With Super Bowl 50 coming soon to Silicon Valley, San Jose plans to piggyback on the hoopla by “activating” Plaza de Cesar Chavez, one of the city’s most iconic parks.

Activate a park?

Think live jazz and programmable light displays to seduce passers-by. Think Tuscan piazza as a backdrop for serendipitous encounters. Think Adirondack chairs, a beer garden and food trucks. These are props in the city’s effort to not just celebrate the big game but use the plaza as a pop-up experiment in its $300,000 campaign to rethink its public spaces.

“Super Bowl is great, but Super Bowl will come and go while San Jose and Cesar Chavez plaza will remain,” says Danny Harris, San Jose’s program director for the Miami-based Knight Foundation, which is partnering with Adobe Systems and the city on the temporary “Winter at Plaza de Cesar Chavez” as well as San Jose’s fledgling plan to draw more residents to their parks, starting this spring with the city focusing on St. James Park. “We’re more interested in the long-term implications of having a park, driven by design, become a place of civic engagement.”

And the activation has begun. Crews from the city’s parks department along with installation teams from Philadelphia-based Groundswell Design Group have descended on Cesar Chavez, a three-minute walk from the Marriott Hotel, where the NFC team will be staying the week before the Feb. 7 game.

An iconic sporting event expected to draw hundreds of millions of viewer around the globe, this year’s Super Bowl 50’s historic status offers San Jose powerful leverage to not only entice people to party but hopefully create a legacy that will change the way a park can be integrated more cohesively into its surroundings. That effort to enliven San Jose’s parks is being jump-started with a $150,000 grant from Knight, matched by city funds.

Kim Walesh, the city’s director of economic development and co-chairwoman of the San Jose Sports Authority, says using the game as a near-term way to help change the public perception of its parks over time became an integral part of the planning process early on.

“We started out a year and a half ago with a small team trying to figure out how to ensure San Jose has an official role in this huge event and how we can use the Super Bowl experience to move San Jose forward in a number of ways,” Walesh said. “Having Super Bowl here in Silicon Valley provides us not just a way to build on our reputation as a tourist destination but also a way to move city projects forward that have been sort of floating around for a long time.”

Cesar Chavez Park, located smack dab in the middle of downtown and surrounded by a rich array of popular visitor destinations, was like the light bulb going on.

“We knew that with one of the teams staying at the Marriott, there’d be a lot of visitors and media in and around the park,” she said. Using it as a temporary party site fit in well with the fact that “the city, going back three or four years, has put an emphasis on not just having parks as green places on a map but as inviting places that people really want to go to and hang out at.”

And so the plan was hatched: Jazz up Cesar Chavez for a Super Bowl bash, even though the NFL’s notoriously restrictive merchandising policies prevent organizers from actually calling it such and test out things like a cafe and beer garden as future draws for other parks in the city.

“Sometimes doing things like that on a permanent basis seems so big and daunting,” Walesh said of the larger parks project. “But doing it incrementally like this, using Super Bowl as the hook, it’s easy to get people on board” and hopefully accept eventual large-scale change in the city’s urban core.

The Cesar Chavez project was inspired, albeit on a more modest scale, by a park-improvement effort in Philadelphia called Spruce Street Harbor Park, where Groundswell’s David Fierabend said a Knight Foundation grant helped transform a neglected space on the Delaware River into what the Huffington Post called one of the best urban beaches in the world.

Just as that pop-up experiment turned into a permanent and popular park, Groundswell and its partners hope to work their magic here in San Jose, starting with the Super Bowl party. “Master plans are great,” said Fierabend of a city’s long-term planning vision, “but what happens in the meantime when these parks aren’t active? How can we revitalize them in a low-cost way but also get a lot of bang for the buck?”

In San Jose this week, that starts with new grounds preparation and trees strung with LED lights that will be programmed to the music, a mini football field, ping-pong and picnic tables, Adirondack chairs and hammocks for relaxing, and more, said Rafael Gomez with the city’s parks department.

Meanwhile, the first of three Groundswell teams is stringing up the light display, Fierabend said, getting everything in place for Friday, Jan. 29, when the park begins its run through Super Bowl Sunday on Feb. 7.

As Knight’s Harris puts it, “Super Bowl traditional creates a sense of urgency for the host cities to spend money and put their best face forward. With the Cesar Chavez Park project, we want to try and keep the momentum going once Super Bowl 50 is gone.”

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689 or follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc