Psychics, Pirates, and More!

        April 2, 2019

**Psychic City: The Medium of Mediums Opening Friday, April 5!**

**Saturday, April 27 - Save the Date for a Very Special Pirate Radio Event!**

Learn the History of NYC's Renegade Airwaves

**What's New in our Making A Museum Exhibit?**

A Classic Sign With A Missing Piece

**The City Reliquary Proudly Presents
Psychic City: The Medium of Mediums!**

**Limited Run Exhibition Opens April 4
Opening Reception Friday, April 5, 7-9 p.m.**

Solve all your problems! Guaranteed results! Explore the history of New York City psychics, mediums, and fortune tellers with this vast archive of handbills, flyers, and other ephemera collected by Harley J. Spiller (aka Inspector Collector). This exhibition - curated and designed by Parsons students - is a multi-sensory experience that allows visitors to ponder the past and seek their future. One visit will show you the way! 

**New York City's Pirates of the Air
Saturday, April 27, 6-9 p.m.**

**You can’t see them, but the skies above New York City hold a tangle of transgressive, culture-bearing radio signals. Secret rooftop transmitters send them winging imperceptibly across the five boroughs. These stations, often called pirates for the way they commandeer the airwaves, operate without a license. Their sounds pour out of simple FM radios in homes and community hangouts throughout tight-knit, sometimes struggling immigrant enclaves, which often lack access to legal bandwidth due to high costs and corporate media control.
Stations like Triple 9, Fierte Haitenne, Kol Hashalom and Radio Gospel Train risk fines, confiscation of equipment and even arrest to keep their signals flowing. Their programs bring music and news from home along with practical guidance and spiritual comfort for surviving in a new land.**
**David Goren, radio producer and creator of the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map, has been researching the New York City’s pirate radio scene for the past five years, talking with station staff and listeners on both sides of the legal divide. David will explore the cultural and political forces driving pirate radio in NYC since the late sixties via live tuning, archival recordings and excerpts from his new radio documentary for the BBC World Service.**
**David will also be joined by two special guests: DJ Cintronics from WBAD, a seminal and influential hip hop pirate from mid-90’s Brooklyn, and Dan Lewis who was part of Queens-based Stereo Nine FM, a progressively political pirate station of the 70’s and 80’s.
Ticket link coming soon! Check cityreliquary.org or our facebook page in the coming days!**

**What's New in our Making A Museum Exhibit?**

**From the Archives: Walk/Dont Walk Pedestrian Signal**

The City Reliquary is taking visitors inside our processes of acquisition, research, and preservation of our collection. As we redesign our permanent collection and bring out some of our rarely exhibited holdings, we’re also adding new objects, studying their history. Every week we’ll be working on new additions, and we invite you to journey with us as we learn new stories of the city. 

The humble pedestrian signal: a street design standard of such obvious utility (albeit habitually ignored by New Yorkers) that it seems to have existed forever. But our streets have not always been ruled by incandescent dictates. In the [early 20th century](http://gothamist.com/2015/08/04/jaywalking_history_nyc.php), pedestrians freely used street space to cross and walk in. As automobile usage became more common, so did pedestrian deaths. In an effort to improve safety and reduce gridlock, the [first permanent traffic lights](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/realestate/a-history-of-new-york-traffic-lights.html) in New York, on 5th Avenue between 14th and 57th Streets, were installed in 1920. [Separate pedestrian signals](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/walk.cfm) were first introduced at a few intersections in the late 1930s.

The yellow box "walk/dont walk" signal we have on view was installed throughout the city in the 1950s. Note the lack of an apostrophe in "dont": [possibly because](http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/07/dont-bother-putting-apostrophe-dont-walk-signs/) the first such signs were neon, with "dont" made out of a single glass tube that made it difficult to include. The idiosyncratic punctuation helped to make the signal [a beloved part of NYC's visual fabric](http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/06/30/10-lost-symbols-of-new-york/photo/manhattan-bridge-and-traffic-signal/). "The apostrophe missing from DONT WALK" was one of the [101 reasons to love New York City](http://gothamist.com/2018/06/05/why_we_love_nyc_list_1970s_and_now.php) cited by the *Times* in 1976 (*please* read the [entire incredible list](http://gothamist.com/2014/05/01/disco_listicle.php#photo-1)), and a [*Times* writer later effused](https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/walk-dont-walk-open-your-wallet/) "[i]t is to Martin Scorsese's midcentury Manhattan what the gas lamp is the Edith Wharton's gilded age." The sign was the titular component of Pratt alum [George Segal's sculpture](https://www.pratt.edu/the-work/gallery/walk-dont-walk-1976/) revealing "passionate honesty and existential weight." And the sign's instructions were sometimes [the first words young New Yorkers learned to read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/the-man-and-the-hand).

Following federal specifications, walk/dont walk signals were exchanged for pictograms, commonly referred to as the man and the hand, [beginning in 1999 (though some escaped replacement until 2006!)](https://forgotten-ny.com/2006/06/walk-dont-run-possibly-the-final-dont-walkwalk-signals-in-nyc/). Initially derided as another way New York was coming to look more like every other U.S. city, our ever inventive citizenry have [made the man and hand our own](http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/11022/). Unlike [other cities worldwide](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/brief-history-stoplight-180968734/), our alterations have so far been unofficial - another example of New Yorkers always [going their own way](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/01/savvy-new-yorkers-guide-to-jaywalking.html).

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