Deck the Streets

Twinkle Twinkle

This is my first holiday season as a government cog. Over the last week, my perfectly grey, cubicle-farm of an office has transformed into a sparkling monument to Christmas. A real Christmas tree now occupies the empty cubicle a few rows down from me, inflatable nutcrackers and candy canes float slowly around the HVAC ducts, and the ladies in Sidewalk Inspection have gone full Macy’s with tinsel hanging from the ceilings and even fake snow. Facilities sent an email reminding people to unplug decorations at night and to use “flame-resistant materials and never use real candles.”

All this is just one part of a much bigger city-wide transformation, as homeowners pump up their inflatable Rudolphs and stores plug in their holiday window displays. I’ve written before about the decoration of the city, and how in an era of bland architecture it often falls to individuals to add their own quirks and wring some beauty out of the built environment. At the Fulton Street subway stop, about as boring a piece of urban design as you can get (and somehow it still cost a billion dollars), a station agent has added a Grinch decal adorned with MetroCards to their window which makes me smile in the morning.

This reminded me of the Christmas decorations TFL employees put out in Tube stops across London, my favorite being this roped-off, very exclusive tree in Vauxhall.

I don’t think there is a coordinated effort on the part of MTA or TFL to decorate. The station agents have gone rogue. They have the same motivation as your neighbor with the blow-up Rudolph — they want to cheer people up, and maybe cheer themselves up in the process. But the holidays are the one time of the year when the whole spectrum of city shapers — community organizations, businesses, the government, and average citizens— get in on the decorating game. The Department of Transportation has issued hundreds of temporary permits allowing business improvement districts to string lights to street lamps and traffic signals along the city’s commercial corridors. The Firehouses and Precincts have their wreaths on. The Zoo, Bryant Park, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden will all have their lighting ceremonies this week. After Christmas, the largest Menorah in the world will be put up by the Chabad of Park Slope in Grand Army Plaza. The workers at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal set up this nativity scene in a shipping container that I passed last weekend.

The history of Christmas decorations, despite all the green ivy and trees, is actually intensely urban. The birthplace of modern Christmas is probably Germany, maybe still the most Christmas-loving place on Earth. I used to travel every two months to Nuremberg for work, a place I don’t recommend unless you’re a war crimes historian or it’s Christmas time. The Nuremberg Christmas market is something straight out of a fairy tale, its striped stalls wafting sausage vapors into the cold night. During medieval times these would have been important opportunities for people to stock up on provisions for the winter, in addition to a celebration of the advent. Many of the tropes of holiday decorating come from these town festivals.

No decoration holds as much power over our streets as the Christmas Tree, another German invention exported to the English-speaking world by Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. An image of the Queen with her children and German husband was printed in a popular American magazine in 1848 - this is often thought to be the first mass image of a tree with presents underneath it.

This domestic vision of the tree flew contrary to the Christmas Tree’s more public space-focused antecedents. The pagan winter solstice celebrations, from which many Christmas celebrations evolved, involved lining buildings with tree branches and the erection of large wooden poles decorated with ferns and wreaths. Saturnalia, the Ancient Roman harvest festival celebrated in late December, involved bringing evergreen trees to Temple squares across the city as symbols of hope. The tradition of the tree as a public focal point can trace its roots to Rome, but it was kicked into overdrive in the US.

An obscure corner of the Boston-New York City rivalry is the fight over who can claim the first public Christmas Tree lighting. Most agree that Boston’s tree was lit roughly 30 minutes before New York City’s in 1912, although the Madison Square Park Conservancy still claims its tree was first… and no one seems to acknowledge that Hartford Connecticut may have beaten both cities by a few minutes. 25,000 people came to watch a 35-foot tree lit up in Boston Common as Mayor “Honey” Fitzgerald, grandfather of JFK, led the crowd in carols. Today, there are enough public tree-lighting ceremonies to fill your advent calendar. The most famous of which is obviously the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. I read an interview with Erik Pauze, the chief Horticulturalist for the complex, - who had this slightly haunting quote: “almost every day, I’m thinking about this year’s Tree, next year’s Tree, and maybe the Tree after that.” Pauze begins looking for the tree across the Northeast in the Spring. After it’s identified he returns to water and care for it. Eventually, a custom trailer arrives and the tree is cut down and delivered to Manhattan by a specialized tree-delivery company called Christmas Tree Brooklyn. Entire streets are closed so the huge tree can be maneuvered around narrow turns. In 2020 an owl was discovered in the tree as it was being erected - she had stowed away for three days as the tree slowly moved toward the city and was promptly brought to a wildlife sanctuary.

I love that so much time and effort is put into something so frivolous. The cynical among us may point out that the trees and lights are often put up by commercial interests—Rockefeller Center wants you to shop etc etc. Others might lament the ritual killing of huge trees for our enjoyment. I think that people who point out stuff like this probably aren’t that fun at parties. And maybe it’s not so frivolous after all. The urban theorist Kevin Lynch set out to understand how average people navigated and understood cities. Lynch was interested mainly in the mental maps people created to get around, but his writing ended up being as much about how cities can be memorable, interesting places, as it was about pure navigation. In The Image of the City Lynch breaks down the environment into five features that guide navigation and memorability:

1. Paths: the streets that guide travel and shape places.

2. Edges: the real and imagined barriers that bound spaces.

3. Districts: The groups of buildings that have some sort of shared identity

4. Nodes: Junctions, focal points, places of collision.

5. Landmarks: Memorable, physical objects or structures that mark a place and by which people can navigate.

The most memorable places combine these elements. Imagine a long street that terminates in a public plaza or open space with a statue or some other landmark in the middle. Chances are you can think of at least one place in your city that feels like this. Even in the age, of Google Maps we still picture the city as a series of memorable places and objects. It’s not hard to see how a giant, lit-up tree enhances these features - especially the last two. They make the places we see daily feel fresh and new - transient landmarks, often places in nodes, breaking up the routine of our environment. Maybe this is why the cubicle tree is so funny - it’s turned the dictionary definition of “boring place” into something celebratory.

I remember being very small and looking up with wonder at the Rockefeller Center tree, the crowd packed so tight you could probably lift your feet off the ground and still be standing upright. There is no better backdrop than a lit-up city plaza or town square, that’s why so many Christmas movies from Elf to Miracle on 34th Street to Love Actually take place in a big city. Even my favorite - It’s a Wonderful Life features a bustling main street (and is basically a movie about the greed of housing developers). Inspired by my co-workers I finally strung some lights around my desk, but I’ve never had a Christmas tree in my apartment because it’s better to enjoy them in the street.