The Found Art of the Stoop-Sale Sign

The institution of the New York City stoop arose during Peter Stuyvesant’s tenure as director of New Amsterdam, when an élite would gain the parlor level of his townhouse by climbing stone steps to a platform faced by double doors. A certain sort of Greenwich Village elder will tell you at length about the many stoop rituals that have evolved in the years since—about sitting, sweeping, ball games, street prostitution, social regulation, all of it—while wagging a Jane Jacobs paperback excavated from a giveaway pile of foxed volumes. My area of interest is the stoop sale, which I like to imagine first occurred around 1650 and featured sportive haggling over a gently used beaver-felt hat.