Jackson Heights whodunit: Where's that Scrabble sign?
The beloved Jackson Heights Scrabble sign is missing. (Photo via phantom xtl on Flickr)
It’s green, it’s playful, and it gives Jackson Heights another bit of distinctive charm.
But the 35th Avenue street sign that’s marked with Scrabble scoring has been missing for at least a month, and no one seems to know why, or even who’s responsible for the sign in the first place.
Reports of the missing sign, which denotes the street where Alfred Mosher Butts invented the board game, first popped up on the Jackson Heights Life blog in late May. Residents were sad, and, being a Scrabble fan myself, I felt their pain.
So I rang up Jackson Heights Beautification Group, hoping someone there might have some insight. That was a no-go; no one there was even aware the sign was missing.
Next, I called up Ted Timbers at the Department of Transportation. He said he had no record of the Scrabble sign, but suggested I call the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The commission, however, also had no record of the sign, said Lauren Charles, the assistant to the LPC’s executive director .
The sign, interestingly, is brown, which the city uses to denote landmarked neighborhoods.
Nevertheless, the hunt continues, and I’ve got a call out to the Jackson Heights Community Board to see if they can help me out.
As Timbers said, “This is part of the great bureaucracy that is New York City government.”
If you know anything about the sign's whereabouts, let us know!
-- Megan Stride
Comments (2)
Thank you for looking into this! I hope we find the scrabble sign soon! It's one of my favorite things to show visitors to my neighborhood.
I also miss the sign. I've lived here all my life, but only learned Scrabble after college, and then just a year or two later learned (via the signage) it was invented in my neighborhood.
The only thing I wonder is if whoever took it put it at a different corner, maybe with a triple word score?