The public bench is a staple of life in New York City. The pigeon ladies sit and toss out bird seed. The performative reader flaunts a copy of “Crime and Punishment.” Foreign spies covertly hold a meeting. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks banter in a rom-com.
In a world where we feel increasingly fractured and disconnected from one another, benches can be a symbol of collective experience. But in a city with so many people, and so little space, they are also prime real estate, and a source of tension.
This year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the subway, installed leaning benches at a highly trafficked subway station in the West Village, in Manhattan. The leaning bench, as the name suggests, is not for sitting but for people to prop their bodies against.
They are not new. They are a continuation of a decades-long shift of reinventing the public bench into something that doesn’t welcome the public at all. This kind of bench is not made for us to spend hours people watching, it’s not made for deep conversations, it’s not made to feed pigeons and, perhaps above all, it’s not made for sleeping.
Over the years, designers, developers and city officials have introduced benches with arm rests, seat dividers and curved shapes, making the seats uncomfortable for the increasing number of homeless people who have turned them into beds.
Often referred to as hostile or defensive architecture, these design changes have entire Instagram accounts and Reddit forums dedicated to documenting their rise. Though people experiencing street homelessness are the main target, legions of New Yorkers are annoyed. Some — especially older New Yorkers — are angry.
“We already have leaning benches in every station,” said Sean Sweeney, 79, a building supervisor in SoHo. “They’re called ‘walls.’”
He added: “As you get older, you get back problems. I need a bench to sit on in the subway to ease my back pain.”
Many public spaces also now have a stark lack of seating. In the $1.6 billion Moynihan Train Hall, for example, passengers sit on the floor while waiting for the Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road.
“It’s unambiguously directed at unhoused individuals,” said Jerold S. Kayden, a professor of urban planning and design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. “These leaning rails prevent anybody from lying down on them or occupying them for a long period of time.”
In many ways, the evolution of the New York City public bench reflects society’s changing relationship with public space, who is viewed as worthy of occupying it and shifting notions of how officials should deal with homelessness.
But hostile architecture doesn’t just affect homeless New Yorkers — it affects everyone. In an age of smartphone addiction, declining social skills and rising loneliness, the endangerment of the bench, a basic street fixture, is especially pressing.
Just how did New York get to a point where the bench, a public symbol of unity, has turned into a warning to stay away?
‘Putting Up Bars’
Central Park, which opened its first section in 1858, was one of the city’s most notable early investments in public space. In the 1870s, a cast-iron bench called the settee was mass-produced for the park, allowing visitors to lounge more comfortably. It looked delicate, with its flared, thin legs. Around 60 years later, a new design became the seating option of choice in city parks: the Chrystie-Forsythe bench, which is bulkier with a concrete base. Neither of them had arm rests at first. Tucked between bushes and overlooking city streets, both types can still be found around New York today.
By the early 1930s, the Great Depression had forced large numbers of Americans into homelessness. Across the country, people set up “Hoovervilles,” shantytowns to live out of, including in the emptied Central Park reservoir.
“People were sleeping on benches during the Depression,” said Sara Cedar Miller, the Central Park Conservancy’s historian emerita. “They were sleeping all over the park then.”
In this climate, another bench would soon take over the city, developed by Robert Moses, the infamous parks commissioner known for his racist and classist approach to transforming New York’s built environment. For the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Mr. Moses worked with Kenneth Lynch, a furniture maker, to create 8,000 benches defined by one main feature: hooped dividers.
Mr. Moses’s intentions in molding the city’s built environment were explained in 1974 in Robert Caro’s definitive biography, “The Power Broker.” Mr. Caro wrote of how Mr. Moses used benches to shape public behavior: “Still drunks kept wandering into the playgrounds at night; Moses tried to keep them out first by putting up bars between the bench groupings.”
The Moses bench is ubiquitous across New York today, lining street medians, parks and sidewalks. Some versions have add-on iron detailing within the hoops that blocks people from sticking their legs through to lie down.
For the unsheltered homeless, dividers, leaning benches and the general scarcity of seating are more than just inconvenient, potentially creating health and safety problems.
“It’s very uncomfortable and, I would say, unsafe because it also hurted my back and my neck,” said Timothy Evans, 45, who was homeless for over a decade as he battled addiction before moving into stable housing last year. This year, over 4,500 people were estimated to be living on the streets and subways, a two-decade high.
