Lawn Chairs in the Pedestrian Plaza of Times Square

They're "tacky and endearing" at the same time. The folding lawn chairs are everywhere in the new "pedestrian plaza" in Times Square. I made the above images on May 30. Weeks later, the lounge chair T-shirts are being sold at the Tourist Information Center.

From the New York Times (By Michael Grynbaum):

The scene-stealing star of the city’s newly opened, $1.5 million pedestrian plaza project may be its fleet of folding lawn chairs, humble refugees from the Ace Hardware catalog that have colonized the Broadway pavement.

In candy-stripe shades of pink, blue and green, the 376 rubber folding chairs and loungers are an unlikely import from the sphere of suburban swimming pools and budget trips to the beach. Average purchase price: about $15 apiece, or 0.001 percent of the project’s total budget.

Since their Memorial Day debut, the chairs have quickly entered the zeitgeist, earning criticism from the mayor and wonderment from pedestrians, who have pronounced them both tacky and endearing. The obligatory merchandise tie-in has already appeared: a pair of local designers produced a T-shirt that replaces the heart in “I ♥ New York” with a lounge chair. A few dozen have already sold.

“I’ve had people say to me both that it’s a stroke of genius and that I’m the king of trailer trash,” said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, the business group that oversees furniture decisions for the plaza. “The lawn chair decision is far and away the most controversial decision I’ve made in my seven years as head of the alliance.”

“I’ve had people say to me both that it’s a stroke of genius and that I’m the king of trailer trash,” said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, the business group that oversees furniture decisions for the plaza. “The lawn chair decision is far and away the most controversial decision I’ve made in my seven years as head of the alliance.”

“People seem to be jumping right past the issue of whether there should be this pedestrian space to what it should look like,” he added.

Like penicillin and Silly Putty, the chairs were an accidental discovery.

Six days before the unveiling of New York’s biggest pedestrian project in years, Mr. Tompkins realized he had a problem: there was no place to sit. Permanent furniture was on order, but the arrival date was August. Months of thoughtful planning would be no match for hordes of tired tourists with nowhere to rest.

“Literally we were going out to whoever we knew to see where we could hustle up a few hundred lawn chairs,” Mr. Tompkins said.

Faced with finding a temporary solution, Mr. Tompkins did what any pragmatic New Yorker would: he ran around the corner to his local hardware store, in this case American Home Hardware & More on Ninth Avenue.

“He said he needed 150 of them. I said to him, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ ” recalled Felix Atlasman, the store’s owner.

Nothing in stock appealed to Mr. Tompkins, so Mr. Atlasman faxed over a few black-and-white pages from a catalog. Despite a brown-and-tan color scheme, model No. BY405-0786 caught Mr. Tompkins’s eye. A simple plastic webbed folding chair, it was the kind of thing “our grandmothers used to bring to the beach on the Jersey Shore,” he said. Sold, 150 at $19.99 apiece. (Later, the group bought several loungers in the same style, at $28.34 each.)

Meanwhile, an alliance security supervisor called up an old friend in Brooklyn: Matthew Pintchik, whose eponymous hardware store is a Park Slope staple.

“They didn’t want to spend a lot of money because clearly whatever was invested in these chairs would be disposed of,” Mr. Pintchik recalled in a telephone interview. He offered the alliance a discount on a line of Ace Hardware neon green and pink rubber chairs, 200 at $10.74 apiece.

The store has since received calls about whether the model is still available for purchase. “People liked the fact that they were sort of campy,” said Mr. Pintchik’s brother, Michael. “It’s too bad we didn’t know, otherwise we would have ordered them in bulk.” Despite the daily wear and tear, attrition has stayed low. After two weeks, only 25 of the nearly 400 chairs and loungers have been taken out of service. Fifteen others were reported stolen, and two more were picked off by an errant fire truck, according to Mr. Tompkins. (“It wasn’t going fast,” he added hastily.)

In some ways, the attention paid to the chairs reflects the more consequential civic debate at the heart of the Broadway project: what is the best use of public space?

“Some people say this is kind of cheesy and fun, and that’s part of Times Square’s identity,” Mr. Tompkins said. “But there’s just as many people who say, no, this is a special place and we should have something more special.”

City officials were quick to reiterate that the lawn chairs will be gone by the end of the summer, replaced by sturdier stock.

“As a temporary treatment in a temporary period, I think the chairs do match the atmosphere of the new space, and they reflect the fact that it’s an unofficial kickoff for summer,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner. But, she added, “The plan all along is to bring in world-class treatment, and we’ve ordered hundreds of new chairs and tables and umbrellas.”

And the richest man in New York has expressed some skepticism.

“I was surprised,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told a radio interviewer about his first encounter with the stopgap seating. In the future, he added, “there will not be those kinds of lounges.”