Moynihan Train Hall’s vaulted skylight ceiling is made from thousands of panels of glass supported by columns and lacy trusses left over from the building’s past life as New York City’s main post office. At its center hangs a twelve-foot-tall fluted geometric clock, dubbed “the Chrysler building in clock form” by a blog for timepiece enthusiasts. 1 The skylight, the trusses, and the clock — all indicators that we are in a train station of the grand old style.
There’s just one thing missing from the picture of a commuter idyll: benches.
There’s just one thing missing from that picture of a commuter idyll: benches. Like most people in the hall, I was waiting for a train. There is a lounge for first-class Amtrak travelers and rewards club VIPs, and another for regular ticket holders. I was in the second category, but the ticketed waiting room looked uninvitingly crowded. It wasn’t anywhere near its official capacity of 320 people, but accounting for travelers’ luggage and the comfortable distance most of us prefer to keep from strangers, it seemed full enough. Boarding time, according to my rough estimate, was about 20 minutes away.
I considered my options. With a three-minute walk, I could reach the dining hall. There, I could probably get a seat, but I’d be far away from the departure screens and Amtrak employees. What if I missed an announcement, or lost track of the time, just to sit down for fourteen minutes? So, like most other people in the station, I stood in place, alternating between holding my phone and my leaky to-go coffee cup in my dominant hand. Nearby, a family — harried-looking man and woman, two serene little girls in matching pink shirts watching something brightly-colored on a tablet — found a different solution. Their four suitcases and three bags were all pressed against a wall. The woman and kids sat on the floor, with backs against their luggage, while the man paced around them.
I’ve never visited the station without seeing travelers sprawled on the floor.
This was not an unusually busy day at Moynihan. In fact, I’ve never visited the station without seeing travelers sprawled on the floor. A mile and a half away, passengers improvise similar perches beneath the starry constellation ceiling of Grand Central Terminal. At the dining concourse downstairs, which used to hold dozens of tables and chairs, there are now only standing tables. In Washington, D.C., my train’s destination, the otherwise stately Union Station also has very limited public seating, favoring instead cafe tables clustered around eateries. It’s hard to tell where one can sit without being obliged to buy a cappuccino.
Benches aren’t just disappearing from large railroad stations, but also from subways, parks, plazas, sidewalks, and esplanades. Public transit systems in Philadelphia, Chicago, Anaheim, and New York City have lost benches, as have the entrance to Seattle’s Pike Place Market, a National Park plaza in Washington, D.C., a thoroughfare of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a boulevard dedicated to Korean veterans in Nashville, and a tiny riverfront park in Janesville, Wisconsin. 2 Some of these seats were replaced with armatures for perching or leaning, but most were not. There is no firm data on how many benches have been removed in total, nor when the trend precisely started. But anecdotal evidence suggests that in the past decade, across the United States, hundreds of places to sit in public have quietly disappeared.
Benches, like other public amenities, are where optimistic visions of civic life meet messy realities.
Benches, like other public amenities, are places where optimistic visions of civic life meet messier realities. They’re sites of leisure and contestation that invite a range of constituencies with vastly differing needs and desires. Office workers may lunch and seniors may rest, but teenagers might socialize at decibels unwelcome by their elders. Benches beckon skateboarders trying to perfect their nosegrinds, and men who sip drinks concealed in paper bags. Unlike parks or homeless shelters, they’re small and relatively inexpensive interventions, six-foot-long microcosms of a far broader debate over whom our cities should be structured to serve and how best to do so. To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.
When Moynihan opened in 2021, it was feted for its main hall, its art installations, and for the all-around contrast it strikes with nearby Penn Station, that much-maligned warren lurking beneath Madison Square Garden. But people noticed the lack of seating, too. A raft of elected officials, including U.S. Congressman Jerry Nadler and State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, wrote a letter to Amtrak and the Metropolitan Transit Authority, requesting more places to sit. Their letter, signed by representatives of various government bodies who possessed no collective ability to regulate Amtrak or the MTA, had no apparent effect.
Still, the letter acknowledged the most popular theory as to why so little seating was available. “We are aware that a number of unhoused individuals frequent this neighborhood,” wrote the signatories, “which might cause some concerns.” 3 To stop homeless people from sitting or lying down, the authors implied, the hall deprived almost everyone of a place to sit.
The idea that benches are for some people and not others isn’t new. Benches are part of how we define our communities.
In 2024, street homelessness in New York hit a 19-year high. 4 It’s a crisis born of other crises, in housing, mental health care, and addiction. What it’s not born of, however, is public benches — they’re just one of the more visible places where homelessness manifests. Like the subway and public library, benches are places that people who have nowhere to go, go. Observers of the public realm have long pointed out that depriving people in distress of a place to sit down is gratuitous cruelty. “Until the lodging problem of the city’s destitute can be adequately solved, it is less heart-rending that the forsaken ones shall have at least the hard comfort of a park bench to turn to at nightfall … than that they shall huddle together in misery, sleeping in the gutters,” wrote landscape architect George Burnap, designer of the first White House Rose Garden, in 1916. 5
While it would be obviously ridiculous to shutter the MTA or close the local library to prevent homeless people from using these resources, eliminating benches is now accepted practice. It’s not even clear that the strategy works. While waiting for my train at Moynihan, I watched a young man with a stiff, shuffling gait circle the station over and over in shoes that were much too big and full of holes.
The idea that benches are for some people and not others isn’t new. In 1908, a St. Petersburg, Florida real estate developer sparked a trend when he installed benches at a downtown intersection. They were so well-liked that other people installed their own, in a range of colors, until the city passed an ordinance permitting only green benches. Eventually, they numbered around 3,000 and St. Petersburg earned a nickname: “The City of Green Benches.” 6 They became staples of the city’s marketing efforts, seen on postcards and in ads as emblems of its winterless weather, friendly community, and unhurried retiree lifestyle. 7
Not everyone was welcome on the green benches. Throughout the Jim Crow era, police prevented Black people from using them. 8 “I can remember walking down Central Avenue with my mother, lined with green benches, and knowing we could not sit on them,” Gwendolyn Reese, a Black resident, told a local news outlet in 2025. “It wasn’t the law. It was the practice.” 9 Another Black local recalled in an interview for the Tampa Bay Times, “What green benches meant to me was racism … It meant ‘no.’ It meant, you’re not good enough.” 10 St. Petersburg’s green benches are reminiscent of benches in 1930s Vienna that were marked “Only for Aryans.” 11
When a group isn’t afforded full civic inclusion, they’re not welcome to share benches with those whose status is secured. Benches are part of how we define our communities, revealing shared commitments to egalitarian ideals, or, conversely, to enforcing racial, religious, or class-based divisions.
It’s possible to think of benches not only as reflecting our societies, but as actively shaping our values and orientation toward the world. The differences between chair-sitting cultures and floor-sitting cultures extend far beyond sitting posture. Japanese philosopher and Buddhist D.T. Suzuki compared Rodin’s rock-perched Thinker to a floor-sitting Zen meditator. “The Zen ‘thinker’ is rooted in the foundation, as it were, of all things, and every thought he may cherish is directly connected with the source of being from which we of the earth come,” wrote Suzuki. “To raise oneself from the ground even by one foot means a detachment, a separation, an abstraction, a going away into the realm of analysis and discrimination.” 12 To Descartes’ inheritors, on the other hand, escaping the ground is precisely the appeal of a chair. Art critic Arthur C. Danto, in his essay on chairs and their significations, “The Seat of the Soul,” notes that by “rest[ing] the body,” the “higher faculties” are made free “to pursue their more elevated concerns.” 13
The public bench draws us away from the humble ground and the vaunted throne, and allows us to enter a polity.
Just as chair-sitting and floor-sitting carry symbolic significance, different forms of seating each have their own connotations. In English, we speak of congressional seats, judicial benches, and chairpersons. Hierarchy is often expressed through patterns of sitting and standing — think of the bailiff demanding “All rise” when a judge enters the courtroom. The art of ancient Egypt suggests that chairs were used only by those of high rank. 14 This seems a slightly improved situation compared to the court of Versailles, where the public was regularly invited to watch the royal family dine, but only princesses and duchesses were permitted to sit. 15
In a seating hierarchy that spans from lofty thrones to lowly footstools, public benches land somewhere in the lower middle class. Communal and anonymous, they afford the dignity and recognition with which our culture imbues chair sitting, but confer no particular status. In the West, the public bench draws us away from both the humble ground and the vaunted throne. Through the bench, we enter the polity. When benches are removed, we lose more than just a place to rest.
No New York City benches are as famous as those in Central Park. The park is home to several designs, each rooted in a specific moment of city history. When it opened to the public in 1858, the park featured two kinds of seating: rustic benches and Central Park settees. The rustic benches were painstakingly handmade of Adirondack-style raw wood. Today, just a few dozen remain — they adorn particularly scenic landscapes, and are often integrated into bridges, pergolas, and summerhouses. 16
The Central Park settees, on the other hand, are mass-produced, featuring five gently sloping wooden seat slats, and two more slats as a backrest, all floating on a thin, iron frame. The silhouette is intentionally spare, as the park’s designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, wanted to minimize human-built impositions on the surrounding landscape.
Olmsted believed Central Park to be “a democratic development of the highest significance” — open to all, rich or poor, putting nature within reach of city dwellers who had no access to country homes or seaside getaways. 17 But in its early years, Central Park was hardly a model of egalitarianism. In the 1860s, 55 percent of park visitors arrived via horse-drawn carriage, but only three to five percent of city households owned the pricey conveyances. 18 The lawns were available for use only on Saturdays, which was part of the workweek for New York’s rank and file. 19
The idea that the powerless can use public space, provided they follow the rules of the powerful, sits uneasily alongside more inclusive visions.
Olmsted’s conception of parks as a public good was also distinctly paternalistic; he assumed parks, like schools and libraries, would help the poor “acquire the refinement and taste and the mental and moral capital of gentlemen.” 20 The idea that the powerless can use public space, provided they mind their p’s and q’s and follow the rules of the powerful, has always sat uneasily alongside more inclusive visions. In the summer of 1901, the president of New York City’s Park Commission granted an enterprising vendor a contract allowing him to rent out private seating in city parks. The chairs — green, cane-bottomed rockers available for five cents, and armchairs for three cents — could be rented between ten in the morning and ten at night. Similar chair rental schemes already existed in European cities. 21
After the New York program was up and running, the city removed many free park benches for repair. But then a record-breaking eight-day-long heatwave struck, and around 700 New Yorkers died as temperatures climbed to 99 degrees in the shade. Hundreds of thousands ventured into parks, which were kept open day and night to provide life-saving relief. People who sought refuge in Central Park found that aside from a few benches located in direct sunlight, they’d now have to pay up to sit down. 22
Days of riots followed. In Madison Square Park, a mob rushed to the defense of a man who squatted in a chair without paying. The crowd tossed a police officer into a pond, and threatened to lynch the rental attendant. In Central Park, an attendant was chased from his post by a woman who jabbed him with her hat pin while shouting that he was “an oppressor of the poor.” 23 The rocking chairs were stolen and stamped to pieces or thrown under the wheels of horse-drawn carriages. 24
The rental chairs were stolen and stamped to pieces or thrown under the wheels of horse-drawn carriages.
The rental chairs had their defenders. Some praised them for being clean and movable, and for allowing the well-heeled to distance themselves from the riffraff. “Are the parks intended for the poor and idlers only?” sniffed a booster in an anonymous letter to the New York Times. “It will be a great boon to many who wish to spend an hour or two in the park to be able to procure for 5 cents a clean and comfortable chair, which may be placed where they will not be compelled to inhale the smoke of ill-smelling pipes, nor nauseated by the expectoration of the ‘gentlemen’ who monopolize the benches.” 25 But the rental advocates didn’t carry the day. Under mass public pressure, the commissioner revoked the vendor’s license. The rental chairs disappeared, and funding was approved for 5,000 new, free benches. 26
For most New Yorkers, Central Park’s benches are indulgences for weekends, summer holidays, or the occasional sunny-day lunch. Park benches are, of course, lovely — but it’s not surprising to find a lovely scene in a park. In contrast, the Department of Transportation’s street-side benches — part of its CityBench program — are weekday workhorses, uncelebrated but indispensable. and found in all sorts of unassuming and often unlovely places — sidewalks, pedestrian islands, bus stops. These benches offer respite at moments of genuine necessity, when a bus hasn’t shown up or when, trudging home with groceries, you need a place to pause and catch your breath.
Before the DOT launched CityBench, in 2012, New York City had no official street-side bench initiative. 27 “All the other benches that were out there were either privately owned or, essentially, illegally [installed],” Shari Gold, Deputy Director of Operations for the DOT Street Furniture Unit, told me. With the help of a federal grant, gleaming new benches began appearing on New York City streets, at a cost of around $3,000 per bench. 28 Since then, the DOT has installed over 2,100 benches, or about six benches per month. 29
DOT benches are weekday workhorses, offering respite at moments of genuine necessity.
Designed by Ignacio Ciocchini, CityBenches are seven-and-a half-feet long, with three spacious seats and four armrests, and are produced in both backed and backless models. 30 The backed benches are more comfortable, but the backless one can accommodate more people. “You can fit up to six people if you’re a family and kids, or you don’t care about touching somebody,” Gold told me. The backless model also allows the sitter to face whichever direction they prefer. Both seats and backs are filled with narrow rectangular cutouts that look a bit like Morse code and offload snow, rain, and heat. The original benches were silver and powder-coated with a graffiti-resistant finish that tends to peel away, giving older editions the appearance of having suffered a bad sunburn. To prevent this stripping, more recent CityBenches have black matte seats. 31 The entire design is modular, so that if a car hits one end, only the damaged seat needs to be replaced, rather than the entire bench. 32
In deciding where to add a bench, the DOT prioritizes locations in Tier 1 neighborhoods, a geographic designation determined by the area’s poverty rate and level of prior departmental investment. 33 Ridership at a bus stop is a major factor, but the unit also considers proximity to high-traffic institutions like schools. New Yorkers can contact DOT directly to request benches, although numerous placement regulations must be considered to ensure that new seating is safe and doesn’t obstruct sidewalks. 34
I tracked the installation of two DOT benches in the Longwood section of the Bronx, and found that residents responded to these new benches with a complicated mix of optimism, worry, and ambivalence. For years, the traffic triangle at the intersection of Westchester Avenue, Fox Street, and 165th Street had been a cobbled patch of asphalt, where cars parked illegally and trash littered the ground. 35 When I made my first visit, the transformation had begun: The blacktop was torn-up rubble, cordoned off by traffic drums. In the weeks that followed, the triangle was paved, bright red curb ramps installed, and the crosswalk painted.
Bronx residents responded to the new benches with a mix of optimism and ambivalence.
The benches were the finishing touch. Although they were still in the bed of a truck when I arrived on the day of installation, debate about their future was well underway. As trains rumbled by on the elevated line above Westchester Avenue, a local man named Jose Rojas told DOT employees that the new pedestrian triangle was not an ideal spot for benches. Rojas had lived in Longwood for decades and owned a home nearby. “I don’t mind public areas for people to come in and relax,” he told me, “That, I don’t mind.” But he worried that these particular benches would invite disorder. “One of my concerns is people sleeping over,” he said. “Drugs.” 36 He didn’t want to clean up needles.
Longwood and adjoining Hunts Point are among the most poorly served communities in the city. Ninety-three percent of the area’s residents are Hispanic or Black, and the poverty rate is nearly twice the city average. The community faces serious crime at a disproportionate rate, and a third of tenants spend more than half their income on rent. 37 The air here is more polluted than in other neighborhoods. 38
The traffic triangle itself was a hotspot of pedestrian, cyclist, and driver injuries, averaging seven accidents per year. With a diagonal road intersecting the rectangular street grid, as often happens under elevated train lines, locations like the Westchester Avenue triangle are “inherently dangerous,” said Amy Howden-Chapman, the DOT project manager who oversaw the renovation. The elevated tracks cast shadow on the road, and the columns obstruct drivers’ vision. The cars parked (illegally) on the triangle forced pedestrians to weave between and around them, sometimes to walk into the street just to get through. “We sadly find that a lot of pedestrian injuries — or worst case, fatalities — can happen at locations like this,” said Howden-Chapman. 39
In fact, there was a death at this intersection, though not the kind the DOT is responsible for preventing. In May of 2022, eleven-year-old Kyhara Tay was struck by a stray bullet and killed. 40 The memory of that murder was very much on Rojas’s mind — further evidence that this was not a safe place to linger. “The little girl right here — ” he gestured toward Fox Street. “She got shot. No reason at all.” 41
Over my visits to the site, I tried to take a measure of local opinions about the benches. “Just knowing what goes on in this area, I would never sit there,” said Brooklyn Nimoh, who was working behind the counter at Uptown Fashions on Westchester Avenue, just around the corner from the triangle. “I’d feel like a sitting duck if something happened.” Nimoh said she was at the store on the afternoon Tay was killed.
There is a memorial at the site — a wooden case with flower garlands, candles, and pictures of Tay — where Nimoh regularly saw the girl’s father sitting for hours. When Nimoh found him there on Father’s Day, she says, she brought him a card. “I had everyone around here sign it, and I gave it to him,” she told me. “I felt so bad.” 42
One resident pointed out that while the renovated triangle had benches, it still lacked a garbage can.
Other people I spoke to were primarily concerned about the threat posed by cars zipping by on all sides. “This is a weird spot [for a bench] because at nighttime, the cars go fast,” Alejandra told me. (Like many New Yorkers I spoke to for this article, she declined to give her last name.) “Drunk people speed over here, so it makes no sense.” Kenya, carrying a small purple scooter when I met her on Westchester Avenue, said she probably wouldn’t sit at the triangle either — it was too easy to imagine her five-year-old darting into the surrounding traffic. There was a sense that benches weren’t enough to reshape this neglected patch of New York City. Nimoh pointed out that the renovated triangle still lacked a garbage can. “You have to have the resources,” she said. “You can’t give us one without the other. You’re going to put in benches? Put a garbage.” 43
On a cool overcast evening in August 2024, I watched a young man quietly sit on a bench in the triangle, looking off towards Fox Street, alongside an older lady deep in her cellphone conversation. There was evidence that someone had eaten a meal on the other bench, which was was partially covered in the contents of an overturned takeout container of chicken and rice. I talked to the young man, Mohammad, who’d recently arrived in the U.S. from Mauritania, and spoke halting English. “For chill, it’s a good place,” he told me. “I never have a problem.” 44
On a subsequent visit, the benches were empty. I stopped to sit and see if anyone would join me. After fifteen minutes, Tanya approached, walking slowly and using a cane. She told me that she’d lived in the neighborhood for sixteen years and was a grandmother. She went for a daily walk on Westchester Avenue, and since the benches’ debut, she sat on them during each outing. Tanya was enthusiastic about the renovations. The brick cobbled roadway had been hazardous to navigate with her cane, and because she was getting on in age, she said, she needed resting spots. She’d seen young people sitting on the benches drinking alcohol, but they never bothered her. She planned to keep visiting the triangle. “I need my vitamin D,” she said, “and my fresh air.”
It might be true that benches can’t create community, but they can support the interactions that do.
It was a tall order to imagine that two benches could make this particular traffic triangle — loud, busy, shadeless; near the site of a child’s murder — into a place rather than a space. “Benches in and of themselves aren’t enough to create … socially activated, democracy-producing belonging,” Setha Low, director of the Public Space Research Group at City University of New York, told me. “We also need something called public culture, which has to do with people bumping into each other and creating ways of being together, and some sort of affective atmosphere.” 45
It might be true that benches can’t create community, but they can support the interactions that do. They give the elderly the ability to navigate their neighborhoods, providing opportunities for cross-generational interaction. Noisy phone calls and messy to-go meals that might otherwise be taken indoors are instead indulged in public, creating minor vexations but bringing people — and watchful eyes — to streets that have been scarred by violence. Despite all they’re up against, the Bronx benches are an invitation to share a space and build a public culture on what was formerly a patch of cobblestones.
Not all of New York’s street-side benches were installed by the DOT. Some are the result of public-private partnerships that involve developers and Business Improvement Districts. Often these benches are intended to further the interests of their corporate funders. At the recently redesigned Plaza33, a stretch of 33rd Street adjoining Madison Square Garden, five marble tree planters double as circular benches. They were installed by Vornado Realty Trust, a $6.5 billion developer that controls ten million square feet of retail and office space in Midtown, including Moynihan Train Hall.
Some benches are the result of public-private partnerships, and are intended to further business interests.
The plaza is a busy way station for tourists, shoppers, and commuters. Signe Nielsen, a founding principal of Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, which designed the space, told me that Vornado wanted the benches to keep people moving along. “As is often the case, there’s controversy around providing seating,” she said, diplomatically. “It was give with one hand and take with another … we had to be very cognizant of the concerns of the developer and the neighborhood, to be perfectly blunt, with regard to not making something that’s too comfortable.” 46
On the other end of the spectrum are unique, one-off benches. In New York, these are often built into tree bed guards, or positioned outside bars and cafés. Other cities, however, have bench activists who have dedicated themselves to installing unauthorized benches en masse. 47 Among the most prolific guerrilla benchers are the duo of Berkeley software engineer Mingwei Samuel and housing activist Darrell Owens. The two met when Owens posted a photo on X of an older man sitting on a curb next to his cane. The man was his neighbor, Owens wrote, and he’d recently had surgery and suffered from chronic pain. “Now he’s sitting on the ground in downtown berkeley because @CityofBerkeley and @rideact dont have benches at their bus stops,” he added. 48 “I can put a bench there,” Samuel replied. A month later, on social media, he posted a photo of a newly-constructed bench at the same bus stop, chained to a sign pole with a bike lock. 49 Since then, Samuel and Owens have installed more than thirty benches, and the city has mostly left them alone. “It’s just not a good look,” Samuel told me, for the city to remove a bench it “can’t replace.” 50
Guerrilla bench activists are dedicated to installing unauthorized benches en masse.
Samuel and Owens use a friendly-looking design called the Duderstadt Bench. The style is simple, but it has a few nice touches. The backrest curves gently, while the seat dips in the back so that the sitter’s butt tilts towards the ground. I didn’t visit California to try them out, but I believed Samuel when he told me the wood benches were “very comfortable.” They were designed by Chris Duderstadt, another citizen bencher in the Bay Area. Duderstadt has been building and installing benches in San Francisco for nearly 50 years, though he does so with the permission, and sometimes the invitation, of the property owner. When I spoke to him, he was working on his 205th Duderstadt Bench. 51
Other activists have targeted armrests, which, because they discourage sleeping, are by far the most controversial element of bench design. In Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority began installing armrests on existing benches in 2020, and activists began removing them the following year, usually at night. In March 2021, activists removed armrests from benches in Central Square in Cambridge, and then released a statement condemning the armrests as “hostile architecture” that “contributes to the further ostracization and oppression of unhoused people by sending a message that they are not part of our community, that they do not even deserve a space to sleep at night.” 52 An MBTA spokesperson countered that the armrests were not installed to prohibit sleeping, but to “offer structural support for customers with mobility challenges when they want to stand up or sit down.” 53
Despite the passage of the American Disabilities Act more than three decades ago, American cities remain profoundly inaccessible. Sharon McLennon Wier, executive director of the Center for the Independence of the Disabled, New York, confirmed that armrests can be helpful for those with mobility needs. “There are some people that once [they] sit, they can’t get up again,” she told me, “and that’s a problem.” 54 Armrests provide purchase that’s helpful to people managing injury, arthritis, and advancing age.
As one urban planner points out, ‘it’s possible to use accessibility in bad faith.’
Still, as urban planner Sara Chellew pointed out in an article for Azure, “it’s possible to use accessibility in bad faith.” 55 Advocates for the homeless find it rather too convenient that city planners, under the banner of accessibility, have fixated on a design feature that renders benches unaccommodating to people who want to lie down. To this point, they argue that some armrests are too low to be useful to someone who actually needs the stability; that their real purpose is to deterring sleepers. 56 The city of Amsterdam recently announced that it would remove all center armrests from city benches, after determining that the change would not harm accessibility for seniors. 57 According to the spokesperson I talked with, Amsterdam officials wanted to avoid giving the impression that the benches are “hostile for homeless people, because that’s absolutely not the case.” 58
Neither the pro- nor anti-armrest contingents tend to acknowledge that it’s possible to design seating that considers the needs of multiple constituencies. Benches are often six to eight feet long, and there’s no need for armrests to be located dead center; an eight-foot bench can accommodate both an armrest and a sleeper. 59 In locations with many benches, one street furniture manufacturer recommends that two-fifths should be equipped with armrests. 60 New York’s 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park takes that approach: there are hundreds of benches conjoined in configurations that often begin and end with benches that lack center armrests, creating both space to lie down and plenty of armrests to go around. 61
Reconciling bench users who have conflicting needs and desires may require negotiation between strangers — a skill grown rusty in our depersonalizing world of mobile commerce and self-checkout machines. These trends were hurried along by the Covid pandemic, whose months of enforced isolation lessened our tolerance for the unexpected intimacies of the public realm. Many people’s understanding of personal space ballooned during the pandemic, from a cultural standard of about four feet, to about six feet or more. 62 A stranger on the other end of a bench might now seem too close to our personal bubble, and any hint of a cough posed a threat. 63 The late theorist Lauren Berlant called these sorts of interactions “the familiar friction of being in relation.” 64 Lately these frictions feel particularly combustible.
Minor conflicts over shared resources are key to the health of democracy.
But mild social friction also spurs the growth of helpful emotional callouses, the kind that allow us to bump up against desires that conflict with our own and come away not too badly bruised. According to theorist Bonnie Honig, minor conflicts over shared resources are key to the health of democracy. “Democracy is rooted in common love for, antipathy to, and contestation of public things,” she writes. 65 Perhaps I am at the library in search of a particular book, or at the park in search of a bench. But in addition to finding (or not finding) a book or a bench, I’ve put myself in proximity to others, including some I might find disagreeable.
In interacting with civic infrastructure, we surrender a degree of control. If the book I want has been checked out, or the seat I sought is occupied, there’s not much to do but wait my turn. These collective goods offer a refresher course in a skill rarely taught after kindergarten: sharing. Public goods help us learn, as Honig writes, that “we are not always in charge.” 66
When sitting on a public bench, marginalized people make a claim to visibility, which is also a claim to personhood.
If we try to avoid an awkward or intimidating exchange, we risk forfeiting the benefits of benches. A 2016 study of the role benches play in the lives of older adults in Vancouver found that they fostered social ties, enhanced mobility, and improved access to public space. But realizing those benefits sometimes required negotiation. “We have a lot of old people in the neighborhood, but we also have street people. So who shall sit?,” an 85-year-old named Beatrice told the researchers. “There are street people that sort of park there for the day. I did not want [the park] taken over totally, so I would occasionally ask somebody, “Could you move? I would like to sit for a while.” Usually, Beatrice secured a seat. 67
I wanted to understand how homeless New Yorkers negotiate similar situations, and was surprised to see that there were very few (apparently) unhoused people sitting on benches. Instead, people were sitting on the ground, or on overturned milk crates and other improvised stools. I asked Elizabeth, who was panhandling from a Midtown sidewalk, if she’d prefer to sit on a bench.
There weren’t any within view, but even if there had been, she told me, she’d prefer to remain on the ground because she received a kinder reception from the public while sitting there. “People judge, being homeless,” Elizabeth said. She was nervous about speaking to a writer, and ended our conversation abruptly, but I found her words striking: She felt more judged when conforming to norms of public behavior by sitting on a bench than she did while breaking them and sitting on the sidewalk. In occupying a public bench, the most marginalized members of society make a claim to visibility, which is also a claim to personhood. And not everyone finds them deserving.
Commemorative benches capitalize on this visibility, with plaques ensuring that their honorees remain fixtures of the public realm. In Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park, a plaque with a longer-than-usual message caught my eye. It read:
In loving memory of Traore Leigh
A local artist from Fort Greene who loved his ‘hood deeply.
