Last October I wrote about how I attended the annual autumn sale of decommissioned New York City subway signs, where I took lots of photos but didn’t buy anything. A few months after that, in January, I wrote about zebra boards, the classically inconspicuous black-and-white striped signs that are mounted on every New York subway platform so the conductors can confirm that the train is properly aligned in the station before the train doors are opened.
You can see where this is going.
As I wrote that article about zebra boards last winter, I was kicking myself for not having purchased one a few months earlier at the subway sign sale. The next sign sale wouldn’t be until October of this year, so I patiently waited, bided my time, and hoped there would be some zebra boards available at this year’s sale.
The sale took place on October 8th. The gates were scheduled to open at 9am, but people usually start lining up well in advance, and only a few dozen people are let in at a time, so you can end up stuck in line for hours. Last year, I arrived at about 10am and didn’t get in until close to 1pm — ugh. So this year I got up early and arrived at the appointed spot, a desolate South Brooklyn industrial lot ringed in razor wire, shortly before 7am. There were about 60 people ahead of me, one of whom was a professional line-sitter who’d been hired by someone who planned to show up just before the gates opened.
I was part of the first wave of people who were allowed in at 9am. I figured there would probably be some zebra boards available (I remembered having seen one last year, before I realized that I wanted one), but there were no guarantees. Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to find a bunch of them, standing upright in the middle of the lot:
