If it seems insignificant in the bigger picture that’s because it is insignificant. But as the torrent of bad headlines morphs into depressing acceptance of The New Reality I consider it no crime to distract oneself with minutiæ. In that spirit let’s scrutinize a piece of Smart City road wart I’ve looked at before: One of the unknown quantity of plywood pylons left to rot by CityBridge, the consortium responsible for the LinkNYC program.

What happens when one of these things sits on a sidewalk for over a year? It deteriorates. These wood husks, intended to signal that a LinkNYC kiosk is on its way, litter innumerable sidewalks around New York. I’ve spotted nine or ten of them, meaning there have to be significantly more than that. Some, like this one at 61st Street and First Avenue, have started to fall to pieces, exposing what they are meant to obscure. This one is well over a year old, though I don’t recall when first I spotted it.

In this case the wood structure obscured the beginnings of a LinkNYC kiosk’s foundational innards, at least I think that’s what this mess of wires and bolts represents. It does not look the same as the more robust framework seen in this posting from 2016, but I don’t know what else it could be.

Had I noticed the sticker with the barcode near the top of this photo I would have tried to get more detail.

Eventually the sheets of plywood which make up this pylon will fall to the ground, leaving splinters and exposed nails, like this one, for all to trip over. To think this mess replaced a bank of two full functional payphones.

This structure covers what appears to be a kiosk foundation, but in some cases they obscure remnants of a payphone’s last remaining piece, as seen in this story from last year. A pylon initially did cover the payphone’s sharp-edged base. Somehow that pylon got removed, leaving this potentially dangerous remnant of a payphone enclosure’s base.

Until this plywood structure on 61st Street disintegrates entirely to dust or otherwise gets removed it will continue to attract graffiti and rogue advertising. In this case Ginjan Brothers took over the surfaces of the pylon to advertise its ginger beverage. Without an actual LinkNYC kiosk to serve up ads I guess something had to give.

Note the working LinkNYC kiosk across the street, because every stretch of sidewalk needs as many of these machines as zoning rules will allow.