Must Make The Street Signs

A slow news weekend, the Times visits the Department of Transportation’s sign-making shop in Maspeth, Queens and files this report:

As New York City’s chief traffic engineer, Michael R. Harnett oversees the manufacture and installation of around 70,000 traffic and street signs each year. But don’t ask him about the often-pesky messages that are actually on the signs: “Don’t Honk – $350 Penalty,” “Don’t Block the Box,” and, of course, the ever-present “No Parking Anytime.”

Angry about ticket agents? They work for the Police Department. Want to appeal a parking ticket? Talk to the Finance Department. Please. After all, Mr. Harnett doesn’t write the signs. He just makes them.

There are an estimated 1.3 million traffic and street signs in New York City, one for every six residents, and most are designed and manufactured in the Transportation Department’s central shop, an unassuming brick building in an industrial section of Maspeth, in central Queens.

The shop, which has 37 workers, is the largest municipal sign shop in the United States. A hive of quiet and constant activity, it makes about 70,000 signs a year.

And if you’re interested, you can purchase an honest-to-god, real-life New York City street sign:

Signs typically last about 10 years, but especially harsh weather or bright lights can shorten their life. Besides suffering wear and tear, some signs are knocked over – and even run over – by wayward vehicles. Others are vandalized or defaced. Then there are those that simply disappear.

In the past, signs for Wall Street in Manhattan and Hooker Place in Staten Island have been stolen repeatedly. Other popular targets are John Street in Manhattan and Love Lane in Brooklyn.

The department’s Sign Sales Program was established in 1995, in part, so that souvenir-hunters could acquire signs legally.

Some signs evoke nostalgia, like the replicas of signs for the 1964 World’s Fair, the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field. Others, like Mr. Koch’s comical signs, have been retired from official use. Still others – “No Parking Except Lillian” or “Yield to Mom” – exist only in people’s imaginations.

John Jurgeleit, who manages the sign-sales program, said it had grown to about $300,000 a year. The city does not make a profit on the signs, but the program pays for itself and is not subsidized by the city. A modest size personalized street sign costs about $30.

Bonus: Department of Transportation’s Custom Made Signs Information Page

Walk . . . Or Risk Getting Fat

The Times notices the new walk/don’t walk signs that feature an emaciated, hunched over pedestrian:

Could they have been subliminal harbingers of the city’s slenderizing campaign?

Is it just coincidence that in the summer that New York City went to war against trans fats, a new generation of “Walk/Don’t Walk” icons began appearing around Columbus Circle with a noticeably skinnier walking man and an almost emaciated red hand?

Your typical walking man – a familiar silhouette around town in the five years since the first new light-emitting diode pedestrian signal was installed at 35th Street and Queens Boulevard – is a pretty robust, smooth-shouldered, round-headed fellow who steps off confidently into traffic, as bubbly as a Keith Haring figure.

This new guy, by contrast, seems a bit rickety. There isn’t a curve to his body. His head – is this too cruel to say? – is pentagonal. His arms and legs are mere sticks. Indeed, he looks as though he’s stooped over with a bad back. (Maybe from waiting so long for the light to change.)

About that upraised hand. The one that New Yorkers have grown accustomed to – not that they pay it any mind – is as smooth and solid as a porcelain glove mold. The new hand is so skeletally thin it might be the crypt keeper’s.

But they say you can never be too thin. After all, the skinny man is formed of 45 light-emitting diodes, where the older version tips the scales at 60. The new hand has 64 diodes, the old one 120. So maybe this was an energy conservation step.

Rethinking A Cab’s Bulletproof Partition

Cab drivers and the Taxi and Limousine Commission are rethinking the unsightly bulletproof partition separating the driver from his or her fares:

It emerged in the 1960’s as an invention born of fear: the taxicab partition, meant to spare the lives of drivers at a time of gunfire, armed robberies and murders. Over its lifetime, it would become yellowed and defaced; its contraption for safely passing money to the driver would often break down. And with the partition closed, the classic cabbie conversation – the one about politics and local lore, current events and competing theories about the best way from, say, Midtown to Kennedy – would become all but impossible.

