I have a favorite public bench - the Parisian bench designed by Gabriel Davioud in the 1870’s. The bench is actually two benches that share a slat that acts as the backrest (and provides zero lumbar support).
I like this bench because the back-to-back arrangement and giant gap in the backrest allow for some creative sitting arrangements
People were less concerned with keeping the unhoused out of public spaces in the 1870’s which leads to my other favorite thing about this bench: a lack of armrests. Public bench armrests have nothing to do with resting your arms and everything to do with making sure you can’t lie down. The first time I went to Paris in the era before international data plans I ended up in Les Halles hours before my friend was meant to pick me up. Nearly broke and not wanting to stray from the meeting point I spent an afternoon treating one of these benches like a personal daybed. I’ve been back several times with more money and a smartphone but this is still one of my favorite travel memories.
It’s “anti-social” to lie on a bench or sleep in a public space - so we add little armrests that stop people from spreading out. The artist Sarah Ross once designed a suit that allowed the wearer to sleep comfortably on an arm-rested bench.
Longtime readers will know I love both urban signs and urban memorials. At some point, someone had the wise idea of selling little memorial plaques on park benches as a fundraising scheme. I love looking at these - they’re sometimes sad, but also often funny. It’s also nice to know the spots that have been meaningful to different people through the years. Here are some plaques I photographed in NYC, Hastings, and London.
The point is, you can tell a lot by looking at benches. “Street furniture” is the catch-all term for objects like trash cans, water fountains, benches, and lamps that go on the street for various purposes. It’s fun to parse the pros and cons of different designs but I’m interested in street furniture mainly because each piece is a window into the social and political life of the city. You can tell even more if you interrogate not just the design of street furniture but how it got there in the first place.
For example, bus shelters and newsstands in New York are actually provided by an advertising company. In 2005 the NYC Department of Transportation launched an effort to modernize the city’s street furniture (you might ask what street furniture has to do with transportation. Since DOT has jurisdiction over the streets and sidewalks, it is the agency responsible for the benches, lamps, bus shelters, news kiosks, etc that go on streets. Interrogating street furniture also reveals a lot of the tangled jurisdictions in a city). DOT struck a deal with Spanish advertising company Cemusa, which was later sold to billboard mogul JCDecaux. Cemusa hired Grimshaw Architects to design steel and glass shelters and kiosks that grace NYC streets in a style I’ll call “high-Bloombergian.”
Why does an advertising company provide our bus shelters? NYC worships at the altar of the public-private partnership, and the city saw an opportunity to upgrade its street furniture at virtually no cost to the city itself. JCDeceaux pays completely for the installation and upkeep of street furniture in exchange for the rights to sell the advertising space on it. The company has a little monopoly on this niche, providing street furniture with brightly lit ads (they invented the backlit billboard) not just in New York but also in Paris, Brussels, Singapore, San Fransisco, and more. It’s incredible to think about the impact this largely unknown company has on city streets around the globe. I don’t remember a time when bus shelters didn’t have ads, but at some point, this must have been a novel convention that we’ve slowly become numb to. The Grimshaw street furniture is the perfect encapsulation of a moment in city-making: sleek metal and glass objects heavily subsidized by consumption and constantly trying to sell you stuff (this is the deep social analysis you come here for!).
Like the Grimshaw pieces, the NYC Park bench is also a little portal into the urban dynamics of its time. The most popular model is the World’s Fair Bench used in Central Park. The bench is made by the iron foundry of Kevin Lynch, whose family still works with the Parks Dept to this day. Its iron hoop armrests were made possible by advances in metal casting, and as the name suggests it was commissioned by Robert Moses for the grounds of his 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Moses disliked the concrete benches that the previous Mayor had commissioned, and as someone with a not unsubstantial ego, he decided to design his own. Maybe it’s fitting that this is still the most common bench today. For all his misguided ideas and megalomania, he was quite productive. You can buy an original model for your garden for a cool $2,300 from the company’s website.
So far we’ve been talking about big companies and city agencies. Is there such a thing as grassroots street furniture? Yes! DIY/Tactical Urbanism has become a popular paradigm for quick, cheap, and flexible interventions in the street to meet the everyday needs of residents - usually executed by community groups or individuals when the city is too slow (or unwilling) to act. A milk crate can be a bench if you put it next to a bus stop that lacks seating, or better yet use some painted plywood.
Function usually takes precedence over form in these cases, but not always. I was lucky enough to tour the studio of the company Street Lab, which designs custom pieces of street furniture each with a unique programming idea behind it. They have a mobile library kit, consisting of a stained plywood bookshelf on wheels and sturdy plastic seats. They’ve designed a drawing station and a mobile nature classroom with similar pieces.
These are still flexible and reasonably cost-effective but there is a thoughtfulness to materials and shapes that I think elevates them above the rest. Their latest kit, dubbed Oasis, is meant to act as a mobile cooling station that recreates the experience of a lazy river.
These kits have been embraced by Open Streets groups, libraries, schools, and other organizations that create pop-up public spaces or have a need for flexibility. Like the park bench or bus shelter, the trend towards flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and grassroots-owned street furniture says something about our urban moment: A response to our shifting environment, gummed-up and underfunded city bureaucracy, and the ongoing need for props to facilitate public comfort and socializing.
I think most planners have an interest in mundane things. It’s a great quality to have because it means you are rarely bored by your surroundings. Flaubert said, “For anything to become interesting, you simply have to look at it for a long time,” and I’ve stared at lots of benches. Street furniture rarely calls much attention to itself, but each piece is full of meaning if you know where/how to look. What we provide to the street and how we furnish it is an expression of values, and each piece has the potential to become a little arena in the never-ending drama of city life. The city is a stage, and every show needs the right props.
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A place to rest in a bustling city is a quest that has always interested me. Reading this, I remembered a New York Times article from long ago that has always stuck with me: "Please, just a nice place to sit," Dec. 3, 1972, by William H. Whyte:(https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/03/archives/please-just-a-nice-place-to-sit.html?searchResultPosition=1). And as a lifelong New Yorker, I learned all kinds of things from this post: that our bus shelters and newsstands are provided by an advertising company and that there's such a things as grassroots street furniture. Thanks for another great essay.
I remember the older park benches in NYC with concrete supports that caused many a banged knee for kids who used it as an extension of the playground...
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