The Dumbest Thing I Ever Did That The New York Times Wrote About

Back when blogs were still new enough that legacy media outlets covered them as something novel, somebody at the New York Times must have liked my blog. I was mentioned often in their “City Room” section, a sort of New-York-centric linkblog on their website that doesn’t exist anymore.

But of all the things they linked to, the one that tickles me still to this day is an absolutely ridiculous thing I posted back in 2010. Here’s how the link appeared on their site:

Yes, that’s right. I posted a photo on my blog of what I called “a standpipe disguised as a rooster,” and the New York Times considered this among all the news that was fit to print (on their website, anyway).

I mean, it does look like a rooster, right?

[Aside: I sometimes lament how within a few years, between the death of Google Reader and the rise of Twitter, this sort of “just one photo and a caption” post would become something I posted on Twitter instead of as a standalone post on a blog, and that Reader/Twitter confluence was a big reason my blog frequency diminished until I resurrected Ironic Sans as a longer-form newsletter in 2020.]

Anyway, I was reminded of this last week when I read a piece published in the “Metropolitan Diary” section of the Times. It was a letter from a woman who visits New York City occasionally and picks themes for things to photograph while she’s there:

Clearly, the New York Times agrees with that sentiment. And who knows? Maybe your standpipe photos will get mentioned by the Times, too!

Actually, the New York Times seem to love standpipe photos. Not only did they link to my photo of a standpipe disguised as a rooster, but in 2017 they published an entire gallery of standpipe photos by street photographer Clay Benskin called “Standpipes of New York.”

It’s almost like they are obsessed with standpipes.

So I dug into their archives further to see if that’s true. I looked at every article that prominently mentioned standpipes. And that’s how I found an article that explained why the standpipe I photographed looks like a rooster to begin with.

See, one year before I took the photo of the rooster standpipe, the city passed a law dictating a color code for how the caps on standpipes should be painted:

So that explains the yellow “beak” of the rooster. But what about the red comb on top of its head? Why is that there? The article has the answer: “To stop you from sitting on them or placing things on them, of course.”

Of course. It’s not a rooster comb, it’s spikes. And it turns out that there’s no standard standpipe spike. They come in a range of styles. As the article explains, “spikes are not sold with the connection itself; they have to be retrofitted, which is why you see such a variety of them.”

I wonder if the standpipe I photographed looks the same today, 15 years after I took it. So I examined the photo for clues to help remember where it was. There’s a sign in the distance that says “Empire State Building” and the edge of a curved awning visible at the top of the image. Comparing the sidewalk in my photo to the sidewalk beneath various awnings in Google Street View photos of the Empire State Building, I was able to pinpoint it as this siamese standpipe attached to the building. Sure enough it is still there in the same color scheme, at least as of four months ago when this Google Street View photo was taken:

It is a two-headed “Siamese” standpipe (they should probably change that name, right? Conjoined standpipe maybe?). I must have taken the photo from an angle where you could only see half of it because it looked more like a rooster that way. I guess if you want to see a two-headed rooster, go to Coney Island.

They’ve changed the little sign since I took my photo, but it confirms what we now know the yellow caps indicate: a combination standpipe and sprinkler.

I dug even further in the Times archives. Just how deep does their obsession with standpipes go? Well, it turns out it doesn’t actually go that much further. There are mostly stories of standpipes not working when they should, putting firefighters at risk, or violating building codes. Normal news stuff.

I did find out that in 1925, the city of Tarrytown wanted to put a standpipe on J.D. Rockefeller’s property, which he objected to and offered to give them some other property they could use to build a reservoir instead. But this wasn’t the same kind of standpipe. This was a large industrial-looking structure, more like a rural water tower than what you see around the city.

I wrote this piece thinking it was just about some urban oddities, but standpipes are firefighting tools, and as I wrote the end of this piece I began to think of the devastating fires in Los Angeles right now. I have family and friends in LA, and I know one person whose home has been totally destroyed. It’s an unthinkable tragedy.

There are various places online with lists of ways to help from wherever you are. Here is one such list from the Associated Press.

As always, thanks for reading. See you next time!

David