Now, however, the partition is being rethought, in a New York City where crime is down and passenger demand for legroom and other comforts is ever greater. The Taxi and Limousine Commission has issued a proposal seeking new ways to design and install the partitions, which have been required in most yellow cabs since 1994.

. . .

The dividers generate strong reactions from drivers and riders alike. Most drivers who work daytime shifts do not bother to close their partitions, leaving the sliding door open to allow for conversation with passengers and easy exchange of money. Riders, in turn, believe the grimy plastic barriers discourage them from giving directions (not a bad thing, from the driver’s perspective) and make them feel as though they are in the vestibule of a battle-scarred liquor store.

Partition opponents cite safety concerns (“a plastic surgeon’s dream”) and aesthetic considerations (the “gritty, scratchy partition that prevents them from seeing the wonderful city around them”) as reason enough to discard the thermoplastic barrier. But that said, there may be other good reasons for it:

Ryszard Belc, 45, a Polish immigrant who lives in Elmhurst, Queens, said he thought the partitions kept out germs during the flu season.

And Mr. Belc said he had little nostalgia for the lost art of taxicab conversation.

“With cellphones, nobody wants to talk to the driver anymore,” he said. “Even on a five-minute trip, they always think of some long-lost aunt they can call.”

So that’s what they think of us — a bunch of infectious, self-involved marks.

The Willets Point Dream Has Died

The auto body shops in the Iron Triangle of Willets Point will live to see another day — New York has lost to Paris and the eventual winner, London, in voting to determine the 2012 Olympics host city:

In Singapore today, the city’s Olympic bid delegation – a group of about 300 people – watched the vote tally on a giant projector screen in a wing of the Ritz Carlton hotel. Guests sipped wine and nibbled on dumplings, spicy fish sausages and croissant-wrapped shrimp in what was a generally giddy atmosphere stoked by the perception that the team’s presentation was a show stopper. But when the losing results came in however, the room fell into a prolonged, stunned silence, according to people who were there.

Mmm . . . shrimp!

Reports indicate that the Q&A period during final presentations bordered on “tense,” even political in tone:

The question-and-answer portion had a tense moment when an I.O.C. member from Syria, Samih Moudallal, pointedly asked [Deputy Mayor Daniel] Doctoroff, “Would the athletes and the officials of these countries on the terrorist list, will they be allowed to enter the United States of America?” He went on to reference what he said were problems Syria had obtaining a visa for one of its Paralympic athletes during the 1996 Games in Atlanta.

And where New York’s delegation gently evoked the memory of the Sept. 11 attacks during its presentation, other countries were just as heartfelt:

Paris had begun its presentation with a note of humility, a nod to the criticism that its past two bids were too arrogant and turned off an organization that prefers to be wooed.

. . .

President Chirac, who did not attend the presentation for the last Paris bid, in 2001, made the most emotional appeal. He emphasized his long relationship with many I.O.C. members and talked about the French people’s desire to host the Games. “I shall vouch for this,” he said in French. “You can put your trust in France. You can trust the French. You can trust us.”

On the other hand, Madrid (whose presentation was the “least professional, relying on still photos with type superimposed for most of its visuals, as opposed to higher-quality video used by the other bids”) chose to emphasize the positive:

“Madrid will be a fiesta,” [Madrid Mayor Alberto] Ruiz-Gallardon said. “We have been celebrating the Olympic spirit for 50 years now.”

The 2012 Olympics will take place in London in 2012. Mmm . . . shrimp!

50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers

The New York Press‘ 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers list is out. At number 12, the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik easily makes the cut. Inclusions go from the obvious (Bill O’Reilly, 29; Mayor Bloomberg, 1; Alex Rodriguez, 50) to the refreshingly counterintiutive (Eliot Spitzer, 35). And which STD-spreading Interpol bassist checks in at number 15? Click the link to find out!