Welcome back to Horror Street, an ongoing journey in search of awesome yet spooky graffiti art on the streets and little-traveled corners of New York City.
Today, we’re in the Queens, New York, neighborhood of Sunnyside, home to the offices of Pan’s publisher, StarWarp Concepts (and Marvel Comics hero Peter Parker, if you’ve seen the movies Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far From Home).
What you see here (click to embiggen, as they say) is what’s known as an Interceptor II, or GO-4 Parking Enforcement vehicle, manufactured by Canada’s Westward Industries and used in New York primarily by the traffic enforcement division and the Parks Department.
The GO-4 is a three-wheeled, one-person scooter that you’ll find tooling around neighborhoods in search of cars to be ticketed for violations, or in parks that need to be patrolled but don’t have mounted police riding horseback. It’s not the kind of thing you’ll ever see involved in a high-speed car chase, since its top speed is around 50 mph, and what’s interesting is that in order to qualify as a “street legal” vehicle they’re registered as motorcycles.
But based on its unique, ghoulish paint job, this particular Interceptor isn’t used for patrolling parks; clearly it’s for cruising the streets of Gothopolis, that city of monsters that lives right alongside New York City but can only be seen by people with special sight—people like our own Pandora Zwieback. Now that she has her learner’s permit, Pan probably wouldn’t mind getting one for herself—if she could convince her parents to spring for one!
Stay tuned for further installments of Horror Street—there’s plenty of macabre graffiti art to be found on the streets of New York, if you look in the right creepy places! And be sure to check out my previous HS entries: the Brooklyn Vampire, the demonic D-Rod, Where the Gene Wilder Things Are, and the beast called Queens’thluhu!