New Yorkers in Exile

[BullNBear52]

British Store Sells Old New York ‘Don’t Walk’ Signs. Only £975.
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM



Jesse Carrington/Trainspotters, Ltd. Animation by The New York Times

One culture’s trash is another’s treasure: A British antique store is selling old (though rewired) New York City “Don’t Walk” signs for about $1,600.Consider the “Don’t Walk” sign, that lost classic of the New York streetscape. It is a yin-yang traffic signal, a functional poem — “Don’t Walk/Walk” — inside an iconic yellow box. It is to Martin Scorsese’s midcentury Manhattan what the gas lamp is to Edith Wharton’s gilded age.

And it can now be yours to keep — for £975. That’s about $1,600, plus shipping and taxes.

How a banal decommissioned street sign morphed into a sought-after collector’s item is a tale of design trends and changing tastes. But it is also a testament to the nostalgic power of even the most ordinary bric-a-brac of New York.

Hundreds of these signs are being offered for sale through Trainspotters Ltd., an upscale English antiques outlet that transforms yesterday’s cultural detritus into today’s chic décor.

“It’s probably the only traffic signal that we would be interested in the world,” Jesse Carrington, the company’s director, said in a telephone interview from the Trainspotters warehouse in Gloucestershire. “They are such a classic. It’s our first entrance into traffic signals, and I think it will be our only venture, because you can’t get any better than it.”

It is not uncommon for city agencies to sell off surplus items at marked-up prices. Subway enthusiasts, for instance, can buy used train doors, poles and benches from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

No city agencies, however, routinely charge four-figure mark-ups on their items, opening the door to private dealers who see treasure in the trash.

An East Village antiques dealer, Billy LeRoy, recently completed a lengthy legal ordeal with the transportation authority, which accused him of selling old, stolen subway signs, though the charges were dropped.

In 2004, the city parks department sold off seats taken from Yankee Stadium, at $1,500 a set. Today, Bronx Bombers enthusiasts might have to shell out more than $2,000 for a single seat from the same era, based on the pricing on YankeeStadiumSeats.com, which bills itself as a direct-order stadium seat reseller.

Despite the high price of the “Don’t Walk/Walk” signs, they are selling well. A few days into the sale, Trainspotters had already shipped to buyers in New Zealand and Switzerland.

The mark-up is justified in part by the inclusion of a new custom electrical circuit, installed by Trainspotters, which allows the buyer to program a unique flash pattern.

The light, which can be suspended or mounted on a wall, comes in the original yellow cast-aluminum and vandalproof tempered glass.

The city’s Department of Transportation phased out “Don’t Walk” signs in the early 2000s in favor of the pictographic hand-and-man signals in use today, in an effort to better serve the entirety of the city’s pedestrian population.

According to Mr. Carrington, a chance encounter with a city employee led to the discovery of a cache of unused signs, manufactured before the changeover.

But a spokesman for the Transportation Department, told of the signs’ lucrative afterlife, seemed flummoxed as to their provenance.

The city, it turns out, already sells some of the signs through its official store — for $35 apiece. They do not light up, however.

“You can let the sun shine through it in your house,” suggested a saleswoman at the store.

The cheaper signs also do not include the signature yellow casing, because the city retained those for use with its current hand-and-man signs.

“The housings used then are the same ones used now, so we would not have removed them from our inventory,” the spokesman, Scott Gastel, wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Carrington, of Trainspotters, said the yellow housings on his wares were original. The city speculated that Mr. Carrington’s signs might have come from the manufacturer.

Mr. Carrington did think it odd that New Yorkers would allow a fixture of their city to fall by the wayside.

“I don’t think that would happen in London,” he said. “Over here, everybody would be all over stuff like that — big competition.” He added: “People are stranger in New York.”

Regardless of how they came to be in England, many of the signs are likely to live out their remaining years back in their native land.

“I’ve bought things from downtown New York before, shipped them back here, and sold them back to the Upper East Side,” Mr. Carrington said with a laugh.

“We’ll see quite a bit of them going back over the Atlantic into people’s apartments in New York.”


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Our transit reporter, Michael M. Grynbaum, advises you on the latest chatter from the city’s roads and rails. Check back every Monday. Got a tip? He can be reached at [e-mail].

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