Chair Defense
(New York City, NY, USA)

The entranceway to 397 Manhattan Avenue, located in a light industrial section of northwest Brooklyn:

A quiet residential street runs perpendicular to a larger, high-traffic industrial throughway and its adjoining overhead interstate freeway. Most days here under the freeway overpass, one can find a small group of dedicated bottle and can collectors, gathered with their common mode of transportation—the pirated grocery store shopping cart—to sort and return their daily findings to the local beverage center's recycling department. From the vantage point of the collectors' position, looking off in the southern direction across the industrial throughway, one will find a small mixed-use triangle of land, fenced in for protection. It appears to belong to the adjacent apartment building, marked with the number 397. It is, however, extremely unclear if this land actually belongs to the apartment, as there is no direct access to the land from the building itself.

On the small entrance landing of the 397 building, underneath an aluminum awning and just to the right side of the front door, there have been found over the years (dating back to at least the early 1990s) to be a succession of nondescript utilitarian chairs, chained for security, to the bottom edge of the adjacent hand rail. The metal chain used in this situation remains the same, even as the chair is updated. The security chain is of low-grade caliber and its varietal could date back as far as the 1970s. The most recent chair selection is a white molded plastic unibody form, which has been present since around 2007, when it replaced a former dilapidated and rusting metal and wood edition similar to students' chairs found throughout the U.S. public school system between the 1960s and the 1990s.

In general, and at most times of the day, it is extremely rare to witness anyone actually using the above-mentioned chair.


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