Sneakers hanging from phone lines.

June 7, 2008 11:30 AM

When driving through the city, quite often, I see sneakers hanging from the telephone lines that run across the street. They usually are childrens size sneakers, that have been tied together with the laces, and apparently thrown up over the line. Why is this done?
posted by Chessbum to Society & Culture (25 answers total)

Urban legend has it that it signifies that drugs are available for purchase.
posted by tristeza at 11:34 AM on June 7, 2008

Lots of reasons. I don't think it has a clear origin.
posted by phunniemee at 11:39 AM on June 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

Here's the Wikipedia article on the subject. I was so sure there was an AskMe about this before, but I can't find it.
posted by pravit at 11:40 AM on June 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

What I heard was that it was a way for gangs to "mark" territory.
posted by Class Goat at 11:51 AM on June 7, 2008

This time of year, it is a celebration of school ending. It's quite fun to watch our students take 8-10 attempts to get their sneakers to stay on the telephone lines by the College!
posted by Susurration at 12:00 PM on June 7, 2008

I think at one point it was to mark gang territory, but not so much anymore. Incidentall, Converse brilliantly used this tradition for a marketing campaign - they tossed one stars over lines all over Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I assume the point was to make converse seem all Urban.
posted by lunasol at 12:12 PM on June 7, 2008

Shoe tossing seems to be popular with members of the army; I saw this a lot while living near Fort Bragg.
posted by PueExMachina at 12:15 PM on June 7, 2008

I've always heard it was a way to commemorate the dead.
posted by Smallpox at 12:21 PM on June 7, 2008

There are lots and lots of reasons cited for how the tradition got started, but none of them really make any sense. When I was a kid, the story was something along the lines of what tristeza and Class Goat said, but even then, those explanations didn't really make sense to me. Cops would figure that out pretty easily, wouldn't they? In any case, many of my friends threw their old shoes up there, just for the hell of it. What else are you going to do with a pair of sneakers once they've worn out? Judging from the way my friends behaved as kids, and the fact that they often seem to be kid's shoes, I'd say this is probably the reason for 90-99% of the shoes up there.
posted by ErWenn at 12:27 PM on June 7, 2008

Snopes also has a discussion of the practice.

I've heard the claims that the shoes mark gang territory or drug houses, but I suspect that those claims A) were never true, or B) are no longer true, or C) are regional. Otherwise, there is some serious invisible gang activity going down on my block, and Zupan's Market up the street is selling a shitload of organic crack.
posted by thinman at 12:29 PM on June 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

My nephew did this when he was about 15. I asked him why and he said it was because he could.
posted by bluesky43 at 12:29 PM on June 7, 2008

When I was a kid in Detroit, we did it just because it was more fun than just throwing worn-out sneakers in the trash.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 12:38 PM on June 7, 2008

Hell, yes. Some of my childhood friends did it just because they could, and because it seemed fun right then at that age. Heh.
posted by Iosephus at 12:38 PM on June 7, 2008

Yeah, I've heard all the urban legends too, but I strongly believe that however the practice began, it has evolved into a more long-lasting equivalent of jumping up to slap the top of a door frame, etc. Something that kids do because they can, and are please to find that they can. I wonder how frequently if ever the phone/power companies clean up the shoe detritus... I've never monitored a pair closely to see how long they last, but they seem to have a pretty decent lifetime up there.
posted by mumkin at 1:11 PM on June 7, 2008

It's something a teenager can do to make their mark on a public place and which (unlike graffiti) is likely to stay there for a while. (Most cities don't have "sneaker teams" that get called out every time a pair of shoes is spotted dangling from an overhead cable.)
posted by Lazlo at 1:12 PM on June 7, 2008

One of my friends once told me that he'd heard "when someone gets hit by a car their shoes fly off and go over the powerlines." Obviously ridiculous, but fun to think about for sure.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 1:28 PM on June 7, 2008

Weirdly enough, I just ran across this in one of the books from the "diary" thread a few days ago. This isn't shoes, but it shows kids have been throwing things over the lines since way back:

From The Real Diary of a Real Boy (p. 6, or search for the word "bolas"):

"Horse-chestnut bolas, calcu-
lated to revolve in opposite directions
with great velocity, by an up-and-
down motion of the holder's wrist;
also extensively used for the adorn-
ment of telegraph-wires,—there were
no telephones in those days,—and
the cause of great profanity amongst
linemen."
posted by MsMolly at 2:04 PM on June 7, 2008

I always read that it was done by someone who lost his virginity.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:13 PM on June 7, 2008

It was done by bullies where I grow up, they would basically tackle you, take your shoes and throw them up on the line. The good thing was when you went home with no shoes, you could show your parents where you lost them and scored some serious sympathy.
posted by pokeedog at 4:09 PM on June 7, 2008

Re how long they stay up -- I live in the Castro, and someone appropriately threw across the power lines outside our windows a pair of red sequinned "Dorothy" shoes. They lasted at least a year, but they're gone now.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 6:20 PM on June 7, 2008

When I was a kid in the late 60's we threw our sneakers on the wires when we got a new pair of sneakers. We all threw them between the same two telephone poles. There were dozens of pairs hanging there.
posted by a.mosquito.or.something at 6:20 PM on June 7, 2008

God where I grew up they also used toads. (I know how disgusting! Dead crusty toads dangling around everywhere. Yuk!) The other day I saw heaps of them (shoes not disgusting toads) just for blocks and blocks. I just gathered someone had discovered they were really good at it (I've heard it's hard to do) and so they were just showing off.

I like it. It always makes the place seem friendly. Like someone funny lives there.
posted by mu~ha~ha~ha~har at 7:21 PM on June 7, 2008

Hah! When I read that, I just knew you were from Queensland ;-)

Little-known fact: Cane toads are stupid (OK, so that may be well-known...), and if you throw them up there while they're alive, they're dumb enough to hang there until they dehydrate and die. So you don't even have to go to the trouble of tying 2 of them together, bolo-like, with a shoelace or fishing line.

Don't ask me how I know that, but if you'd visited my suburb in the early 70's you'd be able to figure it out ;-)
posted by Pinback at 10:57 PM on June 7, 2008

i heard its used to mark a place where people deal drugs
posted by alitorbati at 12:27 PM on June 8, 2008

In the hood in SW Houston where I grew up, I was told that it was the shoes of victims murdered by the local gangs. I have absolutely nothing else to back that up, though, and I feel like there were more shoes hanging up than murders that I had heard about.
posted by Nattie at 1:45 PM on June 9, 2008