by Giordano Pozzi
Public benches are communal objects that serve as temporary rest stops, sleeping surfaces and meeting points. They surround us in urban environments and we use them as needed, rarely considering them beyond their purpose. These objects are witness to the environment and lives around them: they bear our weight in silence while listening to the world around them. What do they hear? In this expedition, I set out to record the sounds that surround public seating in Manhattan. A soundtrack of benches.
Designed and built in 1986 by I.M. Pei and Partners, the glass box Javitz Center convention building stands on the edge of Manhattan in a strangely undefi ned urban landscape that feels remarkably devoid of local life. The benches are built into a traffi c island that creates a parking plaza for the center. These built-in benches reference the benches built by Pei in the Silver Tower development of 1967 for NYU as part of the Robert Moses downtown renovation master plan. I imagine people sit here only to wait for transportation to another place.
Grand Central Station was designed by Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore for Cornelius Vanderbilt and opened to the public in 1913. It subsequently fell into disrepair and was almost demolished in the 1960s. The MTA restored the building and reopened the refurbished terminal to the public in 1998. Originally the terminal was fi lled with large oak waiting benches, which were slowly removed in an effort to control the homeless population that started using the train station as a dormitory in the 60s and 70s. Only a few of the original monumental benches remain in the terminal. This is one of them, located in the lower concourse food court.
Bryant Park sits behind the New York Public Library and is a multi-functional park famously used to house the tents of New York’s Fashion Week. The New York Public Library and park opened in 1911 and soon became a cornerstone of the city’s intellectual life. In the 60s and 70s the park fell into the hands of drug dealers. As part of a 1990s’ effort to reclaim the park, the management chose to heed the advice of the urbanist William H. Whyte and installed movable seating to allow people to move the seats into the sun. The Fermob bistro chair was chosen to populate the park.
This Times Square bench, made of stainless steel and manufactured to withstand extreme urban abuse, is called “silver bench.” The bench sits in the middle of what used to be a major thoroughfare, which has been reclaimed as green space by the efforts of the Green Light for Midtown Project and Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. It sits on an asphalt road surface painted gray-green, which hints at its precarious perch on reclaimed space that could return to roadway if traffi c studies determine it necessary. Sitting on this bench, one clearly feels that one is sitting in the middle of the road.
Originally designed for the 1939 World’s Fair and used throughout the NYC parks system, this bench sits along the Hudson River Park and looks towards New Jersey. The bench sits on a relatively new public space for New York as the park opened in 2003 after thirty years of development work.
This bench is a built-in architectural element designed by Thomas Balsley Associates as part of the overall park design. The stone slab and stainless steel are intended to refl ect the industrial and shipping past of the neighborhood. The park has an interesting soundscape in that it combines distinct sounds of birds, children and the undulating river of traffic noise.