Are Partiers Dimming the 37th Street Lights?
Eighty-four-year-old Ray Pine was disappointed when he saw a woman walk past his house on 37th Street during the Christmas season last year with a baby in one hand and a beer in the other. For about 20 years, 37th Street dwellings on the block just east of Guadalupe have featured elaborate, complex, and occasionally ludicrous Christmas light displays. People’s changing attitudes toward Christmas, however, has in recent years cheapened and commercialized the season, Pine said, resulting in Christmas on 37th Street being treated differently than in years past: “as a holiday when people get drunk, making a Sixth Street out of it,” as he put it. Last year, for example, he said he filled three yard-waste bags with beer cans and bottles he picked up outside his and neighbors’ homes during the first week of his street’s annual lights extravaganza. The party attitude toward the neighborhood has extended in recent years beyond the holidays as well, said Pine, who, since 1947, has owned 12 house
