In the Union Square area of New York City - on 14th Street between Broadway and 4th Avenue, to be exact - there is a building with a row of fifteen huge numbers brightly illuminated and always on display. The digits on the left and right sides remain relatively constant, but as the eye moves toward the middle of the row, the digits are seen to be moving more and more rapidly from zero to nine in endless repetition.
There is no explanation given for what these numbers mean.
For many years I didn't know what they meant, if anything, and I finally decided out of frustration that it was merely "pretentious art". I thought it was just somebody's idea of a joke - how to drive everyone crazy by putting up randomly moving numbers that meant nothing.
Now it just so happens that if you're driving down Broadway you will inevitably hit red lights at both 17th Street, where Broadway and Union Square East melt into each other, and then again one block further down the road at 16th Street. From both of these vantage points you can easily see the numbers and, if you're a taxi driver, that will mean as years pass by that there will be a significant amount of time spent at both these places with nothing better to do than to look at the numbers until the light turns green.
And I guess that is why I eventually understood what the numbers meant. I wasn't trying to figure it out. It just hit me one day, as if by osmosis, after about ten years. I suddenly saw it and once I saw it there was no denying what it meant. It was indisputable, and it turns out it wasn't pretentious art after all.
Being armed with this revelation, I naturally wondered when stopped at these intersections with passengers in the cab if they knew what the numbers meant. I found that, even with passengers who lived in the general vicinity, that only about one in twenty knew it. And some of the others had completely incorrect assumptions, such as:
--the number of people in the world who have died of AIDS (not bothering to notice that the number on the building would be higher than the actual number of people in existence in the world).
--and, my favorite, the "amount of records sold in Virgin Records" (which until recently had occupied one of the stores beneath the numbers).
I noticed that passengers I enlightened were often quite grateful to learn the truth about the numbers as this turned out to be something they, too, had wondered about for years. This gratitude often translates into bigger tips, so I've probably made hundreds of dollars from this revelation.
So, you wanna try your luck?
Step right up, take a look at what we've got here. I took a two-minute video of the numbers. It's a little blurry at the beginning, but then it goes into focus and you can observe what the numbers are doing. Hopefully it won't take you ten years to figure it out!
If you give up, click on the "comments" at the bottom of this post. The answer is there.
There is no explanation given for what these numbers mean.
For many years I didn't know what they meant, if anything, and I finally decided out of frustration that it was merely "pretentious art". I thought it was just somebody's idea of a joke - how to drive everyone crazy by putting up randomly moving numbers that meant nothing.
Now it just so happens that if you're driving down Broadway you will inevitably hit red lights at both 17th Street, where Broadway and Union Square East melt into each other, and then again one block further down the road at 16th Street. From both of these vantage points you can easily see the numbers and, if you're a taxi driver, that will mean as years pass by that there will be a significant amount of time spent at both these places with nothing better to do than to look at the numbers until the light turns green.
And I guess that is why I eventually understood what the numbers meant. I wasn't trying to figure it out. It just hit me one day, as if by osmosis, after about ten years. I suddenly saw it and once I saw it there was no denying what it meant. It was indisputable, and it turns out it wasn't pretentious art after all.
Being armed with this revelation, I naturally wondered when stopped at these intersections with passengers in the cab if they knew what the numbers meant. I found that, even with passengers who lived in the general vicinity, that only about one in twenty knew it. And some of the others had completely incorrect assumptions, such as:
--the "national debt". This was a confusion with a different set of numbers that once flashed on a different sign on 6th Avenue around 44th Street. It showed the accumulating total of the national debt (and no one seemed to know exactly what that meant) and, if that didn't depress you enough, it also displayed "your family's share".
--the amount of time that has passed since the beginning of the millenium.--the number of people in the world who have died of AIDS (not bothering to notice that the number on the building would be higher than the actual number of people in existence in the world).
--and, my favorite, the "amount of records sold in Virgin Records" (which until recently had occupied one of the stores beneath the numbers).
I noticed that passengers I enlightened were often quite grateful to learn the truth about the numbers as this turned out to be something they, too, had wondered about for years. This gratitude often translates into bigger tips, so I've probably made hundreds of dollars from this revelation.
So, you wanna try your luck?
Step right up, take a look at what we've got here. I took a two-minute video of the numbers. It's a little blurry at the beginning, but then it goes into focus and you can observe what the numbers are doing. Hopefully it won't take you ten years to figure it out!
If you give up, click on the "comments" at the bottom of this post. The answer is there.
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And while you're wracking your brain, why not take a break to click here for Pictures From A Taxi?
