Plumbing the iconography of the working class with your guide, the fearless New York Times
They're Soft, Cuddly and Lashed to the Front of a Truck. But Why? - New York Times
A bear with a prominent grease spot on his little beige nose spends his days wedged behind the bumper guard of an ironworker's pickup in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. A fuzzy rabbit and a clown, garroted by a bungee cord, slump from the front of a Dodge van in Park Slope. Stewie, the evil baby from "Family Guy," scowls from the grille of a Pepperidge Farm delivery truck in Brooklyn Heights, mold occasionally sprouting from his forehead.
All are soldiers in the tattered, scattered army of the stuffed: mostly discarded toys plucked from the trash and given new if punishing lives on the prows of large motor vehicles, their fluffy white guts flapping from burst seams and going gray in the soot-stream of a thousand exhaust pipes.
Grille-mounted stuffed animals form a compelling yet little-studied aspect of the urban streetscape, a traveling gallery of baldly transgressive public art. The time has come not just to praise them but to ask the big question. Why?
That is, why do a small percentage of trucks and vans have filthy plush toys lashed to their fronts, like prisoners at the mast? Are they someone's idea of a joke? Parking aids? Talismans against summonses?
Don't expect an easy answer.
Me! Me! I know! I actually had a job in the late 1970s recycling paper from garbage, and we routinely pulled out stuffed animals to decorate our forklifts, truck and compactor. It's a way of goofing on the job itself, humanizing a dull routine and declaring your distance from a grungy job. Plus it really bothers some prissy people (such as, apparently, New York Times reporters).