Is it just me, or is there a bit of a parklet arms race going on these days? For some years, cafes and restaurants have been upping the ante in terms of their parklet structures — looking at you, Ritual Coffee on Valencia, with your wooden parklet shaped like a beached ship. Yet one proposed structure on California at Fillmore Street in the ritzy Lower Pac Heights shopping corridor might just take the cake. An expansion of the existing parklet outside of the Delfina Pizza there that's brought to our attention by Hoodline would provide an arch over the street.

As some neighbors point out, however, the structure isn't without precedent. 14 iron arches spanned the corridor from 1907 to 1943, as a piece of historical writing in The New Fillmore recalls. "Merchants were soon referring to Fillmore Street as 'the new Market Street,'" they write, and "Large electrically lit iron arches were built across the intersections to provide grandeur." Those arches, built after the 1906 earthquake and fires, were taken down and used for scrap metal during World War II.

The New Fillmore had news of the proposed arch in late October, writing that "The plan would incorporate the Fillmore Stoop parklet in front of Delfina restaurant on California Street and extend it eastward into a landscaped area with public seating in the parking spaces and sidewalk fronting the Preston Apartments, Smitten Ice Cream and Dino & Santino’s pizzeria." The design for the new incarnation of the arches comes Siol Studios, and architect Kevin Hackett says if this one is a go and well received, more could be built at other intersections along the corridor.

Related: San Francisco's 10 Prettiest Parklets

"The New Fillmore Hotel, pictured in 1936, was at 930 Fillmore, near Fulton Street"via the New Fillmore