It is a neighborhood Christmas display with New York attitude: big, brash, loud and over-the-top. Blazing lights, giant toy soldiers, angels, snowmen, wise men, Santas and piped-in Sinatra caroling form an all-out barrage on the senses from nearly every house in the heart of Brooklyn’s Dyker Heights neighborhood, an annual extravaganza that draws thousands of tourists every evening by the car and busload.
However, all of it has some residents just wishing for a silent night.
“As pretty as it can be, it’s difficult,” said Linda Rebmann, 72, who has lived in Dyker Heights all her life and has only an unlit cranberry wreath on her home. “It’s a little out of hand. It’s gotten to be a bit much.”
Photo: AP
Nobody is talking about pulling the plug on the displays, which are still a source of neighborhood pride. However, there has been extra grumbling this season, especially after some parking spots usually used by residents were blocked off for rows of tour buses.
“This close to Christmas you can’t walk. It’s like Manhattan,” said Joyce Arpino, 55, a resident for three decades.
She said she stopped decorating inside her windows because gawkers would peer inside and rap the glass. Tourists used to park in front of her house or even in her driveway until she set out some orange traffic cones.
Photo: AP
“I don’t want to sound like a Scrooge, but it’s horrible,” she said.
To that, residents like 30-year-old Vinny Privitelli respond: Lighten up.
This year, he spent all of last month and thousands of dollars to install strings of red and white lights on his roof and around every window and adorn his lawn with reindeer, a trio of dancing elves and a nativity scene. Privitelli admits part of the fun is trying to outdo his neighbors, some of whom hire professionals to do their displays. And he has no problem with the throngs of visitors.
“It’s nice to see them enjoying it, that’s what we get out of it,” he said. “Everything in the news is negative, so at least we get one positive thing.”
Around the corner, a crowd of 35 people stopped at another house, where every inch of the stoop and patio was packed with glowing nutcrackers, snowmen, reindeer and plastic angels.
On another lawn, a 3.96m-tall, animatronic Santa Claus sat between a pair of giant toy soldiers and two carousels ablaze with lights. It was all so bright that the selfie-snapping crowds did not need to use a flash.
“Let’s go folks. You can’t hold up traffic,” an officer inside a police van shouted at drivers stopped in the street.
“I like it when they take pictures,” said Angela Peralta, whose display includes a candy cane arch over the driveway, a “Merry Christmas” banner and a waving, inflatable snowman. “People are very respectful. They say it’s beautiful.”
The light displays became a neighborhood activity in the 1980s, and buses began bringing in tourists from Manhattan about a decade ago. Some bus tours play up the area’s Italian-American heritage, including stops at a nearby bakery for cannolis and hot chocolate.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS