Love Park introduces Toronto's first movable park chairs, inviting the public to a unique experiment at 88 Queens Quay W.Ammar Bowaihl/The Globe and Mail
When is a chair not just a chair? When it’s a symbol of personal will, deliberately left untethered in a park to allow visitors to make the space their own.
This simple idea, still rare in North America, is rooted in research that helped inform the wildly successful revitalization of Bryant Park in New York. The concept is now travelling to a new park set to open later this month in downtown Toronto. And while the spot’s designers acknowledge the possibility that someone will pull up a truck and steal all the furniture, it’s a risk they’re willing to run.
Love Park, named for its heart-shaped pond, is slated to open June 23 in a place formerly occupied by a highway off-ramp. The pond will be ringed by a ledge that can serve as seating. But the nearly one-hectare park will also have 63 moveable chairs contributed by the Waterfront business improvement area (BIA).
“If every day, at the end of the day when they go to put the chairs away, they’re in different places than they were the day before, or where they put them in the morning, then that’s success,” said Pina Mallozzi, a vice-president at Waterfront Toronto, which oversees revitalization along the lake and commissioned the $15-million park.
Giving people free rein with these chairs will let the park’s different constituencies – lunching office workers, tourists, residents of nearby buildings – use the space in different ways.
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This philosophy stems from a pioneering study done in the 1970s by urbanist William Whyte. A keen social observer, Mr. Whyte had noticed that when people encountered moveable furniture, they invariably moved it.
The new spot was maybe a bit farther into the shade, or more in the sun. Closer to a friend or farther from the guy with the boom-box. But sometimes the shift was infinitesimal, with no obvious physical advantage. It was just about exercising autonomy.
“The possibility of choice is as important as the exercise of it,” Mr. Whyte wrote in his seminal book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
The idea of moveable chairs was embraced as a civilizing influence by the revitalizers of Bryant Park, which at the time was too dangerous for many New Yorkers to feel comfortable visiting. And although this was only part of changes that also included more entrances, better maintenance and more things to do in the park, it was the symbol that stuck in the public’s mind.
“People saw that the chair was there, they can control it, it was well designed, it was attractive, it was appealing, it wasn’t being stolen,” Andy Manshel, the former associate director and counsel of the Bryant Park Restoration Corp., said in an interview from New York.
“So all of those components told people, this is a space in which I can predict the behaviour of others, and I don’t feel like I may be physically threatened.”
When Mr. Manshel wrote a book about his work at Bryant Park and other public spaces, it was one of those chairs that graced the cover.
Some other world-renowned parks employ the same approach to moveable furniture. Among them are famed Parisian parks such as the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries Garden, where chairs and loungers are dragged this way and that as people seek their perfect spot around the pond.
This philosophy is at odds with the experience at most Canadian parks, though, which tend to fix chairs in place. The resulting message is two-fold: You have to use this furniture the way we want you to, and we’re worried someone will steal it if we don’t tie it down.
However, there has been a slight shift. When Love Park designers CCxA created Sugar Beach, also for Waterfront Toronto, they tethered only some of the furniture. It seemed to work, said the firm’s co-president, Marc Hallé, though he acknowledged that a handful of chairs did end up in the lake. And not attaching them with a cable had the extra benefit of removing a tripping hazard.
A few blocks away, at Love Park, would-be thieves or vandals may be deterred by the surrounding buildings. They’d never know if someone might be looking down at them. Or maybe people will just react positively to being treated as trustworthy with something as simple as a moveable chair.
“It gives them a lot more agency, and in response to that I think they show a lot more respect and love for the space,” said Mr. Hallé.
“I don’t think anybody likes to be told what to do. You know, when someone’s going to look at you when you walk into a store, look at you as if, hey, you’re going to steal something, it almost makes you want to steal. So give the benefit of the doubt to human nature, right.”