Goodbye and good riddance to the giant game pieces downtown

Those surreal board game pieces the size of small cars that dot Thomas Paine Plaza surrounding the Municipal Services Building are gone.

Thank God for that.

The exhibit sat for nearly my entire life at the nexus of every major transit route in the city. Seen by hundreds of thousands of people per day, this collection of chipped and fading artwork was also a monument to the slurs so often lobbed at our local government: costly, confusing, and ineffective.

If you somehow never saw or can’t quite recall these monstrosities or their unsettling imposition, imagine if game pieces were really, really big. Got it?

Now have them bleach in the sun for 30 years and double as both park benches and public restrooms for just as long. Never explain what they are or mention them much at all, either, and let visitors and residents alike just kind of wonder why they’re there.

Now you’ve really got it.

When the exhibit Your Move — its official name — opened in 1996, it initially featured 45 whimsical oversized monuments by artists Daniel Martinez, Renée Petropoulis, and Roger White. By the time city crews removed them a few weeks ago, only 34 of them remained. (The rest had been mercifully removed from our sight.)

The city funded the project through its Percent for Art program, which dictates that up to 1% of the budget for any municipal construction project must go toward public art. While that program is indeed one of the best things ever to happen in City Hall, Your Move was one of its glaring missteps.

For instance, there were no plans for the long-term exhibition of the pieces. Over the years, the work required what the city calls “extensive, exhaustive, and expensive restoration and conservation” efforts. Yet decades of weather and people touching them had the pieces looking like damaged drug flashbacks.

The fact that none of the artists wanted any of the pieces back and requested the city put them in their proper place — the trash — probably says a lot. Then again, the city only gave them the option to keep whichever pieces they themselves paid to remove.

And so none survive.

Of course, not everyone shares my excitement at the demise of Your Move. The whimsy of the game pieces often provided a contrast to more sobering scenes like Occupy Philly, protests during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, or soldiers in gas masks with M-16s slung over their shoulders during the pandemic.

But over the past few years, the game pieces started showing how the city’s government was failing its citizens, right outside its headquarters.

Without adequate seating across all of Philly’s public spaces, they became park benches. Without nearly any public restrooms for Philadelphians to use when needed, some of the pieces functioned as privacy screens or ad hoc toilets themselves. Without an effective affordable housing or homeless services plan, the city let the game pieces become open-air pieds-à-terre for those experiencing homelessness. Of course, it was no safe space for people living on the street, who are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence. Ironically, the city’s Office of Homeless Services is housed in the Municipal Services Building, so every morning on their way to work, its leadership had to filter through the exhibit and its ever-increasing portfolio of purpose.

Without any follow-up or engagement with the public, the city let Your Move just kind of wither on the vine, just as it has countless ballyhooed initiatives that start off with a bang and end not with a whimper, but with nothing but obscurity and the constant forward march of time.

The city let Your Move just kind of wither on the vine.

When long-planned renovations to Thomas Paine Plaza called for Your Move’s deaccession — which I’ve learned is the word for that — I certainly didn’t shed a tear. Good riddance to all of it.

I do wonder, however, what people will do without some of the city’s most accessible and centrally located park benches, public restrooms, and affordable housing units.

Maybe the city can actually build real ones instead.

Josh Kruger is a writer in Philadelphia who has lived experience with homelessness and worked for years as a City Hall spokesperson.