Pole Tacks
Wooden utility poles are often pockmarked with nails and staples, turning the poles into canvases for a unique form of abstract art.
When I was growing up in a small town on Long Island, I would wait for the school bus each morning at a street corner near my family’s house. There was a telephone pole installed at that corner, and the pole was a popular spot for people to post signs about upcoming yard sales, “Lost Dog” flyers, “Handyman Available” notices, and the like. As a result, a portion of the pole’s surface was completely encrusted with nails, tacks, and heavy-duty staples, sort of like the industrial version of an everything bagel.
Once I noticed this phenomenon, I became fascinated by it. I didn’t really have the language for this as a child, but I think I saw the array of hardware on the pole as a form of accidental abstract art. I also thought about how each nail or staple represented a sign that had been affixed to the pole, and how each one had been affixed by someone who was probably one of my neighbors. In short, each metal fastener represented a potential story.
That street corner is shown above. There’s still a pole there (it might even be the same one I grew up with1), and if you zoom in on the photo you’ll see that it’s still covered in nails and staples.
I hadn’t thought about any of that that in many years, probably because I’ve lived my entire adult life in New York City, most of which doesn’t have utility poles because our phone lines, power lines, and so on are mostly buried underground (and even in the neighborhoods that do have old-fashioned utility poles, the poles tend to be positioned along property lines in people’s backyards, not on the street), so flyers tend to be taped to metal lampposts, not nailed or stapled to wooden poles.
But my interest in utility pole surfaces was recently rekindled by IC reader Kurt Rozek (who you may remember from his improvised fix of a street sign typo, which I wrote about a few months ago). He’s spent more than a decade documenting the nails and other hardware on a pole in Allouez, Wisconsin. Here’s the pole in its natural habitat, at the northeast corner of Webster Avenue and Hoffman Road:
Although you can’t see it in that long view, the pole’s surface is full of nails, screws, and staples, and Kurt’s reaction to it was similar to my childhood response. “I was intrigued by all of the different nails and screws, the different sizes, nail heads, textures, etc.,” he recently told me. “I thought it looked really neat, almost artsy as opposed to being an eyesore.”
That led Kurt to take his first photo of the pole, on January 10th, 2014:
“I then became curious to see if much changed over time,” says Kurt. So almost exactly four years later — on January 17th, 2018 — he returned to take another photo of the same spot on the pole: