Our Story
Leap on a one-ton Table
After college HENGE founder Alan Good joined a world-class dance company.
In 2008 he took off a couple months from choreography to recuperate from plantar fasciitis. To avoid going stir crazy he imagined how he might introduce concrete tennis tables to the US like he’d seen in Berlin. (1500 concrete ping pong tables in that city.) He searched and found only two in this country. Henge was born.
HENGE donated a table to the City of New York—at Tompkins Square Park. The New York Times covered the table and the regulars who played it.
Henge supplied city parks and Navy bases, then schools and condo courtyards.
Henge likes negative space—the space around the table. People do things in space— they stroll or hurry through or linger. It depends on what they see as they pass through.
Good continues: “We figure clean design adds to any outdoor space. We cut S-curves and empty portholes into the base to float the table. When you sit on the 30” high table top, your feet swing like if you were five. If you stand and lean against the table, and shove it sharply with your hip, it doesn’t move. But light streams under it.”
The result is a stone object that looks great in any season, in any light, alone, or as people play it.
A concrete precast company in Brooklyn makes HENGE products. It’s a three-generation family-owned business. Now it’s the birthplace of the newest HENGE family member: Corn hole.
How do you move from dance performances in Paris and New York to make one-ton concrete tables? Turns out, those gigs aren’t different. Both allow strangers to see and hear each other. Let’s hope people linger and strangers mix. If we can exchange just a nod, word, or smile with someone, it might start to knit us together.
