2023

The idea for this year’s card has been kicking around my brain since 2016. That was when it was first announced that the L train tunnel would be fully shut down for 15 months starting in April of 2019.

What’s the big deal? This New York City subway tunnel links North Brooklyn and Manhattan, running 1.5 miles beneath the East River. 225,000 people travel DAILY on the L train through this tunnel. And I was one of them. Shut this tunnel down and 225,000 of us suddenly find ourselves stranded on one side or the other of the East River.

I live in Manhattan and I work in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and with the L train running, you can get from Manhattan to Williamsburg in 5 minutes . Without the L train running, you’re looking at an hour by the time you figure out another way to cross the East River. This shut-down struck fear into the heart of anyone facing this daily commute. In July of 2016, just two months after this plan was announced, the New York Post newspaper ran with the headline, "2019 is the year Williamsburg dies."

Why the impending L train shut down? The tunnel through which it whizzes beneath the East River was badly damaged with floodwater in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy. The MTA had already started work on the outside of the tunnel in 2016 with the subway still running, but said they needed to completely shut down the L train to repair the inside of the tunnel itself.

Construction crews became a constant sight at the Bedford Avenue L-train stop at the corner near my office. Every time I went outside, I’d see swarms of workers in their neon-yellow reflective vests, many with hand-held STOP signs mounted on wooden posts managing the traffic. My holiday-card-making-brain was awakened.

I hadn’t made a card since 2004 and while I’d been telling myself every year that that year, I’d make one again, and I had many ideas for doing so, I’d not yet put any of those ideas into action. With scenes of construction sites now becoming part of my daily commute, my creative juices were flowing and I started photographing any construction site I came across all over the city to get a sense of the outfits the workers were wearing and the size of the STOP signs. I even asked one of the workers if I could measure the sign so I could replicate it exactly, except with HAPPY HOLIDAYS on it instead (FYI: 18” x 18”, 77” from ground to top of sign).

Meanwhile, the years went on. 2016. 2017. 2018. I didn’t make the holiday card and no one seemed to be able to figure out how to fix this tunnel without completely shutting down the train for 15 months. Many people moved out of Williamsburg in 2017 and 2018 as the closure in 2019 loomed. By August of 2018, housing prices in Williamsburg were down and housing vacancies were 25% higher than just the year prior.

At the 11th hour, in January of 2019 -- after 3 years of L-train-commuters’ collective dread and just three-months before the shutdown was slated to happen -- it was announced by then-Governor Cuomo that the L train would not have to completely shut down after all. Through an “innovative, high tech and as-yet-untested method,” the L train tunnel would stay operational Monday through Friday and then the trains would be stopped and the tunnel repaired on nights and weekends. This was pre-pandemic (and pre-pre the eventual fall of Governor Cuomo’s political star). Our mayor at the time was Bill De Blasio and it was common knowledge in local politics that Cuomo and De Blasio didn’t get along. It was speculated that Cuomo swooping in at the last minute to rescue this situation was both to deliver a blow to De Blasio (who hadn’t come up with any solution all this time) while also attempting to gain Cuomo some national recognition for a rumored 2020 presidential run.

Thankfully, the L train didn’t shut down. People who had pre-emptively moved out of Williamsburg were angry that they moved for no reason. Those of us who had no commuting backup plan whatsoever (like me!) were relieved and life went on.

But that’s all old news now. It’s 2023. So why this construction scene for this year’s card?

I usually have a few ideas rolling around when it comes to making my card and I just wait for one of them to bubble up to the top. And this one did. It had never gone away despite the L-train repairs being long completed and forgotten. Plus for seven years now I’d been fixated on construction sites in the city wherever I saw them, imagining myself joining the crew with my sign in tow. I also liked that it was relatively simple (costume and prop-wise) and that the background of the city was the real star. After coming through the pandemic in New York City, it felt right to shine a light on the city that had weathered that terrible storm and come through it all.


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THE MAKING OF:

This time I wasn’t creating a scene, I was stepping into one. On one hand, that’s simpler – I just need my costume and my props. On the other hand, it’s more challenging because I don’t have control of the background action at all.

