FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1993
by Alex Marshall

When was the last time a city offered you a seat? If your town is like most towns, not recently. The public bench, once a common piece of furniture in a city’s living room, has declined in number and significance along with the public spaces it once graced.

In the resort town of Virginia Beach, it is making a comeback after a long absence. As part of an overall renovation, the city has planted teak benches at regular intervals along the 40-block strip.

A minor thing, you might say, but 25-years ago, the city ripped them all out to discourage hippies, then making their appearance, from lounging around the town’s sidewalks and beachfront. For the same reason, the city also regularly arrested people for loitering.

“If you had 10 long-hairs standing together for any reason, people got alarmed,” remembers Police Captain Jim Brazier, who used to herd people along outside the Carol Lee Donut Shop on 22nd Street, a main hippie hang out. “They were big on that then. You had to keep moving.”

The old benches, although nothing special, had a certain charm. They were blocks of concrete, with painted planks running between them, and advertisements for things like “Mary Jane Bread” along their backs. They sat along Atlantic Avenue, the resort’s main drag, and the boardwalk by the beach, just as the new ones do. The new benches are part of a $50 million renovation that emphasizes the resort as a public space. People are encouraged to walk, to stroll, to loiter. It’s an amazingly daring action for an at-times such a tacky town. Sidewalks have been widened, telephone lines put underground, and small public squares with street art like giant beach balls created from formerly dead-end side streets. Now, like flowers responding to the right kind of dirt, sidewalk cafes are popping up.

One wishes the city been more daring in the design. The benches’s neo, faux Victorian curves, for example, match those of the neo, faux Victorian street lamps. They remind you of the ones in parts of New York that suggest the city is some kind of quaint museum.

But cut Virginia Beach some slack. The city planted the benches over the objections of politically-powerful hotel, souvenir shop, and restaurant owners. They feared benches might distract visitors from their central task of playing putt-putt golf, and buying seashells and $6 breakfasts. Already, the city has thinned the number of benches in a few blocks, after merchants complained that teenagers were grouping up around them. Still, there is hope. Fort Lauderdale, another beach town, recently renovated its resort along similar lines as Virginia Beach. Sidewalks were spruced up and a new brick walkway put along the beach front. It’s a turn away from the city’s encouragement of private, locked-gated condominium towers. Such actions increase the chance that, next time you stroll, a city might be hospitable enough to offer you a place to sit down.