Dyker Heights Christmas Lights Walking Tour
Four stops, including Lucy Spata's house at 1152 84th Street, which began with 40 angels, and the Polizzotto house across the street.
The Woman Who Lit 84th Street
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You're on 84th Street in Dyker Heights, in front of number 1152. This is Lucy Spata's house. Look past the lights for the angels. Lucy Spata put up 40 of them at the start, and she still sets those original 40 out today, surrounded by snowmen, Santas and a crowd of other holiday characters. See how many angels you can pick out.
To understand why they matter, picture this block in the mid-1980s. Dyker Heights already had big houses and deep front yards. What it didn't have, come December, was much of anything glowing in them.
In 1986, Lucy Spata and her husband, Angelo, moved onto 84th Street. Lucy has remembered that first stretch as a kind of dark age. She and Angelo were disappointed by how plain the neighborhood looked. Lucy decided not to wait for anyone else to fix it. She started decorating, and those first angels were the beginning.
Then came the turn that no city planner or tourism office arranged. People noticed. Neighbors began to decorate too, house by house, year by year. The guides who know this neighborhood best name Lucy Spata as one of its pioneers, and the tradition many credit to this house goes back more than 30 years. One woman's idea of what a street should feel like in winter slowly became the whole neighborhood's.
That's the real insight behind the spectacle around you. The Dyker Heights lights began not as an attraction but as homeowners making their own corner of Brooklyn brighter. Today busloads of visitors come to see them. The thing they come for started with a couple who thought their new street looked a little too plain.
And Lucy Spata never really learned the meaning of the word enough. The visitors' guide sums up her yard in four words: every inch is decorated. Look around the property and you'll find that's not much of an exaggeration. There are displays tucked onto surfaces you'd never think to decorate.
One thing to keep in mind as you stand here. This is still Lucy's home, on a street where people live year-round. The best thanks you can offer the woman who helped light 84th Street is to enjoy it from the sidewalk, keep your voice down, and leave the angels exactly where she put them.
Before you go, take one more look at those 40 originals. Everything else on this block, and on the blocks around it, followed them.
When you're ready, walk southeast about three minutes to the Polizzotto House, where you'll meet the families and the pros who keep this tradition running.
