On East 2nd between Avenues B and C, one can sometimes catch sight of a yellow extension cord being thrown down from a window in a brick co-op, where it is then picked up by a man who pulls the cord through the bars of an iron fence, duct-tapes it to the sidewalk, and plugs it into his Lincoln Corsair. A block away, on East 3rd, another guy was recently doing this same choreography. “He’s a legend,” says a woman walking into the building who overheard me asking Joe McGinty about the setup. McGinty lives nearby and was walking his dog past the building when he first saw the cable, looped around the restaurant sign, crossing to a tree and down around the back of a Tesla. He said he admired the hustle, the grit, the problem-solving: “I thought, Okay, so someone’s found a way to do it.” Many someones, in fact. A Cybertruck owner on West 175th Street had his charging rig go semi-viral in a video last November and was blamed for a brief power outage this fall. In Crown Heights, an extension cord hooked around a brownstone’s parlor-floor window frame and looped around a lamppost is listed publicly on a map of local charging stations. Then there are the drivers who are hiding EV chargers so well you might not spot them at all — with outlets inside little free libraries, on utility poles, and in dog-poop-bag dispensers.
To be clear, none of this is legal, and it’s happening for the same reason that New Yorkers double-park, block bike lanes, and buy gray-market weed: We’re a speedy city run by slow-moving bureaucrats. Right now, New York is both the wild west of unregulated DIY EV charging and a “hotbed of EV charging innovation,” per The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on how companies selling chargers are trying to fill a gap here. The basic problem is that New Yorkers don’t live like suburban EV owners, who pull into garages, plug in at home, and wake up to a full charge by morning. (It can take four-to-ten hours to charge a car battery off a standard 220-volt outlet for a home dryer.) About half of car owners here park on the street and depend on just 2,000 chargers, compared to Los Angeles’s 8,000 or Amsterdam’s 15,000. Some of New York’s are far from homes and businesses or work only with some types of EVs, like the Tesla chargers under the Best Buy on Atlantic. Some are wildly expensive becuase of upcharges for their speed and convenience or just wildly inconvenient with locations in private garages.
