-ups means Street Lab can act quickly to try out new ideas. Leslie said, “We often put prototypes on the street right away, so people can help test it, and also benefit from it.” She gave an example of an obstacle course they designed with mesh barriers for kids to jump over. “The first day we brought it out, it was so beautiful and we thought we had designed it for wind, but it all blew over with the first gust.” The version now in use has wooden frames with circular cutouts.
As they shared with the class, they’re intentionally focused on intergenerational appeal. “Our play streets make space and seating for adults—seniors, in particular, who often are caregivers of the children,” Sam said. “As you get older, getting out of a chair is different, so we consider the heights, the backs, stuff like that.” Street Lab also offers a misting river to cool off in during the summer—an offering more accessible to a variety of ages, unlike the dog days tradition of opening fire hydrants for kids to beat the heat.
Leslie said that considering the needs of different stakeholders is fundamental to their approach: As they respond to community requests, they also try to align their programming with existing government priorities. “It opens the door to solving permitting issues, and you can get connected to different kinds of resources like shared trucking, for example,” she said. “Those kinds of relationships are crucial if you want to do something with public space.”
At the assembly, Fairfax introduced the Davols and spoke about the Joan Shaw Herman Award. “As a community that usually eschews prizes and honors in favor of celebrating individuality, creativity, and collaboration,” he said, the school’s annual tradition of honoring alums who inspire by example testifies to the “shared value of service to others that we as CA members uphold.”
Aurora Hao ’25, who served as a student rep on the Joan Shaw Herman Award selection committee, reflected on Joan Shaw Herman ’46, the award’s namesake. Herman contracted polio the summer after her graduation. Though she was confined to an iron lung, she worked devotedly to improve the lives of others with disabilities. “Joan Shaw Herman Award recipients embody the Concord Academy ideals of empathy, integrity, and responsibility as they personally strive to build a more just and sustainable future for all,” Aurora said.
During their presentation, the Davols first delivered a well-honed pitch: a visually engaging tour of the kinds of neighborhood-building experiences Street Lab brings to life. They deploy 15 types of pop-ups that make a place for learning, play, and community, 500 times a year, citywide, 95% of them in low-income areas. They also work with more than 30 community groups every year to close streets temporarily to traffic and create space for people to gather in areas where public safety and a lack of open space have been long-standing challenges. To make this all possible, they design and fabricate pop-up infrastructure, and they send their designs to other cities around the world that want to copy their model.
The pop-ups and street programming are ephemeral by nature, lasting only an afternoon. But their impact lasts far longer. As Leslie said during the pitch, “One teen recently showed me a picture on his phone of himself from 10 years before, sitting and reading a book at one of our first pop-up reading rooms. This is pop-up that changes lives.”
The relationships Street Lab cultivates have also paved the way for more lasting changes in some neighborhoods. Occasionally, that’s a pedestrianized plaza, but more often it’s seeing partners empowered to continue Street Lab’s mission in their own ways. “We get community groups working side by side with city agencies, building trust, solving problems together,” Sam said. “I think this might be the most significant result of some of our work: showing a way that New Yorkers can work together alongside government to make the city better today.”
For the second part of the assembly, the Davols then shared their personal story. They structured it around four challenging moments when things didn’t turn out as they had expected. As Sam said, “Everyone I’ve ever met out there who’s trying to do something in the world, to make a difference, struggles, often deeply sometimes.”
First came 9/11. After graduating from CA, Leslie had studied art history, completed a master’s in American studies, and worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums. Sam had studied social anthropology, earned a law degree, and was working as an attorney in the Legal Aid Society’s civil division. On the day of the terrorist attacks in 2001, they were raising a young daughter, and Leslie was pregnant with their son. They were apart at the time; later they safely reunited, but the events of that day shifted everything. “Our neighborhood, our city, and our lives had been changed,” Leslie said. “In a way, everything that Sam and I have done in cities and public space is an attempt to create what we wanted on September 12 and the days that followed.”
Leslie was working in a new role, helping to rebuild the World Trade Center site, when their daughter stopped speaking in school. To help her, they quit their jobs and moved to the Boston area to be near family. It was there, in Chinatown, where their apartment faced a littered empty lot, that they had the idea to host a Chinese language outdoor film festival. It was the first thing they’d ever produced together, and they were nervous, but the event was a success. Films at the Gate is now approaching its 20th anniversary.
Their neighborhood also didn’t have a library. The Davols wanted to see the values of learning and literacy reflected on the street, so they sourced donations of 5,000 books and transformed a vacant shop into a storefront library, which operated from 2009 through 2010. There they developed the sorts of programming that eventually became their pop-up approach. They even experimented with a writer-in-residence: Jared Green ’88, P’22 ’28.
Ultimately, though, the storefront model didn’t prove viable. As they faced that reality, the Davols decided to create a portable version they could bring to the streets—and to launch it back in New York City, where it could scale and grow. As self-described “urbanists,” they saw New York’s potential for more efficient living with “smaller private spaces, more public spaces, fewer cars, more public transportation, more interdependence, and a shared belief in looking out for each other when the moment called for it.”
Funding their project through Kickstarter, they partnered with architects to create a portable library, but the large design, though eye-catching, was cumbersome to transport. For nearly 40 years, Sam has toured as a cellist as a member of the band The Magnetic Fields (along with Claudia Gonson ’86), and among his touring road cases the Davols found the idea for their second approach.
On the P.A.C. stage, Sam wheeled out a box that in a single movement unfolded into a mobile book display. “The lighter our footprint, the more impact we could have,” Leslie said.
In less than two years, Street Lab tripled in size. Everything seemed to be going well until in 2020 they faced their third major hurdle: the COVID pandemic. Again, they found the setback opened up new opportunities. Suddenly in the time of social distancing, they were flooded with requests for outdoor pop-ups, and collaborated with architects on new pandemic-appropriate designs. On the same day public restrictions were lifted in New York City, Street Lab set out a no-touch obstacle course. The city began closing streets to cars to make space for public gatherings. As Sam said, the Davols saw a once-in-a-lifetime chance to “unseat the dominance of the car in city streets.”
With their varieties of pop-ups growing, the Davols secured a larger warehouse and hired an urban planner and a community organizer. Just when they had established a thriving, expanding ecosystem for their work, following the November 2024 elections, new funding cuts eliminated nearly half of their budget.
“There’s an active dismantling of all kinds of service going on right now, as you know, not just Street Lab,” Leslie said. “This is the current chapter of our story. It’s not the last. We will survive this, and we’re figuring out new ways to move forward.”
Amid a new intensive focus on fundraising, they’ve noticed more and more young people have been reaching out to work with them. “There’s an energy, determination, and urgency in their voices that reminds us of us, the reasons we embarked on this journey, and the core of what service means to us,” Leslie said. In turn, they’ve inspired her and Sam to start a youth program to bring New York public high school students into all aspects of Street Lab’s work.
They had some advice for CA students: “If you’re unafraid to start small, caring for the places right around you, your neighborhood, your block, things have a way of unfolding and growing from there,” Sam said. “So if you want a career in service, maybe don’t wait—just start serving right where you are now.”
Before they departed, the couple reflected on their visit, and on CA’s school culture. Besides being the place he learned to write (“that is increasingly rare, unfortunately”), Sam said, “One of CA’s strengths is making a space where everyone feels like they’re connected.” He drew a connection to what Street Lab does today: creating spaces where people who may not know each other feel comfortable engaging together.
Empowering others is their priority. “If this is going to spread, it’s not just me and Leslie; it’s not just Street Lab, even,” Sam said. “It’s how we’re making it possible for other people to do this type of work.”
