Q. Scattered throughout Long Island City and Astoria, Queens, are small circular street signs that read, “Hike New York Long Island City.” The signs show a cuffed trouser leg and black dress shoe in midstride. The choices of clothing and footwear seem odd for a sign promoting a hike, at least for today’s sensibilities. Do these signs refer to a formal hike?
A. The eye-catching signs were placed along a five-mile loop through Long Island City and parts of Sunnyside and Astoria, Queens, in 1994 in a joint project of the city’s Transportation Department and the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit group. The 44 pairs of orange-and-blue signs, on 24-inch aluminum plates, led walkers past sweeping waterfront views of the Manhattan skyline and residential blocks, as well as the Socrates Sculpture Park, the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), the Noguchi Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center and a few institutions that no longer exist.
The signs’ creator, the artist Richard Deon, who works in Dutchess County, said in an e-mail that he was delighted at the continuing interest in the 18-year-old project. “I enjoyed this hike/project a lot,” he said. “For me it was something I always wanted to do: draw a five-mile line on a city map and mark it as a trail. The trail had to be an interesting cross-section, showing the transportation, highway, electric infrastructure of the city. I always wanted to find the area between the urban and the suburban, the first patch of homeowner’s lawn.”
“Soon after the trail went up,” Mr. Deon added, “a few (not too many) signs went ‘missing.’ Over the years it is impossible for me to keep track. Would I like the round signs to be replaced? Yes! But this is something that has to be budgeted again.” Mr. Deon said he had a suggestion for the city or the Public Art Fund: print six-inch decals of the signs and stick them up to fill the gaps.
As for the dressy shoes, Mr. Deon wrote in an artist’s statement, the project was intended “to attract metropolitan hikers, so my design features a distinctly urban foot.”
No Free Wash
Q. Heading east into Queens on the Long Island Rail Road, coming out of the tunnel and passing through the Sunnyside Yards, I see New Jersey Transit trains lining up for train-car washes. Why those and not L.I.R.R. trains, and who is paying?
A. Amtrak’s Sunnyside rail yard, in Long Island City, Queens, is used for midday storage of New Jersey Transit and Amtrak trains, said a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The Long Island Rail Road stores its trains in its West Side Yard, west of Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.
New Jersey Transit pays Amtrak $6.2 million a year for equipment storage and servicing at Sunnyside Yards, a fee that covers the scrub-downs, a New Jersey Transit spokeswoman said.
