Seriously. Does this happen in your city?



Hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging off powerlines throughout the city. What's the point? Is it kids just thinking it's funny, or is there a more serious political/protest stance at work? Does anybody know?

Are any Obnerds living a double-life as a shoe tosser?

I know of two origins for this, BR. The first, after WWII, soldiers tossed their combat boots. A final "I'm outta this man's Army forever, Muhfucka!"

The second, is from Trenton, NJ. You see boots on the wires, the house accross the street gots that bud. (Or coke, or H or whatevs) Supposedly a Jamaican gang thing.

from snopes.com

Legend: Old running shoes hanging from trees and power lines are 'gang signs.'

Origins: All across the United States, you'll encounter discarded shoes hanging from wires, poles, and trees. Theories as to what these shoes signify abound, but, contrary to what one hears, there's no one right answer.

Who put the shoes there and why? The list of explanations goes on. Suggestions include:

* It's the work of gangs marking the boundaries of their territory.

* Bullies take them off defenceless kids, then sling them up out of reach as the ultimate taunt.

* Gang members create an informal memorial at the spot where a friend lost his life.

* Crack dealers festoon wires to advertise their presence in the neighborhood.

* The shoes increase wire visibility for low-flying aircraft.

* Overly puffed-up boys who have just lost their virginity or otherwise passed a sexual milestone look to signal the event to others.

* Graduating seniors mark this transition in their lives by leaving something of themselves behind; namely, their shoes.

* Kids do it just because it's fun. And besides, what else are you going to do with a worn-out pair of sneakers other than tie the laces together and toss them high?

In the Southwest exists a similar practice, that of placing old, worn boots upside down on fence posts by the side of a road. Driving along, one passes upturned boot after upturned boot. Some people tell us these boots Sneakers are a way for a homeowner to indicate if he's gone to town for the day; on his way out, he stops where his driveway meets the road and adjusts the boot so its toe points outwards. When the toe is pointing towards the house, he's telling the world he's home. Others say it's just a boot-on-a-fencepost thing with no more rhyme or reason to it than there is to those sneakers hanging over telephone wires.

Members of the military have pointed to the practice of pitching an old pair of army boots over the wires when leaving a post as a possible origin for sneaker slinging. According to some, army boot pitching is a ritual performed upon completing basic training, according to others, the boots are tossed when a soldier leaves one post for another, and a final school of thought holds that boot pitching is properly done only when the service itself is being left. The boots are often painted yellow or orange prior to being festooned over a wire.

There's no one definitive answer as to why those shoes hang from telephone wires. Perhaps the answer lies within each of us, shoe-slinger and non-shoe-slinger alike. We are a determinedly decorative society. At Christmas and Halloween, on Easter and the 4th of July, many of us feel compelled to doll up houses, windows, and lawns with all manner of objects and lights. Some call this folk art. Others will tell you it has to do with the human need for self-expression.

Slinging shoes over a power line could be no more than us letting that side of ourselves run riot. Then again, the whole thing could be merely an invented tradition, with people doing it because they see others doing it.

Barbara "shoe fly" Mikkelson

Sightings: In the 1997 film Wag the Dog, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman conspire to festoon tree after tree with shoes as a "spontaneous" show of homegrown support for their manufactured war hero Sgt. William Schumann (the "old shoe").

Last updated: 12 April 1999[/i]

I've always heard that shoes are a marker for drugs which seems like an urban myth on par with the origins of "4:20"

Because those buildings or towers are just to easy to miss???

In places where they fly helicopters, they have large orange globes strung between the wires. They don't need shoes. And if you've ever seen pictures of what wires do to helicopters, you'd know that yeah, they fly low, and no it ain't good.

<----- Dad was a helo pilot for about 30 yrs.

ghetto windchimes

Forgot about helos... good call. Have seen those orange things out in the mountains.

Power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged.

A college friend of mine's dad invented 'em.

Someone told me there was shoe tossing in 'Bulworth' but I've never seen the movie to know what the hell he was talking about.

There was shoe tossing in "Training Day" as well, but they mostly focused on the release of pigeons to let everyone know that the po po were on their way...

There are a few of these round Glasgow.

I just thought it was a drunken student lark, you know sort of like wearing traffic cones over your head and going downhill in shopping trollies.

i usually see shoes tossed into the lines at intersections, right over the center. i always figured it was just someone with a lot of time in the middle of the night. have you ever actually tried to get shoes up on power lines? it's kinda difficult.

A friend of mine did this one night when he was drunk and feeling resentful of his yuppie suburban neighborhood.

this has been going on since i was a kid...and that was a long time ago.

I saw this once outside a bar down the street my house. I don't get it. I'll be damned if anyone touches my shoes, someone will get hurt.

We did in front of our Pineview townhouse at UGA for the sole purpose of making that shit look ghetto as hell.

Totally neat-o thing that I learned when I worked at Boeing and got to work around the Apache helicopters: the Apache (and some others, I'm sure) is equipped with razors at key points on the fuselage such as the nose, just over the cockpit, and right before the rotorshaft to cut powerlines and trip-wires set up to destroy low-flying helicopters.

And now back to shoes.

Shoes are a women's best friend.

Obviously someone has never used a jetpack.