For the Love of Benches
I feel insanely jealous when I see people reading on park benches.
Not angry jealous, more of an introspective what-am-i-doing-wrong-in-my-life-that-i’m-not-reading-on-a-park-bench-more-frequently flavor of jealousy.
Park benches are the official furniture of the third place. Our first place is our home, our second place is work, but the third place is the social space in our lives separate from these two. An ideal third place is free to enter, like a library, house or worship, community center, or dog park. Some third places require a small buy-in: a cup of coffee or a beer at a local cafe or bar; while others require membership, like a gym, yoga studio, or a country/golf club. For a period before internet shopping, malls were this space for the high school set, and for an even briefer period, for the senior set to hit their step count in a safe, climate-controlled environment.
My favorite third spaces are public parks: free to all.
There is something special about public parks: a place where everyone is welcome, a pause in an urban labyrinth or residential environment, an egalitarian space that exists outside of productivity, domesticity, and labr.. A place free from commercial interruption (maybe). A place to just be. Bonus when there are lots of places to sit and clean restrooms.
I grew up in a small suburb-with-an-exurb-complex of 20,000. The town’s only sidewalks stretch for about half a mile down main street. I can recall no park benches, but I was a child then punk-ass-clueless teen. I didn’t give a shit about a place to sit. Just now, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time crawling through that town via Google street view. I found one bench in the center of town near a war memorial. I also learned that for around $1200 I can buy a bench-in-honor-of-a-loved-one to place in any town park.
In this town, our third place was the McDonald’s parking lot. Erected throughout the lot were invisible, but inviolable, borders demarcating territories for each local high school. Not a bench in sight, but the bathrooms inside were pretty clean.
Now, however, I live in the land of benches. I see people reading in them every day. I am so grateful that the closest one is a mere 19 steps from my front door, less for someone with average legs and a longer gait. It is from this bench that I’m writing.
Within a 1,000 foot radius of my front door are 65 benches. I live in Savannah, Georgia, a city designed in 1733 by James Oglethorpe around a series of squares. As this city on the bluff grew, Oglethorpe’s plans also grew to include 24 squares and a large park. The squares served as a community space, grounds for drilling militia, fire breaks, as well as maintaining cisterns for fighting fires. These days, the militia drills has been replaced by bachelorette photo shoots, weddings, students, families, picnics, yoga classes, drawing sessions, and tourists. We have a proper fire department, so the cisterns have been replaced by irrigation systems to water the centuries old live oaks. Each of these squares has between 4 and 20 benches. So many opportunities to sit and read. Or watch the world go by. So many opportunities to pause in a third place with your fellow humans.
Fun fact: There are 10,000 benches in New York City’s central park.
Benches are more than just slightly uncomfortable reading chairs. They are a place to pause and allow the rest of the world to carry on around you, a rest for weary legs, a moment in the shade. A perfect place for a snack. Benches provide a moment of solitude amongst an ocean of humanity.
These humble platforms offer a neutral place for humans, real and fictional, to coexist and interact. Amongst a river of people going about their lives, a bench is a raft from which to converse and connect, privately in public.
Forrest Gump sits on a bench telling his life story to a stranger. In LaLaLand, a bench is the first step in a relationship. In Manhattan, our characters contemplate life and the Queensboro bridge from a bench. There’s so much more: Men in Black, Love Actually, Notting Hill, 500 Days of summer. Pretty much almost any movie or show set in England, land of public seating.
Benches are gifts to fellow humans. Here person, I’m giving you a place to rest your feet and your soul. Any bench indicates a patch of planet earth dedicated to a moment of repose. Here is a place to sit and breathe and listen and think and experience life. Here is a spot deemed worthy of spending a relaxing moment in. Allow this bench to hold the burden of what you carry, while you prepare to move on— both literally and metaphorically.
I especially love benches in unexpected places, like the middle of a field, or along a hiking path. Someone had to carry the tools and equipment up that hiking trail and build a bench right there, and as a result, we now have a view out over this swamp, or cool tree or interesting cityscape.
I cannot stress this enough. Benches are free-to-use public perches, open to all, outside of work or home, from which to experience the world or as a respite from it. They deserve so much love. Distressingly, many municipalities have been removing public benches or modifying them so they’re less comfortable and impossible to be slept on by humans without a bed or home of their own. With some public parks now operated by private companies, the expense of buying and maintaining benches has been deemed unnecessary, thus the benches disappear. Cities in China have been experimenting with pay-to-use benches.
We don’t all live near an abundance of park benches. I invite us to be on the lookout for the benches in our world (hello, frequency illusion). Who is using them? How are they being used? I invite us to create opportunities to spend moments of pause, phone calls, cups of coffee, conversations, or reading books on benches.
In the past 24 hours, things I have seen people doing on benches in my city
Signing marriage licenses
Changing diapers
Smoking blunts
Reading books
Face timing
First date
Sleeping off Saturday night
Waiting for a table in a restaurant
Photo shoot
Picnic spot
Reading a map
Reading a book
Selling palm flowers
Texting
Scrolling
Chatting on the phone
Evening ritual of sitting on the benches by the fountain
My favourite third place is the library! For awhile in my 20s, it was the local bar on karaoke night.
Rubi, there is an amazing comic book/graphic novel called "The Park Bench" from a french autor called Christophe Chabouté that came to my mind while reading your text, I think you'd like it.