Yes, it’s absolutely true — and I’ve spotted it myself more than once. A lot of modern street benches are deliberately designed to be anti-theft, and the whole “you can’t just unbolt them” thing is a feature, not an accident. Cities and parks departments got tired of watching their furniture vanish overnight, so they worked with manufacturers to come up with fittings that can’t be undone with a regular wrench.
The trick is usually in the bolts. Standard hex-head bolts would be way too easy for anyone with a socket set, so you’ll often find what are called security bolts or shear-head bolts. These have a unique drive pattern — maybe a pin-in-torx, a tri-groove, or a pentagonal head that your average hardware store tool won’t fit. Some bolts even have a breakaway head that snaps off once installed, leaving behind a smooth, rounded cone that’s basically impossible to grip with pliers. At that point, the bench leg is permanently locked to the concrete pad or footing underneath.
Then there’s the whole anchoring system. Instead of just sitting on top of the pavement, many benches have embedded anchors cast right into the concrete during installation. The bench frame is dropped onto threaded rods, and those specialty nuts get tightened down with a dedicated tool that only the maintenance crew owns. Even if you overcome the hardware, you’d need an angle grinder and a lot of noise to slice through the steel legs — and doing that on a busy sidewalk tends to attract attention.
I’ve also noticed some places take a low-tech but equally effective approach: welding the bench down completely or using tamper-proof concrete enclosures around the base, so you can’t even reach the fastener. It’s not always about the bolt alone; sometimes the entire design discourages theft by making the bench too heavy, too awkward, or too public to move discreetly.
So next time you sit on a bench and glance at the base, you might see those strange-looking bolt heads and realize they’re not there by chance. They’re a quiet little piece of urban defense, and honestly, they work really well. Most would-be thieves just move on to easier targets.