While weekend brunchers last week toasted the end to the blue law that prohibited restaurants from serving booze before noon on Sunday, New Yorkers are still saddled with dozens of anachronistic laws that today seem staggeringly stupid.
Gotham residents aren’t even aware of half the ancient laws they might be breaking every day — especially those who dabble in puppetry, hang laundry, eat ice cream or flirt.
Luckily for these blissful lawbreakers, most cops are as ignorant of these wacky statutes as they are.
Many blue laws “were designed for a religious purpose, but when they are challenged legally, the courts almost always strike the laws down,” said professor David J. Hanson, a
SUNY-Potsdam sociologist.
“They go back to the 1700s,” he explained. “They were designed really to encourage and reinforce church attendance and they originally covered all sorts of behaviors . . . no playing games, no sports, no sex. Back in the day, George Washington almost got arrested for traveling on Sunday.”
Civil-rights attorney Ron Kuby noted that once such rules are codified into law, they tend to stick around for a while.
“It’s easy to pass laws regulating people’s behavior,” he said. “It is very difficult to repeal those laws.”
It requires political courage to erase them.
“Morality laws tend to get passed in a flurry of indignation about one offense or another,” Kuby explained. “They remain on the books because you need an affirmative act to repeal them, and you risk angering those who supported them in the first place — and you appear to be endorsing the behavior that’s been outlawed.”
Kuby called New York’s penal code “an archaeology of the eras of New York” littered with rules that “would be unconstitutional today.
“So they linger like old family photos in the books. And occasionally the books get opened by a reporter and we say, ‘Look at those people, look at that time . . . How weird?’ ”
Among the city and state’s lamest laws:
It is against the law to throw a ball at someone’s face for fun
A person is guilty of “offensive exhibition” if they operate a public event where a person is “voluntarily submitting to indignities such as the throwing of balls … at his head or body.” The law’s origins appear to protect carnies from abusive bosses. Other sections outlaw “propelling” knives at a person, or making them dance or ride a bike “without respite for more than 8 hours.”
It is illegal to sell cat or dog hair
A statute that’s part of the state’s anti-cruelty provisions makes it a crime to “ import, sell, offer for sale . . . transport or otherwise market” dog or cat fur. If you’re trafficking in coyote, fox, lynx or bobcat fur, on the other hand, you’re good.
Flirting can result in a $25 fine
Flutter your eyelids at that handsome straphanger and be prepared to cough up a $25 fine. “I wonder if [the no-flirting edict] is really code for soliciting or prostitution,” Hanson said. “The further back you go, the more likely the terms used were euphemistic.”
A license must be purchased before hanging clothes on a clothesline
If cops ever cracked down on this law — a license is needed to hang a clothesline — half of Brooklyn would be in jail. Many states are currently revoking clothesline bans because what were once considered eyesores are now viewed as eco-friendly.
No taking selfies with tigers
On the books since 2014 with a $500 fine, Manhattan Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal introduced the measure to prevent maulings — there were two in the last 10 years — at traveling circuses and county fairs where the public is allowed to cozy up to big cats.
It’s against the law to run a puppet show in a window
Don’t even think about it, Geppetto! Section 10-114 of the city administrative code cracks down on those who use “any window or open space of any house . . . [for] any performance of puppet or other figures.” The penalty for perpetrating puppetry is up to a $25 fine and 30 days in jail.
You may not walk around on Sundays with an ice cream cone in your pocket
No one seems to know where this law comes from, but CraveOnline.com notes there were once blue laws against eating ice cream on Sundays. So theoretically, sweet-toothed outlaws would pocket their vanilla cones to hide them from passing policemen.
It’s illegal for two or more mask-wearing people to congregate in public
You’d never know it from watching the parade of creepy costumed panhandlers in Times Square, but it’s actually against the law — New York Penal Law 240.35 — to congregate in public with two or more people while each is wearing a mask or any face covering disguising their identity.
The law has existed since 1845, “when tenant farmers, in response to a lowering of wheat prices, dressed up” as Native Americans, according to DumbLaws.com and “covered their faces with masks in order to attack the police anonymously.”
Of course, there is special dispensation for masquerade parties and Halloween.