Your Bicentennial Memories Are Here: The Year of an Unusual Public Art Project

Every town in America painted them. Almost none survive. The story of the Bicentennial fire hydrants.

It’s the spring of 1976, and somewhere on your block, a grown adult is on their knees in front of a fire hydrant with a paintbrush and a very specific vision of Betsy Ross.

Maybe it was the Jaycees. Maybe it was the Cub Scouts. Maybe it was your weird uncle who took it upon himself. All over America that year, ordinary people decided that the most patriotic thing they could do for their country’s 200th birthday was paint the johnny pump on the corner to look like a Revolutionary War soldier, or Uncle Sam, or a Minuteman.

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Fifty years later, almost all of them are gone. But not quite all.

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Photos assembled by the author from Firehydrants.org (http://www.firehydrant.org/pictures/bicentennial.html).

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Here is the thing nobody planned and nobody coordinated and nobody put in a federal memo: in 1976, an enormous number of American towns painted their fire hydrants.

There was no national program. There was no committee. The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration in Washington was busy approving wagon trains and tall ships and commemorative coins. The fire hydrants were not their idea. The fire hydrants were everybody else’s idea, all at once, in thousands of towns at the same time, and that is somehow the most American thing about the whole story.

In Burbank, California, the city went all-in. Hydrants up and down the streets were painted to look like Revolutionary War figures — soldiers standing rigid at attention, red coats and blue coats, tricorn hats sculpted out of the iron caps. The Associated Press came out and took pictures. “The city of Burbank, Calif., plugs the nation’s bicentennial,” the wire copy read, in a pun the AP photographer almost certainly thought was the cleverest thing he’d written all year.

In Shawnee, Kansas, they painted them. In Kings Mountain, North Carolina, they painted them. In Norwalk and Cerritos and small towns in Ohio and big neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In Baltimore, somebody named Adam Paul has been documenting the survivors there for decades. People sent their kids out to pose next to the finished ones for the family photo album.

If you were a child in 1976, you might remember the riding-around game. Spotting them out the window of the station wagon. (You weren’t strapped in, of course. Nobody was strapped in. You were just rolling around in the way-back, free-range, hollering when you saw a good one.) Some were folk-art masterpieces. Some were enthusiastic and bad. Some were Betsy Ross with a face only her mother could love. They were all somebody’s, and that was the point.

They were not built to last. Most were repainted within a year or two — fire-hydrant red, regulation yellow, whatever the municipal code required. Time and weather and water department crews took care of the rest.

But here is the small miracle. In New York City, a writer named Kevin Walsh, who runs a website called Forgotten New York, has spent twenty-plus years documenting the ones that are still standing. He calls them Bicentennial johnny pumps. Most of the survivors are the old “fat” hydrants, the high-pressure models from the 1910s that the city kept installing into the 1970s, before switching to a streamlined design in the 1980s. The newer thin hydrants replaced almost all of them. The fat ones got pulled.

Almost all of them. A few are still out there. Walsh found them on Beekman Street in Port Richmond, on Decker Avenue with a star detail still visible on the crown, in Eastchester, in the Bronx, on a few quiet corners of Staten Island. Faded. Repainted, sometimes badly. Still there.

Every fire hydrant in New York City has its installation date stamped near the base. Walsh figured out you can verify them. If the date reads 1976 or earlier and the paint underneath the regulation yellow has any red and blue in it at all, you are almost certainly looking at a survivor.

Fifty years. A few coats of municipal paint. The same iron, the same corner, the same neighborhood that has changed around it three or four times over.

Almost nobody knows they’re there. The kids who painted them are in their sixties now. The adults who supervised are mostly gone. The wire photos are in archives. But the hydrants — a handful of them, in a few specific places — are still on the corner where somebody put them in 1976.

If you remember a hydrant in your hometown, it almost certainly isn’t there anymore. But it was. And somebody painted it on purpose. And you saw it. And fifty years later, you still remember.

That counts.

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DID YOU KNOW?

• The Burbank, California, hydrant project made the AP wire on April 23, 1975 over a year before the actual Bicentennial. Some towns started painting almost as soon as the planning began, and by the summer of 1976, the phenomenon had spread coast to coast with no national coordination at all.

• In Baltimore, a man named Adam Paul once documented the survivors on an early personal website. The page is gone now. When he died, the website did too. The hydrants might be too. Even the record of the record is disappearing.

• NYC fire hydrants have their installation date stamped near the base. If you live in New York and want to play detective, the date is right there. Anything reading 1976 or earlier is a candidate.

• The Spirit of ‘76 hydrants were almost entirely a grassroots effort. No federal funds. No program. Just Jaycees, Cub Scouts, garden clubs, civic associations, and regular people who decided their corner needed a Betsy Ross.

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YOUR TURN

Did your hometown paint its fire hydrants in 1976?

Do you remember a specific one — the corner, the design, who painted it, what it looked like?

And here’s the long shot: does one still exist where you live? We’d love to see a photo. Reply to this email or post it in the comments. Let’s see how many survivors we can find.

—Denyse

The Bicentennial Memory Project

Have a 1976 memory you’ve been carrying around? We’d love to read it. Send it to bicentennialmemoryproject@gmail.com — a paragraph or ten pages, polished or rough, it doesn’t matter. Every memory belongs in the archive.