Stealing Signs
It’s the time of year where some teenage ne’er do wells spend time and effort stealing religious iconography.
I can honestly say that I never did that during my vandal stage. However I did go through a brief stage some 20 years ago or so of collecting traffic signs. It started off innocently enough – sometimes weather or car accidents would knock down “No Parking” or other such signs to the ground. As they were damaged, I figured the city would just replace them with new signs and as a taxpayer (I have the good fortune of being continuously employed since the age of 16) I figured I was entitled to the old one that was just going to get tossed anyway.
Once you start with the sign racket. It’s difficult to turn back.
A friend of mine during my college years was a much more advanced collector of municipal street furniture. In his room over the years he accumulated a traffic light (which he hooked up plugged in and operated indoors), a fare box from an old bus, a parking meter, a fire hydrant and dozens of traffic signs. Many if not most of these were acquired through legitimate means: New York City will sell you items such as this if you want them. I just did a quick Google shopping search and found that someone is selling a pair of subway doors on eBay, for example. Some of the items were found. Some were, well, some required judicious application of a socket wrench.
Occasionally I would join this friend on a trip to harvest a particularly interesting sign. One night we went to collect a sign down at the beach, I forget what was interesting about it but we wanted one. So it was that we pulled onto the beach road, shut the car and went to work. The sign was located on a long, one lane street behind an old hangar (the beach abutted Miller Field on Staten Island which was a working airfield in the middle part of the 20th century) that connected the main street to a parking lot. It was a popular teenage drinking spot owing to its seclusion as the hangar blocked the view from the main street until you were close enough to turn the corner. We were perfectly sober this night as we turned the corner and located our quarry.
The sign was giving us some difficulty as the nuts appeared to be metric while the sockets that my buddy owned were all fractional. We were standing by the trunk of the car trying to find the right size socket when a car pulled in to the other end of the road and we were caught in the headlights.
Oh shit.
It looked like the right silhouette for a police vehicle, though there were no lights on top so it would have to be an undercover model. Or as they used to say on the CB radio in the ‘70’s, “A bear in a plain brown wrapper”. The car stopped about 20 yards from us and cut the lights. We saw two silhouettes in the front seat.
My friend and I slowly and casually got in our car but decided not to run. We sat and waited, trying feverishly to come up with an explanation as to why we were “working on the car” on a dark beach road. About five minutes passed and nobody had exited the vehicle in front of us. At this point we decided that it might be OK to casually leave the scene. My friend started the car and turned on the headlights.
Well, it wasn’t the police in the other car.
Seconds after our lights hit the windshield of the other car we saw a quick flash of naked flesh jump over the seat. The other car revved its engine and peeled out of there.
We cut the engine again as it was several minutes before we stopped laughing. We decided against taking the sign though. The next car that might come down the road could contain cranky cops instead of amorous teenagers.
That experience was pretty much the end of my “collecting” days. Besides, what does one do with a bunch of street signs indoors? Open up a crappy chain restaurant maybe. Huh. I wonder where all those TGI whatevers get their street signs?
I can honestly say that I never did that during my vandal stage. However I did go through a brief stage some 20 years ago or so of collecting traffic signs. It started off innocently enough – sometimes weather or car accidents would knock down “No Parking” or other such signs to the ground. As they were damaged, I figured the city would just replace them with new signs and as a taxpayer (I have the good fortune of being continuously employed since the age of 16) I figured I was entitled to the old one that was just going to get tossed anyway.
Once you start with the sign racket. It’s difficult to turn back.
A friend of mine during my college years was a much more advanced collector of municipal street furniture. In his room over the years he accumulated a traffic light (which he hooked up plugged in and operated indoors), a fare box from an old bus, a parking meter, a fire hydrant and dozens of traffic signs. Many if not most of these were acquired through legitimate means: New York City will sell you items such as this if you want them. I just did a quick Google shopping search and found that someone is selling a pair of subway doors on eBay, for example. Some of the items were found. Some were, well, some required judicious application of a socket wrench.
Occasionally I would join this friend on a trip to harvest a particularly interesting sign. One night we went to collect a sign down at the beach, I forget what was interesting about it but we wanted one. So it was that we pulled onto the beach road, shut the car and went to work. The sign was located on a long, one lane street behind an old hangar (the beach abutted Miller Field on Staten Island which was a working airfield in the middle part of the 20th century) that connected the main street to a parking lot. It was a popular teenage drinking spot owing to its seclusion as the hangar blocked the view from the main street until you were close enough to turn the corner. We were perfectly sober this night as we turned the corner and located our quarry.
The sign was giving us some difficulty as the nuts appeared to be metric while the sockets that my buddy owned were all fractional. We were standing by the trunk of the car trying to find the right size socket when a car pulled in to the other end of the road and we were caught in the headlights.
Oh shit.
It looked like the right silhouette for a police vehicle, though there were no lights on top so it would have to be an undercover model. Or as they used to say on the CB radio in the ‘70’s, “A bear in a plain brown wrapper”. The car stopped about 20 yards from us and cut the lights. We saw two silhouettes in the front seat.
My friend and I slowly and casually got in our car but decided not to run. We sat and waited, trying feverishly to come up with an explanation as to why we were “working on the car” on a dark beach road. About five minutes passed and nobody had exited the vehicle in front of us. At this point we decided that it might be OK to casually leave the scene. My friend started the car and turned on the headlights.
Well, it wasn’t the police in the other car.
Seconds after our lights hit the windshield of the other car we saw a quick flash of naked flesh jump over the seat. The other car revved its engine and peeled out of there.
We cut the engine again as it was several minutes before we stopped laughing. We decided against taking the sign though. The next car that might come down the road could contain cranky cops instead of amorous teenagers.
That experience was pretty much the end of my “collecting” days. Besides, what does one do with a bunch of street signs indoors? Open up a crappy chain restaurant maybe. Huh. I wonder where all those TGI whatevers get their street signs?
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