First stop – the sign. I found a company that would make a custom “STOP” sign with any wording I wanted. I ordered my HAPPY HOLIDAYS sign (pole not included!) which arrived within days. I brought the sign to a local hardware store in Williamsburg to figure out how to mount it on some sort of pole. Despite walking in about 15 minutes before closing time, an amazing worker there immediately saw the fun in this caper and personally stayed past closing time to afix it to a PVC pole gratis.

Next stop – the photographer. I called up Geoffrey Croft to enlist him once again to take the photo – and, bonus!, it turned out he had a couple of hard hats, reflective vests, and a hoodie left behind by his niece’s ex-boyfriend which would work perfectly under the vest. I bought a few more reflective vests to have as choices so I could make sure I matched the look of whatever construction site I ended up using.

And then I scouted locations. I was walking and citibiking up and down Lexington Avenue, 3rd Avenue, Madison, Park, 14th Street, 34th Street. I was looking for a construction site with orange cones and barrels which was jutting out into part of the street, thus necessitating flaggers with their “STOP” signs.

I found a very active construction site on 56th and Lexington which was teeming with workers and all kinds of STOP and SLOW signs being held up. I asked to speak to the supervisor of the site who eventually came out to talk to me and I explained that I wanted to bring my own sign and blend in with their workers for my holiday card. He said it was fine for me to come, “but if we are mixing cement, just don’t get in the way.”

On the morning that we showed up to take the photograph, I approached one of the women working there who was wearing a hard hat and holding a stop sign and told her that I was there to take this photo and that I'd spoken to the supervisor already. She said, “Okay, let me just tell somebody you're here” and then she turned around and yelled “SAFETY!.” Immediately, another woman in a hard hat appeared. Once I told her that I’d already spoken to the supervisor, we essentially had free rein to create.

That first woman I’d spoken to was named Toi and she was amazing. She made sure my outfit looked correct. She offered me one of their orange flags to hold and, when she could, she’d stand where we’d ask her to in order to get her STOP sign in the frame as well. She was in on the hijinks, for sure.

This set up was challenging because all of the action was behind me so I couldn’t tell what was going on. Geoff, the photographer, had brought a friend Victoria along and I’d brought Dave along and both were extremely helpful at pointing out when something good was about to happen behind me – a city bus or a yellow cab was coming, or lots of construction workers were gathering to buy their lunch from the woman delivering homemade food in a cooler, or a truck was pulling up to drop some huge piece of building material off and a crane was swooping in to pick it up. When Dave and Victoria weren’t acting as lookouts, they were enlisted as extras and just kept walking back and forth and back and forth behind me any time Geoff was photographing.

With all that in place, it’s go time! One problem… I'm a terrible actress. I know this about myself but I forget every time until the camera is going. So now we have all the elements happening -- the city in the background, the bus coming, the cab pulled up to the intersection, the other construction workers holding up their stop signs, Dave and Victoria as pedestrians behind me -- the dance is happening and then I’m stricken: Where do I look? What's my expression? How do I fake-direct traffic? Am I putting my hand out? Am I not putting my hand out? How emphatically am I putting my hand out? Do I look bored like the flaggers usually look bored? In the end, lots of the photos we got have this fantastic tableau unfolding behind me and I have some goofy expression on my face.

Toward the end of our time at the site, one of the construction workers asked me, “Where are these pictures going to come out?” Sensing an opening, I said, “Do you want to be in it?” He said, “No, everybody here knows I'm not in pictures. But where's it going to come out?” I said, “Oh, it's just for me. I'm just sending them out to my friends and family.” And with a slight bit of disappointment he said, “Oh, it's not gonna come out in a magazine in Europe??”

I never want the shoot to be over once it starts. I could go on and on and on. Try this angle. Try that angle. We could have been there all day and I would have been happy. It’s creative. People are having fun watching us. Just seeing a stop sign that says “Happy Holidays” makes people on the street smile. But it’s also an active construction site and when I’d spoken to the supervisor of the site to get permission to be there, he said, “You’re going to be fast, right? Like in and out, right?”

Once Geoff assured me that “we got it,” I reluctantly came out of the middle of the construction scene and stepped onto the nearby sidewalk. To celebrate the moment, we asked a passerby to take a group photo of the photographer Geoff, our helpers Dave and Victoria and me. Just then a tourist stops and says to me, “Can I get a picture with you too?” And so I posed with my sign, still in full construction costume, with this tourist and her family. I knew if I didn’t cover the sign up, I could be there all morning posing for photos. So I put a trash bag over the sign (which is how I traveled up there via subway without attracting attention) and drifted back into the streets of NYC in anonymity.


