Build it, and they will sit

For a city with lots of inviting outdoor spaces, we do little to help people sit down, relax and enjoy them.

Thestar.com
June 6, 2016
By Edward Keenan

In the 1990s, I remember spending a lot of time watching Ben Kerr play his guitar. The frequent no-hope mayoral candidate and singer-songwriter would wheel a mini PA system out to the sidewalk near the corner of Yonge and Bloor and serenade us in a voice and rhythm that evoked Johnny Cash with his songs about carrot-ginger cocktail, the businessman Frank Stronach and the missing string of his guitar (which he called “playing without my G-string” there on the street).

I liked him. He was an interesting urban character with stories to tell, and sometimes he’d take a break and tell them to me.

But the reason I knew him, became familiar with his music, was around to talk to him at all, was not because I was an avid quirk-country fan. It was that I needed a place to sit.

I was young and broke, and I lived a long way from downtown. I worked and socialized around Yonge and Bloor a lot in those days, so I would often find myself with time to kill. And virtually the only place in that area to take a seat - despite the broad sidewalks that seemed to be an invitation to linger - were the grand front steps of the Royal Bank branch there. There were signs specifically forbidding sitting on those steps, but lots of us would anyway. Office workers on smoke breaks. Couples waiting for their movie to start. Homeless people. Aimless loiterers like me.

There, we could watch the girls in their summer clothes and the men with their shirts off, see the traffic, enjoy the sunshine, and listen to Ben play his guitar - I assume the presence of the seated audience was why he chose that location.

Kerr died more than a decade ago - I realize I’m grasping back a ways to find an anecdote about the pleasures of sitting around in a public place in Toronto. And that’s largely because this is a city that does a poor job of encouraging, or even allowing, anyone to take a seat.

If Otis Redding had gotten off that train from Georgia here, he’d have been “Standing on the Dock of the Bay.” John Lennon would have had to settle for “Leaning Here Watching The Wheels Go Round and Round.”

It isn’t that we don’t like sitting in the street. The city is addicted to patios - and there are generally plenty of them if you have money to spend and want a beer - but when it comes to free places on public property to sit around, we’re often out of luck.

It’s a problem that was highlighted this weekend with a sit-in event staged with folding chairs at various locations by a group of activists gathered under the name #sitTO. It seems like a little thing, but the lack of available seating is defining when it comes to public spaces.

You look at the new gathering space in front of Union Station, or at Maple Leaf Square, or even Nathan Phillips Square, places that seem to be designed at least in part as gathering spaces, and they offer so few places for people to relax and enjoy them. Even many of our parks and parkettes have only a few benches, and those heavily fixed in place. Most people need to find a seat on the ground.

It’s a little thing, but it’s a shame. And there seems to be no reason for it. Seating is not gratuitously expensive. It needn’t be obtrusive. But it could be invaluable.

In a 2013 book, Jonathan Rowe wrote about an experiment in which he put a couple of garden benches on a main-street vacant lot and watched as it became a well-used gathering place. I’ve seen the same phenomenon in Toronto’s Junction on a vacant lot where the property owner allowed a faux train platform to be constructed, providing places to sit. They are almost always in use and the lot has become a landmark for neighbours needing to meet up.

Rowe was inspired to try his experiment after reading the work of William H. Whyte, who, in his studies of urban spaces Rowe recounts, discovered that “people don’t care about the architectural design of a public space. What they do care about is one simple thing: places to sit.”

Whyte found that people especially liked chairs they could move themselves, into or out of the shade, into conversational clusters, towards the view they like best. His research is part of the reason that today, if you go to New York City, most little neighbourhood squares are packed with folding chairs (and sometimes moveable tables). In Bryant Park, for example, there are more than 3,000 folding chairs. Paris, too, features ubiquitous movable park chairs, theirs made out of green metal, that were designed and introduced in the 1920s. They are a defining feature of the city’s beloved public spaces.

This observation has been put to more modern use in New York, too: in her book Streetfight, former transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan explains how the successful pedestrianization of Times Square hinged on the last-minute purchase of 376 beach chairs for about $10 each - chairs that people passing by put to use within minutes of their installation, and that dominated the launch event’s news coverage.

It seems like some of this message is trickling into Toronto: when the city has run pedestrian pilot sites on Yonge and John, for example, they have put out Muskoka chairs that got immediate use. In Dundas Square, movable chairs and tables have been a welcome addition in recent years, part of what has seen the once-barren spot evolve into a more successful public space. But when it comes to giving people a seat, Toronto has just begun to get it.

And after all these years of standing, our legs are tired. It’s a little thing, but it’s easy to fix, too. Just give us a seat. And then the next generation’s versions of Ben Kerr will have a ready audience, too.