The Disappearance of the Public Bench ⇥ placesjournal.org

Gabrielle Bruney, Places:

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. 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.

This is New York-centric and U.S.-heavy, but it is something I have also noticed around me, too. A bench is one of the few places you can sit and spend time for free. Their absence in so many public places is notable for what it says about who we consider part of the public.