The lights of Port Washington

Downtown Port Washington is beautiful year-round, but at Christmas it takes on a magical quality thanks to the glow of thousands of lights decorating the trees.

But it’s not elves who create the magic — unless you count the handful of employees of the city’s Parks and Recreation and Street departments who sometimes don Santa caps while twisting strands of lights around the tree branches as helpers of Mr. Claus.

These men, who don’t seem like the decorating type, spend more than 100 hours each year lighting the trees along Franklin Street and putting up vintage decorations on the light poles along Franklin Street and Grand Avenue.

They could use a little magic to help with the job, which Jon Crain, superintendent of parks and forestry, said is “very time consuming.”

“You need to wrap all those branches individually,” he said. “It teaches you a lot of patience.”

The crew puts up more than 25,000 white lights — roughly 85 strands —on the honey locusts and ginkgo trees that line Franklin Street, plus another 15,000 or so on the trees outside City Hall and three junipers at the Highway 33 roundabout on the west edge of the city.

The crew is also tasked with lighting the tree at the foot of St. Mary’s Hill, which is the city’s official Christmas tree lit by the mayor during Christmas on the Corner.

“That’s a tricky one,” Crain said. “We try our best, but it’s not ideal to decorate. Some people say it looks like the lights were just thrown on, but there are such large gaps between the branches ...  It’s difficult for us to make it look perfect.”

Many people have suggested the city should also light the trees in Upper Lake Park, but Crain said that’s impractical.

“It would take too much manpower,” he said. “We would have to get a lot of volunteers and volunteer groups for that.”

Crain said he tries to free three or four people to work on the trees at a time over 10 days or so to get the work done. He tries to rotate the crew each year so the same people don’t wrap the lights each year “for sanity reasons,” he said.

“Imagine wrapping these branches over and over,” he said. “You want it to go faster but it takes time to get the lights all the way in.”

Some years, the weather cooperates with the lighting efforts. This year, that wasn’t the case as early snows and cold made life difficult. 

“We were pressed this year. We had leaves that had to be picked up, snow that had to be plowed,” Crain said.

Even before the lights go up, crews are busy working on the decorations. Gary Fischer keeps the vintage decorations in tip-top shape, Crain said, noting they need to be touched up annually and maintenance work done each year.

Crain recently found the receipt for those 35 decorations, which the city bought in 1967 at a cost of $1,734.

“To replace them would cost well over $500 apiece,” he said.

The city has been decorating the downtown trees for more than 10 years, since Franklin Street was rebuilt, Crain said. Initially, a private firm installed the lights, but when the trees got too tall the city took over the work.

Similarly, the city decided to decorate the roundabout trees after Highway 33 was rebuilt.

The decorations stay up until about Easter. Crews cut the lights off the downtown trees, Crain said.
“It would take so much time it’s not cost effective,” he said, adding the city spends about $1,000 annually to buy lights.

The city can’t leave the lights on the trees year-round, he added, or they would girdle the trees, ultimately killing them.

Although it’s a challenging job to install the lights each year, Crain said it’s well worth the effort.

One woman called to find out when the lights would be up and how long the city would light the trees because they would be the perfect backdrop for her engagement photos, he said. 

They also create the perfect backdrop for the business district during the holiday shopping season, Crain said.

“It really pays off when the downtown is lit up. I think they help the business district and the city overall,” he said. “It draws people to town. 

“You don’t think about it until people start commenting on it. We get a lot of compliments on them.”