LONG LIVE GOOD-NATURED ‘GUERILLA URBANISM’
We won’t deny it. The punk artsy homemade bench painted red and white with the big sign reading “This bench is illegal, but shouldn’t be” brought us a big smile and warmed our heart.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press wrote about the bench this week under the headline of “Guerilla Urbanism.”
And from our perch, the bench offered a perfect metaphor for a city and community that calls itself caring and initiates programs to help the homeless — but then hypocritically pulls perfectly good benches and public seating off of sidewalks to discourage the homeless. And, of course, they discourage, too, anybody else who wants to sit outside to eat their lunch.
City officials and business leaders said removing the perfectly good benches was intended to make Market Street and other busy pedestrian areas safer and deter “crime.”
These “problem” benches had been linked to panhandling, harassment and littering, they told our reporter last fall.
Please! The benches were never the “problem,” folks. The absurd costs of rent, never mind steep interest rates, climbing home costs, wages that aren’t keeping pace with inflation, and other social ills are the problem.
Then — whoa! We blinked and suddenly a new makeshift bench appeared in Phillips Park on McCallie and Georgia avenues.
TFP reporter Ellen Gerst sussed out that the “illegal-but-shouldn’t-be” bench was built and placed there by a newly-formed mutual aid group dubbed the Chattanooga Urbanist Society. Their handiwork replaced one of the perfectly good public benches that officials removed because they said they “contributed to loitering, harassment and other crime.”
We see the handmade bench as some of the city’s best and most pointed public art.
Better still, it’s just one of at least 50 the group hopes to install around the city this year to remind us all that caring is better than not caring.
Most of the removed benches were on Market Street near Sixth and Seventh streets. City spokeswoman Kirsten Yates said in an email Tuesday that all of the removed seats are set to be reinstalled by the end of the month.
To be fair, Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly, his administration and the City Council have been forward thinking on ways to help our community’s growing homeless population, which has swollen five-fold since 2020.
The city found a place for and funded oversight of a sanctioned and guarded homeless camp near what used to be called the Community Kitchen. The city also voted more than a year ago to spend nearly $3 million to purchase and reinvent the former 74-room Airport Inn hotel on Lee Highway into apartments to rehouse some of the homeless people — with social services help to keep them housed and off the streets.
But don’t you wonder what we taxpayers spent to remove and now reinstall these benches?
Don’t you wonder how we can, as a city, appear any more hypocritical than we did by taking the benches out of
downtown to keep the homeless away, while we told residents whose children go to a school near the old Airport Inn that they shouldn’t be afraid and should welcome these new neighbors with open arms?
Yes, the Silverdale residents should extend such a welcome — and help. Yet when downtown tourist-district merchants didn’t, our city officials caved to their concerns.
So, kudos to the pointed wit of the Chattanooga Urbanist Society.
And long live well-intended “guerilla urbanism.”
The group’s founder told our reporter that the attention-grabbing homemade bench wasn’t the group’s first project. In December, members temporarily repaired a downed guardrail on a Dodds Avenue bridge, patching the hole with reclaimed wood stenciled with the group’s logo — a brick.
“I understand there’s work orders, and processes, but there were weeks that if someone were to walk over that bridge, there was about a 6-foot section where there was no guardrail, and it was a 25-foot drop,” the group’s founder told the TFP.
About a week after the Urbanist Society posted a TikTok of the guardrail repair, the gap was fixed. And when the group posted a second video showing crews replacing the concrete section, more than 2 million TikTok viewers watched it, and more than 300,000 “liked” it.
Words of support for the group began pouring in. Chattanoogans know a need when they see one.
And they know a dumb idea when they see one, too — a dumb idea like taking away benches from public spaces and failing to provide seating at bus stops.
The Urbanist Society didn’t get mad and didn’t get even. It just got busy.
We’re just piling on — while we smile.