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THE EPILOGUE:

I was feeling so proud of myself for how I was chugging along with this project. Photos taken early December, prints and custom rubber stamps made mid-December, hand-coloring started late December. I was on track to be able to send out my cards in early January – astounding in my world! One last piece to complete was to update this website with this year’s card. Last year, my friend Rachel had scanned my past cards with her high-quality scanner in order to upload the images onto this website. I’d asked her to do the same with this year’s card as well so I could add them in too.

It was 5pm on January 11th and it was a dark and stormy night – punishing cold rain coming down steadily with howling high speed winds. I got a phone call as I was leaving my apartment to head to Williamsburg to meet up with Rachel to do the scanning. Absorbed in conversation as I readied myself to leave my apartment, I grabbed the manila envelope with all the photos I had hand-colored thus far. This was my treasure chest – about 20 cards that represented probably about 40 hours of me figuring out my technique for hand-coloring. Some were done with photo oils applied with q-tips. Some were sprayed with a matte fixative, some sprayed with a different textured fixative. Some were colored with photo pencils. Some with a combo of oils and pencils. All were expressions of my artistic endeavors and once the website was complete, they were to be the first twenty cards to be sent out. I put this manila envelope inside of a plastic bag to protect it from the rain and then put that inside of a black fabric tote bag. I walked out the door while still talking on the phone.

I was carrying an umbrella, my phone, and the plain black tote bag. Absorbed in conversation, I kept postponing getting on the L train to Williamsburg because I could keep talking if I kept walking more. “I’ll just walk to the next stop” I’d say to myself. Then at that next stop, I’d decide to walk to the following one, and so on. Instead of getting on at the closest stop at 14th Street and 6th Avenue, I kept walking east along 14th Street along the L train route, until I got to the last stop in Manhattan. I finally got off the phone and got onto the L train at 1st Avenue.

I was only on the L-train for one stop – from Manhattan to Brooklyn, underneath the East River -- through the very tunnel that had inspired this card in the first place.

Well, the L train giveth and the L train taketh away. Because somewhere between leaving my apartment in Manhattan around 5pm, walking along 14th Street, getting on the L-train for 5 minutes and meeting up with Rachel at 6pm in Williamsburg, the bag was gone. Gone! Poof!! It seemed to have vanished into thin air. And with it, all of my completed hand-colored creations thus far.

I was sure I must have left it at the falafel place where I met Rachel that evening – but it was not there. I retraced all of my steps in the battering rain and wind, even checking trash cans along the route in case someone found it and threw it away.

It was a very dark night and I was scouring the roads for a black bag on wet streets that were littered with broken black umbrellas and black trash bags awaiting pickup by sanitation workers. I not only retraced all my steps in Williamsburg, I also retraced my whole walk along 14th Street in Manhattan. I arrived home at 11pm, sopping wet, freezing cold, exhausted and empty-handed. My step counter registered 16,293 steps.

There are certainly far worse things that could have happened – and while the creative energy captured in the lost cards is not re-capturable, I certainly am able to and will make new ones. It’s just that energetically, it was a setback.

When I send out my first set of cards, and having them finally land in the receiver’s hands, they become portals to the outside world for me – a bridge from the ideas inside my head to the tangibleness of the card you’re holding in your hands. And the feedback I receive from those first cards energizes me and keeps me going to continue to hand-color and rubber-stamp and create and send out the rest. So in that respect, having lost my first batch, the bridge had to be rebuilt. The portal was temporarily out of reach and I lost momentum. Even though all the elements were in place, after losing those cards it felt like I was starting over completely again. I am slowly but surely finding my way back to the project. If you’re holding a card and it’s February or March, it’s still a victory in my book!

The good news is, a big lesson was handed to me and I received it loud and clear. I had been trying to do too many things all at the same time and was so inattentive and distracted that I somehow managed to lose this incredibly precious-to-me batch of completed cards. With the trend of picking a word or phrase to represent the new year, after that experience, I have chosen “Be Present.” And so, I wish you all a happy and healthy 2024 filled with many moments of being purely present and plugged in to the now.

Xo Danya