You! On the bench.

Amber Taylor doesn't like a law banning the childless from playground benches, and suggests that the greater problem is children alone in parks. At 22, I still vaguely remember being a child, so here's my take: Children playing in a park may not be alone, but a caregiver will presumably not be climbing the monkey bars, etc., with an 8-year-old. Society does what it can so that urban parks are safe enough for a kid to play without--as is sometimes the case in NYC--being attached to a parent via a leash. A determined pedophile (and, from what TV movies will teach you, they're a determined bunch) will seize the opportunity to kidnap a child when a caregiver is not right at the child's side.

And Rivington Street--along with the Lower East Side, not to mention Lower Manhattan in general--is a veritable playground for grown-ups. The bars and restaurants of the area are out of reach, legally or price-wise, for the city's kids. Is it really so bad for one part of the place to be designated as children-and-caregivers-only? For rational reasons, minors can't go to, say, Max Fish. Not legally, at least. So, for other, equally if not more rational reasons, adults wishing to chill on a bench, maybe whine about bad blind dates and so forth, maybe just sit and stare, maybe molest children, are not allowed in this park.

That said, how odd that this law was actually enforced, and yes, how unfortunate for the woman made an example of. I've seen those signs before and always assumed they were to prevent groups of menacing late-teens from lurking and dealing/promoting drugs. If I get all Freudian-like and think back to my own childhood, I don't (thankfully) know of any pedophiles, but I have a vague recollection of menacing teenagers, who, in retrospect, were probably just relatively harmless potheads, but you never know, and therein lies one possible rationale for a strange but not altogether objectionable law.