Results tagged “lawnchairs”

      

It's happened! The lawn chairs, placed in the Times Square pedestrian plazas to much derision, pain and enjoyment, have been gathered up to make way for more permanent chairs. The Times Square Alliance asked sculptor Jason Peters to create some art from the chairs, and the Post says he used "zip ties to lash about 70 of the chairs together Friday morning in an installation that will stay up until 9 p.m. tonight. Maybe you can say adieu before the public screening of the Mad Men premiere in Times Square at 10 p.m. (details).

The Times Square Alliance has started rolling out the upgraded look of the pedestrian malls that have taken over the center of the city with brand new seating and even some greenery to really get tourists in the true lounging spirit. The Alliance said that the new seats were "more typical of outdoor furniture" and the Post is calling them "classy." And what screams classy more than sitting inside a giant baseball glove chair? (Let's hope that Beetlejuice doesn't find his way over to the Theater District!) Also arriving at the closed-off sections of Broadway to replace the original eyesore, death trap lawn chairs are silver benches made for two, so get ready to catch some PDA in your periphery while averting your eyes from the Naked Cowboy. The center of the roadway also now will have a Zelkova or oak trees surrounded by "dozens of other small plants." Not everyone loves the new European look though, with one woman from Austin telling the Post, "I wanted to see taxi-to-taxi gridlock and grittiness. I didn't expect to see trees in the middle of the street." Great, now even tourists want the nasty old Times Square back.

Whaddaya know, those oh-so-controversial cheap lawn chairs scattered through the Broadway pedestrian plazas are falling apart! WCBS was on the scene yesterday to report on the disintegrating seats, and confirmed that the plastic straps holding them together are frayed and snapping! Critics have been dissing the chairs, bought at Pintchik Hardware in Brooklyn, since they first appeared, for supposedly attracting the homeless, the lazy, and the European. And now the haters have new ammo, because these things are obviously a grave safety hazard. Floridian tourist Norma Frank saw a chair collapse under her husband Mitch yesterday, and pleaded with New Yorkers for help, "If anybody would like to chip in for a new pair of pants and possibly a new knee..." Mitch insists he wasn't "really" injured, but sometimes it takes a lawyer to show you where it hurts. The Times Square BID will be replacing the chairs with sturdier street furniture by the end of the month, so get over there now if you want in on the inevitable class action lawsuit.

It's almost the end of the road for those cheap lawn chairs scattered throughout the Broadway pedestrian plazas. After incurring enormous vitriol from likes of NY Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who condemned "the flimsy furniture that littered the streets like a going-out-of-business sale," the Times Square Alliance is finally taking action to appease the haters. Some new signs have been placed around the car-free sections of Broadway to explain what the future holds:

Continue reading "End is Nigh for Controversial Lawn Chairs on Broadway"

The gangs of tourists roaming around from one set of patio furniture to the next in our new extra pedestrian-friendly Gotham are not only getting to enjoy some R&R for free, they're also getting to take in interactive displays informing them what the latest cable offerings are without the nuisance of clicking on a TV or flipping through a magazine. That's because we're now learning that the city has been quietly been pocketing money from advertisers and other private groups wanting to set up camp in the new pedestrian plazas. Officials have yet to deny one permit for companies who want to stage events in the plazas for fees as high as $38,500 that go into the city's general fund. No one would comment on whether the revenue potential was a factor in its plan for a car-free Broadway, but a spokesman did emphasize that unclogging traffic was its motivation. The Project for Public Spaces sounds generally supportive of the extra attraction that the paid events bring to the plazas, but one person lounging got demanding with who gets them, saying, “Would I have Mariah Carey here performing? Probably not.”