Farther south, at the High Line, Calvin Josh Fields decided to put his feet up on one of the slender wooden benches that seem to emerge organically from the elevated park’s stone paving. “I love the sleekness of it,” he said, after waking from a short nap as a parade of people ambled past.

The fanciful benches are most common in the city’s newer parks that have conservancies or special financing mechanisms, like Brooklyn Bridge Park, and can afford to maintain novel designs. (At that park, a new picnic pavilion, installed last year, features custom-designed picnic tables with fixed metal umbrellas, and stadium-style seating overlooking New York Harbor.) Older parks still tend to have standard park benches, most based on designs from the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. “They are well designed, they are comfortable, they have nice proportions,” said Gail Wittwer-Laird, a senior designer with the parks department. “They got it right.”

Still, these days, the varieties seem endless. In Hudson River Park, which stretches along the west side of Manhattan from Battery Place to West 59th Street, the sculptor Mark Gibian was commissioned to create three works for the esplanade in TriBeCa, collectively called Serpentine Structures. They are made from steel pipes that have been rolled, notched and welded. One, titled “Torque,” is a double-sided bench of sorts, with undulating surfaces that evoke a bird’s nest, a crown and nautical netting. Mark Cersosimo, 26, who was visiting the park from Queens, gave “Torque” a try, but then switched to a simple stone bench a few feet away. “The entire thing is like the awkward bumps between the subway seats,” he said.

Across New York Harbor from Battery Park is Governors Island, where the sedentary public can choose from an assortment of Adirondack chairs, rocking chairs and hammocks, which are perhaps the ultimate symbol of summertime comfort.