Doing the Barnes Dance

Meyer Lansky, the Secretary of the Treasury for Organized Crime who had a distinctive Lower East Side Yiddish accent and cadence to his speech, liked to meet other people who sounded like he did. Meyer passed away in Miami in 1983, but would stop by and talk to people who he detected sounded like he did from the old neighborhood. The sound of their voices made him homesick.

When he heard what he detected was New Yawk talk from people outside  a café or inside a restaurant, he would like to chat them up and tell them how nice it was to meet people who sounded like he did. Not everyone in South Florida came from New York.

Transplanted New Yorkers are everywhere. Whether it was true or not, I seem to remember someone saying in the 1950s that 1 out of 8 people in the United States could claim they were born in Brooklyn. This does seem remarkable, but possible nonetheless considering that Brooklyn has always been the most populated borough.

As if to further prove the New York origins of people, consider the person I know who moved to a nice town in Western Connecticut. They were a lifelong New Yorker, but have recently settled in a picturesque New England town.

A recent visit to see them resulted in one of those stories that just had to be a blog posting. The town has a busy main street with traffic lights and blinking WALK DON'T WALK  icons. Some places in New England have zebra-style crosswalks in the street with instructions to drivers to let pedestrians in the crosswalk cross the street. As a New Yorker, I know I'm never comfortable with the honor system of expecting drivers to slow and stop.

But this town's main street is a little busy, so they have directional signals at the corners for the pedestrians to press to alert the computers that someone wants to cross the street. An automated voice tells them to WAIT. Such a system can be found in a lot of communities. There is one here where I live in Nassau County. It's state of the art.

The story goes that after crossing the street in somewhat a cater-corner fashion, not adhering to automated WALK icons, my friend was met on the other side of the street by a man who made a comment.

Whether they actually saw the jaywalking transplanted New Yorker or not, they commented to them that, "you don't see anyone jaywalk around here." My friend replied that they just moved into the area from New York. The man explained that he was from Bayside, Queens. near "Frannie Lew."

Anyone from Queens knows that "Frannie Lew" is shorthand for Francis Lewis Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare. Francis Lewis Boulevard is named in honor of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Thus, two transplanted New Yorkers had a momentary bond over jaywalking, something they both knew something about. What are the chances of that? Pretty good, since Transplanted New Yorkers are everywhere.

But what is jaywalking? I always knew it was a reference to crossing a street without paying attention to traffic signals. Crossing between parked cars is a favorite type of jaywalking, as is just plain not waiting for the WALK indicator or scooting past an expired WALK indicator to get to the other side of  the street. New Yorkers like to keep moving, even if it imperils their life. Okay, but how did it come  to be called jaywalking?

Turns out it has nothing to do with the gait of an imagined blue jay crossing a street. Google tells us Jay refers to an un-lawabiding rube who drives his wagon on the  wrong side of the road, or any pedestrian who doesn't adhere to traffic rules. Guilty.

Being the sometime New York City historian that I am, I remember when Henry Barnes became traffic commissioner in NYC. He came to New York in 1962 and served under two mayors, Robert Wagner and John Lindsay. His 1968 obituary tells us he passed away passed away at 61 on the job, suffering another one of his heart attacks.

Apparently he was a bit of a pugnacious (the obit says irascible) guy, but did introduce many features into the flow of New York  City traffic that are still in existence today. I didn't know it was he who made Fifth, Madison, and Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue) one way thoroughfares, much to what was then everyone's displeasure.

What I remember most about Barnes was that he introduced legal jaywalking at the intersection of Vanderbilt Avenue and 42nd Street by programming the WALK signs to simultaneously give pedestrians the right of way to cross Vanderbilt Avenue and 42nd Street at the same time.

The intersection is right outside Grand Central Terminal. Vanderbilt Avenue is a short block that flows north from 42nd Street to 45th Street. There is not a lot of traffic on Vanderbilt. I think it is a two-way street. 

This innovation in pedestrian crossing was tried in Australia before New York. It was derided on the evening news and was nicknamed the Barnes Dance. I think the signals to this day allow the WALK signs at this intersection to give the two-way right of way.

New Yorkers are so oblivious to traffic signs that I doubt anyone crossing that intersection today—whether jaywalking or not—realizes its history as the first legalized jaywalking in New York City.

Newspaper protocols in the 1960s required the reporter to give the exact address where something happened, Thus, when Barnes had his fatal heart attack at work we were told it was at Traffic headquarters at 28-11 Bridge Plaza North, in Long Island City, Queens, (still there) hard by the Queens entrance to the bridge now known by three names depending on when you were born: The 59th Street Bridge; the Queensboro Bridge; The Ed Koch Bridge, named after a former, now deceased mayor.

Likewise, at the end of the obituary was learn not only the name of the funeral parlor where Henry Barnes was being waked, Frederick Funeral Home at 193rd Street and Northern Boulevard, Flushing (it's still there), but where Mr. Barnes lived: 79-33 215th Street, Bayside, Queens.

The Möbius Strip lives on. We're all connected. The man who stood on a Connecticut street corner and remarked that no one there jaywalks is from Bayside, and Henry Barnes lived in Bayside.

You can't make this up.

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