Forgotten New York

7TH AVENUE BLACK

BELIEVE me, I wouldn’t publish this photo of the depicted sign, at 7th Avenue and 1st Street in Pasrk Slope, if it hadn’t already been replaced. When I went by in 2017, it was still there; I checked on it periodically. In the 2010s, NYC’s Department of Transportation went on a final offensive on all nonstandard NYC street signs, expunging the remaining signs from past eras. Google Street View shows it hanging in there as late as 2020. Unfortunately, one of my favorite Mexican restaurants, Rancho Allegre, a block away at 7th and Garfield Place, has likewise been expunged. (Meanwhile, the DOT leaves most sunbleached signs in place.)

As you know by now if you have been a FNY fan, NYC street signs were formerly color coded by borough; Brooklyn was white on black, Queens blue on white, Bronx white on blue, and both Staten Island and Manhattan, black on yellow. In the 1980s the feds mandated that signage, except in historic and developmental districts, must be the same shade of green used on highway signs; so it was written and so it was done. In the 2010s the Feds further mandated that all new street signs had to be upper and lower case, instead of all caps.

Till recently you could see some stragglers in outlying areas; this one, in the heart of Park Slope, was simply overlooked in the 1980s during the first wave of replacements; maybe they ran out of 7th Avenue signs on the truck.

As is frequently the case… sick transit, Gloria!

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10/5/23

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