I don’t want to talk about the baseball game yesterday. 👎 — Dan
A Bench You Can’t Sit On?
Pictured above is a screenshot from Google Maps’ Street View feature from August 2015. The location seen is a running path next to Jamaica Pond in Boston (here’s a map), and … it looks like a running path, with joggers and concrete and benches on the side. But if you look closely, you may notice that one of those benches is not like the others. Can’t see it? It’s not one of the closer benches — it’s the one further down the path. Here’s a stand-alone photo, and you’ll immediately see the problem.
You can’t easily sit on that, which is strange, because the purpose of a bench is to be sat on. But no, this wasn’t a weird mistake by the caretakers of the pond or some other Boston authority. It’s a prank, of sorts, one that started — and ended up — as a unique piece of art.
The bench was imagined and created by Matthew Hincman, a sculpture professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. As he told NBC Boston, in 2006, he was on his typical stroll around the park when inspiration hit:
“I'm walking around the pond and I looked at one of the existing benches and I kind of just saw it [in my head] mirrored,” he said. “I saw the form mirrored and I saw this shape. And when I saw the shape, I saw all the different kinds of possible meanings that it could carry. And I thought that would be really interesting because it can be a coffee and a kayak or a canoe. It could be a cradle. It could be so many different things.”
But Hincman didn’t just build it — he added it to the park’s running path. Without permission, though. As Boston.com reported, “Hincman wasn’t able to track down a park official to help him approve the project" so he and some friends — at the crack of dawn one morning — installed it. He expected someone would notice right away, but the weather had other plans. Boston.com continues:
But as soon as the bench was bolted into place, Hincman said, it started raining. And it didn’t stop for a week, which meant that there were no officials or people at the park to notice the unusual installation.
“Once they figured out it was there, they asked around for another week to figure out who put it down,” Hincman said. “They were convinced, because it was so well made and so well installed, that it had to have been an official and sanctioned project.”
When park officials finally realized that the “bench” shouldn’t be there, they had it removed, and Hincman claimed responsibility for it. The head of the Parks department chastised him for what could fairly be called a prank, but the Park official wasn’t all that angry — in fact, he had already gone to the local art commission to get permission to reinstall the bench as a temporary installation, making appearances on and off for a couple of years. Ultimately, it became so popular that the city made it a permanent addition to the Jamaica Pond experience.
And yes, people try to sit on it, with limited success, as you’d imagine — although as seen here via Hincman’s official website, it is doable, albeit uncomfortably so. That said, the bench does have another use case. As one redditor suggested, you can easily take a nap on it, and “it wasn't as uncomfortable as you might imagine.” Maybe it’s not great for sitting, but it’s perfect — or close enough — if you want to lie down.
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More About Park Benches
Today’s Bonus fact: Some benches, unlike Hincman’s, are designed for sitting — and to make almost anything else difficult. A good example of this is the Camden bench, seen here. According to the (archived) official website of the company that made the bench, it is specifically designed to deter people from sleeping on it, from skateboarding on it, or for using it for drug deals (there are “no crevices in which to hide such materials”). The Camden bench is part of a design school called “hostile architecture,” which, per Wikipedia’s editors, “uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide behavior. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others, such as youth, poor people, and homeless people, by restricting the physical behaviors they can engage in.”
From the Archives: The Friend on the Bench: A man who sits on a bench all day and is there in case you need a friend.
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And thanks! — Dan