Page 11 - OUR SERIAL STORY. OUR SERIAL STORY. Flows out again by the swing doors, to. The lower levels of Piccadilly. Acquaintance with. A girl and a dog, of a silver birch re. Fleeted in a pool, of a tumbling wave.

There are 9,485 benches in the park. Almost half of them are more than simply places to sit. Credit Photographs by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times and Yana Paskova for The New York Times In the park, there are 9,485 of them. You sit on them. Polish off a pulled-pork sandwich. Feed the pigeons. Wait for a friend, maybe a spy.

Or it’s a sluggish day when you have nothing to do, and this is a delicious place to accomplish absolutely nothing. Or you can drift off and muse on the plaque affixed there, representing a story behind the bench. The Central Park bench. You aren’t just sitting on wood.

You are sitting on memories. There is, for instance, a bench on the Mall that reads, “Two Red Foxes and a Pup.” What could that possibly mean? It means this.

Last year, Karen May wanted to adopt a bench as a surprise 65th-birthday gift for her husband, Tony, a retired investment banker. She inscribed it: “Tony, win, lose or break even, you always have me. Love Karen.” When their two sons were young and he came home from his work on Wall Street, they would rush to greet him and ask, “Hey, Poppy, did you win, lose or break even?” And he would reply that he broke even, because that was what much of life was about, breaking even. Plaques on benches Karen May adopted. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times Caitlin LaMorte was in the park one morning, the weather obligingly balmy though rain was possible later. As development manager for the Women’s Committee of the, which manages the park, she runs the.

It began in 1986, as a way to finance the maintenance of the benches and their immediate surroundings. (For those with different park preferences, orphan benches are up for in New York and some other cities.) If you can afford it, it’s simple enough. Pay $10,000 (it began at $5,000) and you get to put a plaque on a bench, saying almost whatever you want (within limits of decorum: no cursing, no advertising), up to a suggested maximum of four lines of 30 characters each. And then it’s there forever. LaMorte consulted her tablet for the latest count: 4,223 of the benches adopted.

About 250 go each year, she said. While plenty of benches remain unadopted, some areas are sold out. For instance, all the benches facing the lake. The ones lining the Mall. Those near the Great Lawn. Those along Wien Walk.

There are three styles of benches: the simple wood-and-concrete version; the World’s Fair style, with its circular armrests, dating to 1939; and the Central Park settee, based on the benches used during the park’s creation, circa 1858. There are also several dozen handmade rustic benches. With those, you have to fund a restoration of an entire park area and the cost starts at about $500,000, not something to rush into. Quite often, Ms. LaMorte said, benches are adopted to remember a relative or friend who has died.

Or on occasion, a pet, generally a dog, though a few cats are honored as well. Something like 840 of the plaques have “memory” in their wording. There are some Sept. 11 remembrances.

Sophos Utm Rapidshare. Three years ago, a woman chose a bench in memory of herself for when her final date comes. It hasn’t yet. The plaque, set to go, sits in one of Ms. LaMorte’s desk drawers. Advertisement Increasingly, Ms. LaMorte said, “we have more plaques that are happy.” Graduations or birthdays or birth wishes or wedding gifts. A Japanese couple, when they returned to Japan after a lengthy stretch in the city, adopted a bench that reads: “We leave our hearts in New York after 23 years of our adventure here.” There are a lot of benches in the playground areas commemorating births.

One man adopted five benches, one for each of his grandchildren, who received them on their 16th birthdays. Last year, Victor Schiller required a birthday present for his wife, Nancy.

She told him, emphatically, no jewelry, thereby ruling out his go-to category. He thought and thought, and then he had it. Give her one of the benches. They didn’t even live in New York.

They lived in Charlottesville, Va., but they had bought a place in Manhattan that they inhabited roughly a week each month. They think Central Park is truly wonderful. Schiller, 59, is retired from creating technology start-ups.

Schiller, 57, is retired from investment work focused on Bulgaria. He gave her the bench, and was she happy. He waited on the inscription so she could have a say. They conferred and agreed on: “We Would Make the Same Mistake All Over Again! Vic & Nancy Schiller. Still Best Friends.” They did not reveal what the mistake was. Understandably, their three mystified children asked them, but lips sealed.