Mr. Evans often slept on benches in Central Park and on the Lower East Side, but he found that sleeping beneath them was the most pleasant option. “With the arm rests, you can’t really lay or spread out,” he said.
‘No Sitting’
Before the 1970s, vague anti-loitering and anti-vagrancy laws widely allowed police officers to arrest people in public spaces — often people of color or the homeless — on a whim.
The laws were used to regulate the movements and public behaviors of Black people and immigrants across the country, said Michael Benediktsson, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College and the author of “In the Midst of Things: The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City.”
But in the early ’70s, the Supreme Court ruled that these laws were unconstitutional. “That’s when you see more of a turn to hostile urban design and planning as a means of achieving the same objective,” Dr. Benediktsson said.
Hostile architecture extends beyond benches to deter people from occupying public spaces: spikes on window ledges, rails and planters or even more obvious features, like “no sitting” signs.
The urbanist William H. Whyte observed people in public to understand what made some plazas lively and others dismal. His main finding? “People tend to sit where there are places to sit,” Mr. Whyte narrates in “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,” his seminal 1980 film. “This might not strike you as an intellectual bombshell, but this simple lesson is one that very few cities have ever heeded.”
Later in the film, a man is drinking on a ledge and a person is sleeping on a bench with their legs scrunched up. “We come to a key person, who some people would call ‘the undesirable,’” Mr. Whyte narrates. “It is for fear of him that spikes are put on ledges and benches made too short to sleep on. An actual fact: Most of these people are harmless and sometimes quite well behaved.”
Another uptick in hostile design happened under Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former Republican mayor who was in office from 1994 to 2001. He introduced several policies that restricted the behaviors of homeless people, including criminalizing sleeping in public. “Streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there,” Mr. Giuliani announced in 1999. “Bedrooms are for sleeping.”
In privately owned public spaces, including some plazas or parks, developers often make design decisions that discourage people from hanging around too long. Trump Tower in Manhattan was required to have public seating in its lobby in exchange for permission to add about 20 floors, but the benches were covered with planters. By 2015, the benches had been removed to make room for kiosks selling MAGA merch; they were reinstalled in 2016 after a backlash.
Lost Space
In recent years, a series of high-profile, violent attacks in the subway system has fueled anxiety among New Yorkers. In 2021, the M.T.A. removed benches from the 23rd Street station and posted on Twitter that the change was meant “to prevent the homeless from sleeping on them,” then deleted the post. (The benches were later returned.)
Setha Low, the director of the Public Space Research Group at the City University of New York, said that these changes symbolize a shift in how transportation hubs are viewed. “We’re thinking about these places as only for circulation and movement, and we’re making sure that it’s no longer a place for socializing, coming together, resting,” she said.
Tim Minton, the communications director for the M.T.A., said in an email that leaning benches were first installed in the late 2010s. They were originally part of a major plan to revamp subway stations. The latest additions, placed this March at the West Fourth Street-Washington Square station in the West Village, were part of a new program. But, Mr. Minton said, “there are currently no plans” to bring the rails to other locations.
On a recent weekday afternoon at the West Fourth Street station, subway riders approached the leaning benches with confusion and caution.
One woman, who walked with a cane, slowly came up to the black metal bars, looking unsure of how to interact with the object. She awkwardly propped one hip against the wrong side of the structure, and waited for her train.
Other people avoided the benches altogether. A couple holding hands stood a few inches in front of one, but didn’t touch it. A woman reading a book about identity theft opted to lean on a nearby wall instead.
At Moynihan Train Hall, there is a matcha shop, a juice bar and a high-end skin care store — but almost nowhere to sit in the main area. Outside a ticketed seating room, people often crouch on the floor while they wait. On a recent day, a mother and daughter perched atop their big purple suitcase. Another person rested against a column. A cluster of people stood uncomfortably by an escalator as it carried riders down to the platform.
The power of public space is that it can also function as a mirror, reflecting the world, in all its complexity — revealing its character, quirks and issues. “The bench is not the problem, and it’s never been the problem,” Ms. Low said. “The problem is that people are unhoused.”
Anna Kodé writes about design and culture for the Real Estate section of The Times.
The post The Slow Death of the New York City Public Bench appeared first on New York Times.
