#newspaper boxes

In the old days—the days of the sidewalk shoeshine, the days of the pay phone—a New Yorker could buy an evening edition of the Times or the Post from a metal news box and read it on the subway home. No push notifications involved. But history has a way of repeating itself. Somehow, baggy jeans are back, and mullets, too. And news boxes are showing up on street corners again. A few years ago, Mitch Anzuoni, a self-proclaimed multimedia mogul who runs a small press called Inpatient, started placing old newspaper boxes around town. Inside: posters, books, zines, erotica. Cost: a quarter. “I publish anything!” Anzuoni said the other day, on the sidewalk near his office, in Boerum Hill. “Newspapers, underground newspapers, stuff I find on the Internet.” He read from one of the offerings, “a book of mind-control patents that are really crazy!”: “This invention pertains to influencing the nervous system of a subject by a weak externally applied magnetic field with a frequency near 1/2 hz.” 

 Anzuoni, who wore dirty white sneakers and carried a waterproof backpack (“I work in books, man! Water is the enemy!”), was loading a recently acquired news box into the back of his girlfriend’s Lexus S.U.V. “This is the Inpatient Express,” he said, of the car. He pointed to the news box, which he had bought on eBay, for two hundred and fifty dollars. “Here is the new guy, a beautiful Facebook blue. I drove out to New Jersey to get it.” 

Since curbside newspaper boxes don't get a lot of action selling papers anymore, a new urban intervention puts them to use as something else: convenient compost bins.

"The boxes are so commonplace in the city, and I wanted to subtly tweak them to make people stop, look twice, and think about what they are seeing versus what they expect to see," says designer Debbie Ullman, who created the New York Compost Box Project.

Placed next to community gardens, the boxes serve as a place for anyone to recycle food waste as they walk by. "The idea is to make it possible for busy New Yorkers to drop their scraps whenever it's convenient for them, 24/7."

(via What To Do With Old Newspaper Boxes? Make Them Streetside Compost Bins)