What a bunch of knit pickers
City orders W. Village trees stripped of festive ‘sweaters’
The city won’t stand for these tree huggers.
Parks Department bureaucrats have demanded the removal of nearly two dozen festive hand-knit sweaters wrapped around trees on Christopher Street.
The decree has angered West Villagers who say the threads, which sprang up in November, have boosted business and increased foot traffic and are just plain cute.
“It’s outrageous that something that brings so much happiness and positivity is being stripped away,” said Bobby Najera, who works at a French eatery on Christopher and Bleecker streets.
“I don’t like the city telling anyone what do with their art,” he added.
Najera said the colorful adornments, also called tree cozies, are a big draw.
“They attract tons of customers and people often request to sit in the dining room by the windows just to look at them and take pictures,” he said. “They’re breathing life back into this area.”
Others report an uptick in business along the stretch of dressed-up trees from Bleecker to Hudson streets.
“When people look down and see how colorful and bright the block is, they naturally want to walk down,” said Jason Ramirez, 21, who works at Jonty Jacobs, a seller of South African beef products.
“I have people coming here all the time saying, ‘I love those. Where did they come from?’ ”
The sweaters were fitted around the trunks of 21 street trees over Thanksgiving weekend.
The mastermind was Holly Boardman, a local merchant who came up with the idea of “yarn bombing” the trees after noticing close to 10 vacant storefronts languishing along Christopher Street.
“The street was so depressing and dreary that I wanted to do something to brighten it up,” said Boardman, 49, who owns the Musée Lingerie boutique.
So Boardman asked her 77- year-old aunt, Polly Larkin, to crochet a design just for the tree in front of her shop.
But soon, Larkin was knitting 1,888 squares and $600 worth of yarn to adorn the entire stretch on Christopher Street.
The Parks Department found out about the sweaters and told Boardman last week that they needed to come down by early March.
A Parks spokesman said the sweaters trap moisture that, with prolonged exposure, can harm the trees’ bark, allowing fungus and parasites to grow and forcing it to leak sap.
Boardman seemed resigned to the fate of the needlework.
“I cherish the time it was up,” she explained, “so all is not lost.”