He spent countless hours in this park — painting, playing with his dogs, and chillin’ in the “Reunion” spot.
He saw the world in his own special way.
We miss and love you always.
The message was written by Amari Rose Leigh, Traore’s daughter. She and her family dedicated the bench in his memory in 2023. 68 When I reached out to her online, we realized that we’d attended the same high school a few years apart. She met me for coffee near the park, and we sat together on a bench near the one dedicated to her father, which was occupied by a chatty twosome. Her parents first met in Fort Greene Park, just a few feet from where we sat. Behind us was the “reunion spot,” her father’s go-to place for convening with friends. After Amari Rose was born, he often took her to the park, which he visited every day with the family’s two pit bulls. 69
Amari Rose told me that Traore was an artist, teacher, and traveler. He also had schizophrenia. As he struggled with his illness, he endured hospitalization, incarceration, and periods of homelessness. After a final hospitalization, he was released without his family being notified. He spent two weeks on the streets, she said, then went to a bridge and ended his life.
Instead of a tombstone — “that wasn’t his vibe” — the family sought a different kind of memorial. Traore felt a profound connection to Fort Greene, the brownstone-lined, history-rich Black neighborhood where he’d grown up in the 1970s. Over the years, his neighborhood had been remade by gentrification. Those changes made a bench memorial feel even more apt — a way to keep a Black Fort Greene native in the heart of the community when so many in his generation were being priced out.
The bench memorializes a Black Fort Greene native in the heart of the community.
There’s a tragic irony in the fact that the park bench on which Traore is memorialized is a place where he may not have been welcome while he was alive. “I think my dad had many situations where people just looked at him as a crazy guy who was making things difficult for the people around him in public spaces,” she said. They didn’t necessarily think, “Okay, he has a life, he has a family.’” The bench quietly refutes these assumptions, and through it, Traore remains a member of his community.
Under the volcanic debris of Pompeii, archaeologists have found: the leg bone of a giraffe, mosaics that spell out “Beware of Dog”, the remains of about 2,000 humans — and 100 benches. 70 Jeremy Hartnett, professor of classics at Wabash College and author of The Roman Street: Urban Life and Society in Pompeii, has studied these benches, many of which were attached to private homes, trying to understand why they were built and how they were used. Under the patronage system, Pompeii’s wealthy elite provided financial and legal support to “clients” who were poorer and more vulnerable. In return, the clients gave deference, gratitude, and political support. One of the clients’ obligations was a daily visit to their patron’s house, called a salutorio. Salutorios happened in the morning, and the clients were expected to be there waiting when the patron opened his doors.
Hartnett explained to me that the benches seem to have been a place for clients to sit — a gesture of hospitality on the part of the patrons. And, of course, like other forms of noblesse oblige, the benches were an exhibition of wealth. A strong showing of clients indicated the patron’s power and influence. Some who weren’t clients might also sit on the benches; all the better. The presence of anyone on the bench redounded to the homeowner’s reputation, giving the impression, Hartnett told me, that people were “waiting for the big man of the house.” 71
Pompeii’s benches were part of a tradition of wealthy donors providing public amenities. “There’s an expectation, in the Roman world, that the elite folk will pony up bucks for public good,” Hartnett explained. “They’ll build a bath, or they’ll hire a gladiatorial troop, or they’ll put a sundial in a temple. And these good works are for the public, but they’re supposed to reflect well on the benefactor.” 72
This negotiation between private wealth and public goods continues today. Contemporary New York City is home to nearly 600 “privately owned public spaces,” or POPS, the result of partnerships between real estate developers and city government. First implemented in 1961 by the Department of City Planning, the program allows developers to secure zoning exemptions in exchange for constructing and managing spaces open to the public.
No ‘privately owned public space’ has been more scrutinized than the one at 725 Fifth Avenue.
Perhaps no POPS has been more scrutinized than the one at 725 Fifth Avenue. In exchange for adding about 13,000 feet of ostensibly public space — spread across an atrium, gardens, and a passageway connecting to a separate POPS nearby — developer Donald Trump was permitted to add 105,436 square feet to Trump Tower. 73 POPS are required to include amenities, too, and here these include air conditioning, bathrooms, movable tables and chairs — and benches. 74
I visited Trump Tower in December 2024, when Midtown Manhattan was crowded with holiday visitors. Three NYPD officers and their Labrador were posted near the doors, and in the entrance hall a sign on a gold pedestal alerted visitors that all bags were subject to search by Trump Tower security.
Drug addicts and vagrants are, of course, members of the public.
To the right there were four crowded benches, backless and made of black metal. 75 As I discovered, these modest seats were the result of a protracted legal dispute between the Trump Organization and New York City. The tower opened in 1984 with a single 22-foot-long bench made of black marble. It was soon surrounded — obstructed — by large planters. 76 An official from the Department of City Planning — which oversees POPS compliance — asked the Trump Organization to remove the planters. 77 “We have had tremendous difficulties with respect to the bench,” Trump wrote in response, “Drug addicts, vagrants, et cetera, have come to the Atrium in large numbers. …Additionally, all sorts of ‘horrors’ had been taking place that effectively ruined the beautiful ambiance of the space which everyone loves so much.” 78
Drug addicts and vagrants are, of course, members of the public, and they’re entitled to exist in the civic realm. POPSs are “supposed to be just as public as any other public space,” Michael Pollack, a professor at Cardozo School of Law, told me. In reality, however, “there’s more supervision of activity, more aggressive enforcement of the rules, or of who is excluded or included.” 79
This was certainly true of the other privately-managed public space where I spent time, the aforementioned Plaza33, built and maintained by Vornado Realty Trust. There, a list of Dos and Don’ts is prominently displayed on a placard. Banned activities outnumber permitted ones, and some of the latter are actually the former, gussied up in a sunny tone: I was welcome to “use one chair per person,” and “enjoy the plantings without entering flower beds or picking flowers.” Personal furniture and tents were banned, as were carts; as at Trump Tower, the area was patrolled by uniformed private security.
Trump removed the marble bench and installed display cases selling Apprentice DVDs and other merch.
After a while the city forced Trump to remove the planters that were screening the Trump Tower benches; but seating became a subject of dispute again in the 2000s. This time, Trump removed the marble bench and installed glass display cases selling Apprentice DVDs and other merch. The Trump Organization was fined around $14,000, far more than the standard $5,000 penalty for violating a POPS agreement. But such figures are insignificant compared to the value of additional prime New York City real estate. 80 And while Trump Tower is highly scrutinized, other POPS are rarely monitored for compliance. A 2017 audit by the city comptroller’s office found that 83 percent of these spaces had not been inspected in at least four years. 81
Eventually, Trump lost his battle with the city, and four black metal benches were installed in 2016. The process, however, took about ten years — and so it seems there was a decade during which Trump’s privately owned “public” space did not offer the public seating it was required to provide in exchange for 105,436 square feet of profit-generating real estate. 82
It’s perhaps unsurprising that these four hard-won benches, located where bags may always be searched, where police and security are always watching, and where the Trump brand is being relentlessly flogged, are not conducive to spontaneous moments of rest, connection, or exploration. While I sat in the atrium, readying myself to step back into the cold, perhaps the social distinctions between myself and the other bench users were eased. But there was only one name above the door, and it wasn’t any of ours.
One day I traveled about two hours north of Manhattan to the tiny hamlet of Livingston Manor to visit a very different kind of bench. There, works by sculptor Francis Cape are exhibited in the bright second-floor gallery of the Catskill Art Space. The sculptures consist of ten poplar benches, some long enough to sit four or five people, others with space only for two. Though all are backless, each a different design: panel legs, sturdy trestle legs, spindly splayed legs. The benches are as alike and different as strangers in a crowd.
They’re part of Cape’s series Utopian Benches, which the artist has been working on since 2010. Each is a meticulous recreation of a bench design from an American intentional community, past or present. The pieces range from the spare elegance of a bench made by the Shakers, whose New World experiment in communal living began in 1774, to the clunky, mass-market bench Cape found at the Ganus community, established on Staten Island in 1979. Beautiful, legible artworks, with rich historical connections, Cape’s benches have found acclaim in exhibitions across the United States and Europe. They’re functional seating too. In fact, the artist makes a condition of their display that they be used for public discussions. 83
Public benches signify a commitment to public life. They’re a small article of faith in an ideal.
I met Cape in the gallery, and we talked while sitting on two of his benches. He explained that he became interested in utopian societies after he spent a youthful summer living with an intentional community in Canada. “I grew up in the late ’60s, early ’70s when we thought we were going to change the world and if not, we were going to drop out and move into a commune somewhere,” he told me. “And by 2010 there was no hope — the Berlin Wall had come down, there was no vision for anything alternative to liberal capitalism. And so the important thing to me was to remember and celebrate people …who live sharing everything.” 84
The benches index a wide range of communities, from the devout Ephrata Cloister, founded in Pennsylvania in 1732, whose semi-monastic sisters and brothers rose from bed at 12 o’clock nightly to look out for the second coming, to the non-religious eight-member Glomus Commune, formed in 2015 around a community farm.
Some of the societies Cape studied were highly controlled and strictly hierarchical; others have been called cults. 85 What Cape admires, however, is simply that they were built around a set of convictions. “It’s about dreaming of a better place,” said Cape, “and the idea that that exists, or it can exist.” 86 Public benches signify a commitment to public life. They’re a small article of faith in an ideal.
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