A playful pop-up at Spruce Street Harbor Park

Last summer, landscape architect David Fierabend was tasked with turning a vacant lot on Broad Street into a peaceful pop-up garden for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. The best indication that his woodland garden - shaded by a copse of graceful honey locusts - had succeeded? How little visitors noticed his handiwork.

"People would come in and say, 'David, you're really lucky these trees were here,' because they seemed like they belonged," said Avram Hornik of Four Corners Management, which worked on the pop-up. "And that's the skill. You can't train someone to do that. Either you have it or you don't have it - and David has it."

Over the last few years, that skill has made Fierabend (pronounced FEER-ra-ben), principal at Groundswell Design Group based in Hopewell, N.J., the go-to design mind for turning ugly and underutilized corners of the city into inviting temporary and permanent "outdoor lifestyle spaces" - that is, pop-up parks, beer gardens, and restaurants.

His latest extreme makeover, which opens to the public Friday, is the rebranded $700,000-plus Spruce Street Harbor Park, once an uninspired stretch of land along Columbus Boulevard. The temporary design, commissioned by the Delaware River Waterfront Corp. (DRWC) as a way to generate excitement and spur development along the river, transforms the park into a destination with boardwalks, swaying hammocks, and a floating restaurant.

Gesturing out toward the barges, where shipping-container concession booths were already installed and workers in a rowboat were coaxing a series of floating garden beds into place, he added, "Look at the flags flapping in the breeze, the trees swaying, and the grasses: I want visitors to feel something that taps into childhood experience, or a really nice moment in their life."

It's more than just landscaping: "We're now involved in this place-making business in Philadelphia," he said.

He has at least eight such projects underway this summer from Wilmington to New York. Many are playful reimaginings of summer in the city.

His work with the DRWC - begun in winter when he and Hornik helped reinvigorate the Blue Cross RiverRink by, as he puts it, "dropping a winter wonderland into a parking lot" - includes a beach-inspired update to Festival Pier.

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A playful pop-up at Spruce Street Harbor Park