Lord of the Bench & the fight for NYC public spaces

 

I don’t have spoons for a full post right now, but this came across my Instagram feed, and I thought it seemed appropriate for this week's class. Content creator 708_lord_of_the_bench is highlighting an issue of public spaces in New York City: there are public plazas in front of many NYC buildings, but the businesses in the buildings are acting as if the plazas are extensions of their building, ergo private property with limits on who can be there. But these plazas are legally meant to be public spaces that anyone in NYC should be able to access and enjoy.

What happened was when these buildings were proposed to develop and build, the owners and builders went to the city to approve the plans and get tax breaks. And the city went “well in order for us to approve this and give you tax breaks, there needs to be space that is dedicated to public use.” So these builders incorporated these plazas with benches and usually some trees and then the city approved the plans and gave them tax breaks and then the buildings went up with and plazas with signs declaring these plazas are to be publicly available 24/7. Apparently, there’s 4 million acres of these sorts of plazas where the owners of the buildings own the land these plazas are on, but these plazas are for public use. 

708_lord_of_the_bench  posing in front of a sign saying the space is for public use and meant to be avaiable for 24 hours a day.  

But now places are realizing they have these beautiful areas with natural elements in as Alicia Keys puts it “concrete jungle where dreamsare made of” and want to have these plazas as perks of the businesses in these buildings. Even with the mandate they are to be public spaces with signs that say these are public places, building owners are now trying to say “my land my plaza” and have started to prevent access to these plazas. Some buildings are purposefully hosing down the benches, others are putting up rope lines and blockades, and some are hiring security to usher people off the plaza.

Many of the videos 708_lord_of_the_bench posts are confrontations between himself and a security person about his sitting on a bench in a plaza.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdHXIYHJNFr/?rpxt=MXNjN3N1bjVuMTlyYg%3D%3D

While the specific video in the link above is an overall pleasant interaction between police and the bench lord, most interactions are hostile and refuse to admit the signs are that state the land is for public use. Now that Zohran Mamdani is the Mayor of New York, the Lord of the Bench and his followers hope the Mayor’s Office will start making efforts to prevent these businesses from preventing the public from accessing these areas. So you should check out more of his videos if you want to learn more about a current example of the tension between public and private spaces.