A block of Dyker Heights in the middle of December, after dark, with snow coming down: detached brick and stone houses on their lawns, every roofline, column, window and tree wrapped in thousands of lights, toy soldiers, nutcrackers, snowmen, angels and reindeer on the lawns, a display that turns, tour buses at the kerb and a crowd on the sidewalk with hot cups. The New Yorkers hang in lit gilt frames on the fences and lawn displays and on the garage doors, facing the sidewalk with everything else.
Dyker Heights was laid out by Walter Loveridge Johnson from October 1895 and built between 1895 and 1902 as a speculative luxury housing development; since the 1940s it has had a majority Italian American population, and by 2020 its Asian population had passed its white population. Nobody agrees on which December the Christmas lights began: newspaper reports and the tours of the area suggest sometime in the 1980s. Early on the two most noted homes stood on 84th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues, directly across from one another. In 1985 Lou Singer began running tours (Singer's Brooklyn) through the most elaborately lit parts of Bensonhurst, Canarsie, Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. Formally the lighting and decorations begin on the last Thursday of November, Thanksgiving, and stay up until the first days of January, with mid December the most visited.
Source · Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, Wikipedia ↗
The two rows of detached houses with their lawns and low iron fences, roof outlines and wrapped columns in white and coloured bulbs, bare trees spiralled in light, the toy soldiers at the gates, the nutcracker that turns, the reindeer that rock, the snowmen and the angels, the turning display, the tour bus that pulls in and lets its crowd out when you stand at the kerb, the snow on the lawns and in the air, and the bridge lights far off to the south. Mood: december, snow, every bulb on the block. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.