Origin

In 2020 two masked strangers met in the hallway of their fifth floor walkup in The West Village. The girl clad in skin-tight nike leggings and a crop top jogged down the stairs to find a very sweaty annoyed gay man with a bad dye job blocking the stairs with a couch. “Do you want help with that?” she asked while removing a single AirPod and jogging in place. “No, single woman moment” came his reply and with that the brown haired bombshell jogged around the couch and left the building to cry on her 5 mile run.

Little did they know, the neighbors who shared a hallway had just met their very best friends. Soon, they were drinking wine illegally on their roof top, terrorizing the rats that inhabited their garbage area and getting coffee every morning together. On their morning walks they’d end up in really intense discussions about boys, beats and why Lana Del Rey was working at a Waffle House. Those discussions would last for hours, during which time they needed to rest. They were left with one option, their front stoop.

Three years later the duo travelled to Madrid where the boy fell off a scooter breaking his femur. They flew back to the fifth floor walk up immediately and slowly the boy began learning to walk again. The morning coffee walks were often too difficult for the boy, resulting in him needing to rest of other building stoops on the .5 mile journey to their favorite coffee spot. 

One day the boy asked the girl “how hard do you think it would be to get a bench?”

“It can’t be that hard. You probably just have to email them or something.” She replied.

The boy remembered that he followed his local city councilman Erik Bottcher of District 3 on Instagram. He remembered commenting sexually suggestive things under very serious posts about serious adult business. Then, he found the number to his office.

The office loved the idea of getting a bench and told the boy to fill out a form and call 311. The boy put a request in to the Department of Transportation and 311 then went on a work trip to San Francisco.

Two weeks later the boy returned and visited the spot where the best friends had surveyed to find it bare, benchless. 

The best friends having plenty of experience as co-chairs of “The Unofficial West Village Neighborhood Watch” formed “The Unofficial West Village Neighborhood Watch Greenstreets Crime Prevention Task Force” and sprung into action. They printed petitions, they spoke with neighbors, they garnered celebrity endorsements from local drag queens and Deaf celebrity Nyle DiMarco. They began, plank by plank… building a movement.

When local businesses caught word of what this dynamic duo was up to, they wanted in. They reached out for invites to the non-exclusive Bench Warming Celebration. They offered sponsorship with free coffee, music and chalk.

Which leads us to today. We’re hard at work over here, getting you and us that bench.

We plan to hold a Bench Warming Inaugural Seating with coffee for all of our neighbors to come, meet and celebrate what is arguably the best thing anyone has ever done in American history for The West Village. Follow us on Instagram for the details and tell Erik Bottcher when you see him in public, that you’re a New Yorker who supports The West Village Bench Project!