Lynne Truss, who wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves: the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is a woman after my own heart. She dreams of a grammar police force that would hunt down and arrest merchants with ungrammatical signs in their shops and others who also abuse the King’s English.
I have similiar peeves, in fact I dream of a tasteless and tacky police force. I’d send them right to East 86th Street to rescue the pear!
In the 1980s the gifted graphic artist Milton Glaser designed a wonderful giant pear for the facade of the Grand Union supermarket in my Yorkville neighborhood on 86th between 1st and 2nd. If you don’t know his name, you know his art – Milton Glaser created the iconic, psychodelic Bob Dylan album cover, the clever cover of the legendary Underground Gourmet restaurant guide, and also the “I (heart) NY” logo, among hundreds or maybe thousands of other images and designs. And recently, in his 80s, Glaser was commissioned to create the “ads” to be used at the client meetings on the new season of TV’s Mad Men. But alas, hear what’s happened to my pear!
Some time ago the Grand Union became a Gristedes and I noticed the pear was repainted. I liked the new supermarket and I thought the new pear color was indeed more pear-ish, so far so good. Then Gristedes decided to sell fresh flowers, also good. But an ugly bleacher-like structure was erected in front of the store to hold the flower bins which now abuts and dwarfs Glaser’s wonderful pear. Now if you’re walking east on 86th Street you can’t even see it. And sadder still, if you’re walking west you see the once delightful pear hanging there looking forlorn and forgotten, hemmed in by tacky paraphernalia.
I sure hope Milton Glaser doesn’t come to Yorkville to buy his flowers.
Dana Susan Lehrman
That is the most pitiful pear I've ever seen. Lost and alone with only Dana to defend it.
A friend in the neighborhood said the poor pear looks like a hanging victim after the box under him was kicked away!