11.23.2005
Just As Good As a Cheap French Door Handle
By Stan Spire 
The French door handles. I had almost forgotten about them. Long gone, lost in the memory hole for most people.
I was walking around downtown Plattsburgh, taking an informal survey of the empty storefronts. I noticed one spot on a corner that used to house a thriving magazine and tobacco shop. Someone had stripped out all the fixtures inside and now it sits there, waiting for someone else to make it into a small goldmine.
The storefront hasn’t been repainted; it’s still trimmed with an off-green shade, something that was probably called Pea Soup Medium Ultra. Years ago the city spent money to renovate a number of storefronts with an uniform scheme, using the same green paint and adding fancy French door handles.
If you’re unfamiliar with that type of handle, imagine a “S” lying on its side and then flattened down enough to form a long curvy shape. While the green paint remained – at least with this one storefront - the fancy door handles are long gone. There were a few of them downtown at different locations and it seemed that within a year of their installation they were all broken, replaced with real door handles.
I wasn’t surprised that the French handles didn’t last. If you have a business with many people coming and going, you need a good quality handle that can stand up to relentless use. The ones selected by the downtown renovation project looked like they were found in the K-Mart bargain bin.
But that’s how the city wastes money. It’ll either take a half-step, not spending a bit more for quality, or it just invests a bundle in a guaranteed doomed-to-failure project.
More recently the city spent lots of $ in planting antique streetlights downtown, flooding the area with piss-yellow glare. On one block, with a period of a year or so, three of these cheap knock-offs have broken. A truck jumps bumps into one and it snaps like a matchstick. I looked inside a couple of these busted posts. I didn’t expect each post to be solid, but at the same time it was surprising to see how hollow it was. The casting is thin for such a tall structure, around a quarter inch or so. And the metal itself looks like it was made from recycled tin cans. I’ve seen better casting with a hollow chocolate Easter bunny.
It doesn’t take much to get one of these posts to shake and shimmy. Just grab one, pull back and forth a few times, and watch it vibrate like a big tuning fork. A prime target for drunken college students bored with bending over street signs.
One day a major windstorm will rip through downtown and most of the cheap antique streetlights will fall down, completely snapping free. Whoever is in power at that time will realize the streetlights aren’t worth replacing and so they’ll be all hauled away to the landfill.
Then, centuries from now, archeologists will be digging through the landfill strata and they will stumble upon the layer with the broken antique lampposts. They shake their heads, upset with the waste of valuable materials. They dig deeper, finding a layer dotted pieces of inferior-quality brass. The archeologists put the pieces together: the parts form cheap French door handles.
At this point their disgust turns into laughter.
(Note: the picture accompanying this article is for only illustrative purposes. The handle shown only looks similar to the type discussed in the article. No quality judgment should be inferred, Mr. Corporation Attorney.)
The French door handles. I had almost forgotten about them. Long gone, lost in the memory hole for most people.
I was walking around downtown Plattsburgh, taking an informal survey of the empty storefronts. I noticed one spot on a corner that used to house a thriving magazine and tobacco shop. Someone had stripped out all the fixtures inside and now it sits there, waiting for someone else to make it into a small goldmine.
The storefront hasn’t been repainted; it’s still trimmed with an off-green shade, something that was probably called Pea Soup Medium Ultra. Years ago the city spent money to renovate a number of storefronts with an uniform scheme, using the same green paint and adding fancy French door handles.
If you’re unfamiliar with that type of handle, imagine a “S” lying on its side and then flattened down enough to form a long curvy shape. While the green paint remained – at least with this one storefront - the fancy door handles are long gone. There were a few of them downtown at different locations and it seemed that within a year of their installation they were all broken, replaced with real door handles.
I wasn’t surprised that the French handles didn’t last. If you have a business with many people coming and going, you need a good quality handle that can stand up to relentless use. The ones selected by the downtown renovation project looked like they were found in the K-Mart bargain bin.
But that’s how the city wastes money. It’ll either take a half-step, not spending a bit more for quality, or it just invests a bundle in a guaranteed doomed-to-failure project.
More recently the city spent lots of $ in planting antique streetlights downtown, flooding the area with piss-yellow glare. On one block, with a period of a year or so, three of these cheap knock-offs have broken. A truck jumps bumps into one and it snaps like a matchstick. I looked inside a couple of these busted posts. I didn’t expect each post to be solid, but at the same time it was surprising to see how hollow it was. The casting is thin for such a tall structure, around a quarter inch or so. And the metal itself looks like it was made from recycled tin cans. I’ve seen better casting with a hollow chocolate Easter bunny.
It doesn’t take much to get one of these posts to shake and shimmy. Just grab one, pull back and forth a few times, and watch it vibrate like a big tuning fork. A prime target for drunken college students bored with bending over street signs.
One day a major windstorm will rip through downtown and most of the cheap antique streetlights will fall down, completely snapping free. Whoever is in power at that time will realize the streetlights aren’t worth replacing and so they’ll be all hauled away to the landfill.
Then, centuries from now, archeologists will be digging through the landfill strata and they will stumble upon the layer with the broken antique lampposts. They shake their heads, upset with the waste of valuable materials. They dig deeper, finding a layer dotted pieces of inferior-quality brass. The archeologists put the pieces together: the parts form cheap French door handles.
At this point their disgust turns into laughter.
(Note: the picture accompanying this article is for only illustrative purposes. The handle shown only looks similar to the type discussed in the article. No quality judgment should be inferred, Mr. Corporation Attorney.)
# posted by Stan Spire @ 3:59 AM 
