The hottest items on sale in New York City this summer might not be from a hyped-up clothing brand or a bakery looking to go viral on TikTok. They’re instead being released by a more staid organization, best known for filling potholes and painting lines on roads: the city's Department of Transportation.
The department on Monday announced it would start selling popular street signs in limited quantities every month, and declared “sign drops are the new sneaker drops.”
“Now you can own an official piece of New York City: authentic commemorative street signs hand made by DOT,” Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said in a statement.
The first of the signs — for Christopher Street/Stonewall Place — hit the NYC City Store early on Monday for $75 each. The DOT made only 50 available, limiting them to one purchase per customer. They sold out in less than three hours.
The release of the signs was timed to coincide with the start of Pride Month. In 1989, the area of Christopher Street in Greenwich Village was given the honorary name of Stonewall Place to commemorate the local bar, the Stonewall Inn, that became the epicenter of the country's LGBTQ+ rights movement two decades earlier. Back then, the watering hole was regularly raided by police, prompting an uprising among the city’s LGBTQ+ community in 1969 that's now widely remembered as the “Stonewall Riots.”
The city’s online store asks prospective buyers to submit their email addresses to be notified if more of the signs come back in stock. DOT representatives did not say if more of the signs would go on sale but noted that the department is being careful not to overload workers in its sign shop who make the city’s other traffic signs.
Another commemorative sign will drop next month, and officials are asking the public to weigh in on which street the city should feature.
