The addition of a bench around the tree completed the public space.

Had you been walking east on 12th Street between Avenues A and B and passed Northern Spy prior to that time, you might have kept staring down at your iPhone and noticed a restaurant on your left only peripherally.

Oh. Gotta check that menu on my way back from the meeting, you tell yourself. But you don’t, because you walk back to 14th Street via Avenue B. You don’t remember Northern Spy until the next meeting.

Yet, with the bench around the tree you are likely to check who, if anyone, is sitting there; whether there’s a dog tied up to the bike rack that immediately precedes the bench and whether it’s a lab or a pug; and whether anyone is exiting or entering the restaurant. You look through the plate glass window and try to determine whether those you see inside look like you or like those you aspire to become, so that perhaps you’ll eat there next time. You are approximately 52% more likely—I made that up—to stop at that moment and check the menu. Which makes it 50% more likely that indeed you will ever check the menu at Northern Spy.

The addition of this bench, therefore, has created a new space in front of the restaurant. There are benches on either side of the entrance facing out to the street. So there are two areas to sit in—the tree bench and the benches against the façade. But this combination—not possible with just the entrance benches and a row of cars or, worse, empty curb—creates a third human space.

It creates what I am going to call a “curbside parlor.”

It’s a bit like Christopher Alexander’s “Public Outdoor Room” (pattern #69) and a bit like a “Flow Through Room” (#131) but located outside a building. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t exist in his book, “A Pattern Language.” Yet it very much makes that stretch of concrete which is otherwise a pedestrian thoroughfare—not a bad thing—into a locus of social intercourse.

It makes that concrete space come to life.

This tree bench and the restaurant itself with its benches create a “parlor” in between where people can congregate. Most of those people are ostensibly connected somehow to the restaurant: they are waiting for their table or they stopped to talk to a friend who is. But it’s possible that some of the people sitting or standing near there are neighbors who live above the restaurant. Maybe their roommates don’t like them to smoke cigarettes inside the apartment, so they have to go downstairs and onto the sidewalk, but until the tree bench came along, they had nowhere to sit and smoke. There are no stoops here.

(New Yorkers who smoke, after all, may soon find themselves huddled on a dedicated barge in one of the rivers. There, or living on Staten Island.)

The word “parlor” comes from the Old French parleor or parler (meaning “to speak”). It originally meant, “a place set aside for speaking with someone, an audience chamber” (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 1993, via Wikipedia). This outdoor urban parlor, extending to the curbside, bottlenecks foot traffic in a mostly pleasant way, allowing for people who may not normally speak to do so, and it creates an “audience chamber.” It also increases the likelihood that people like me will stop and check the menu.

A new pattern: #69.2, “Curbside Parlor.”

photo: Google & manipulation by H. Freeman in Instagram