Let me tell you something about Dumbo. I know Dumbo. I delivered dry cleaning to Dumbo in 1987 when it was still warehouses and broken glass and nobody was taking pictures of nothing. Now it's a whole situation. Tour buses. Influencers. Couples standing in the middle of Washington Street at high noon waiting for the bridge to line up perfect in the frame while actual human beings with groceries are trying to get home. The residents have had it, and they are going guerrilla.
What that means, practically speaking: signs. Planted foot traffic barriers. Neighbors collectively parking their cars to break up the congregation zones. One resident, according to reporting by Curbed, draped herself over a bench for forty-five minutes just to keep the shot from being usable. That is commitment. That is a woman who has heard one too many tripods click open outside her window at six in the morning. The broader pattern is the same one you see in every neighborhood that got discovered — the residents become extras in someone else's backdrop, and eventually the extras start ad-libbing lines that weren't in the script.
Here is where I have to come clean about my cousin Paulie and the truck. Paulie had an idea — I will not say it was my idea, because it was not my idea, it was entirely Paulie's idea and I merely said it sounded reasonable — to rent out premium parking spots along the Washington Street corridor to photographers who wanted the bridge shot without the crowd interference. Twenty bucks a spot, the truck as a rolling visual anchor, a laminated sign that said “Certified Photo Zone — Congestion Managed.” We had seven spots mapped. We had the sign laminated. The truck was borrowed from Paulie's brother-in-law who runs a tile business in Canarsie and does not know the truck was in Brooklyn on a Tuesday.
The point is the city is not wrong to look at Dumbo and see a revenue question. Tourism in the five boroughs generates billions. What it does not generate is any relief for the family on the third floor of a walk-up on Front Street who cannot get a moving truck to the curb because forty tourists are debating aperture settings in the street. The neighborhood's character — what made it worth photographing in the first place — is being consumed by the appetite for the photograph. That is not a new story. That is the whole story of New York for the last thirty years.
Some residents want the city to look at pedestrian flow studies, rerouting, maybe some honest signage about what Washington Street actually is versus what Instagram says it is. That seems right to me. Something official. Something with teeth.
As for Paulie's parking scheme: the tile-business brother-in-law found out about the truck on Wednesday. The laminated sign is currently in a recycling bin on Atlantic Avenue. We did not collect a single twenty dollars. The scheme is dead, the truck is back in Canarsie, and Paulie owes his brother-in-law a full tank of premium plus a box of those cannoli from Court Street. Some angles just do not pay out.