A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed New York—long before smartphones, Ubers, and LinkNYC streetside screens were daily facts of life—a labyrinth of caverns below the surface of the city was filled with newsstands peddling physical newspapers filled with all the Jurassic news that was fit to print.
Most of these newsstands have shuttered, and these days schoolkids don’t know one when they see one, according to MTA worker Marjorie Nassirou. “It’s prehistoric,” she said. Boomers, on the other hand, are delighted to see Rex’s Dino Store, a new pop-up newsstand kiosk in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza station near the Plaza Street East/Vanderbilt Avenue exit. “I tease them, I ask them if they went to school with the owner,” Nassirou said.
Rex, the stately papier-mache Tyrannosaurus rex proprietor of the Dino Store, definitely has a few years on the station passersby. Behind a plexiglass window, he proffers a vast variety of antediluvian offerings. From issues of Jurassic Park Slope Courier to Trilo-bite snacks to Snarlboro cigarettes, the jam-packed kiosk offers a barrage of dino details that would take far more time to appreciate than most rushed commuters are willing to spare.
The pun-proficient artists behind NYC’s only bodega for dinosaurs, Akiva Leffert and Sarah Cassidy, brought the old-fashioned newsstand back to the subway as part of the MTA’s ongoing Vacant Unit Activation Program.
The program has been running since 2023, offering artists the opportunity to “fill vacant retail units in the subway system with creative non-traditional uses.” Other installations across the subway system include sculptures, paintings, and posters by local artists, but Rex’s Dino Store is perhaps the most captivating offering thus far.
Leffert says the inspiration for Rex’s Dino Store came very quickly when he and Cassidy thought about the space that they’d be working in: “We were just like, okay, old newsstand… really old newsstand… Really, really, really old newsstand.” And thus Rex’s Dino Store was born.
Allegra Rosenberg / Atlas Obscura
The pair had some prior experience with public art, including a rat-themed performance onboard a subway train, but this was their largest-scale project yet. It wasn’t too daunting, though. “I feel like my core competency is going from, oh, wouldn’t that be funny to, oh wait, we’re doing this,” Leffert said.
It was a big job, but over the course of a year he and Cassidy were able to recruit their friends to help contribute to the immersive reptilian world inside the Dino Store. They had parties at Leffert’s place where they sat around and generated ideas, eventually creating a giant spreadsheet of different dino-themed puns. This was the genesis of the spot-on elements that made it into the final installation, such as Lifestyles of the Rich and Amphibious magazine and boxes of meteorite particle filter masks.
Once the puns were in place, everyone set to work actually creating the material for the interior—with a budget coming straight out of the artists’ pockets (printing stacks of fake newspapers was more expensive than they’d thought). Cassidy took the lead on constructing Rex himself, the centerpiece of the installation, and everyone else pitched in to print, cut, fold, and craft the various products.
“There’s a long, rich history of fake products,” says Leffert. “We were definitely partly inspired by Lucy Sparrow’s felt bagel bites and that stuff.” The best parts of the Dino Store are the ones that nod to hyper-specific bits of New York history and culture. “I think we found that dinosaurs and New York are both just very rich texts.”
The mash-ups are myriad and hilarious. One poster on the bulletin board says “THE MOTHSHIACH IS COMING” (a nod to the Hasidic Jewish communities of Brooklyn), one promotes the law firm of Cellino and Barney, and another advertises a Cave for Rent, “dank and mossy” and “meadow adjacent” at the low, low price of $4,500/moon. On the back wall, where newsstands and bodegas usually stock their pharmaceuticals, you can spot a Dr. Bronner’s parody (with unreadably tiny but surely very funny text) and even a box of Dur-rex cloaca dams, “designed to give her earth shattering experiences.”
At the station on a Wednesday afternoon, tourists and locals alike found their attention drawn by the intriguing facade of the Dino Store. Station attendant Nassirou stood by to wave people over and introduce them to friendly Rex and his array of affordable offerings—some children were fascinated, but others were more eager to head through the gates and board the train (true New Yorkers already).
Chatting to visitors Tabea Schneider and Cheng-Hsun Yang, Leffert explained how the year-long process behind getting the store off the ground, involving lots of bureaucratic red tape, left them with plenty of time to brainstorm new items. “How many dino jokes do you have now?” Schneider asked. “Oh my God, thousands,” said Leffert.
That’s surely enough to power multiple more iterations of Rex’s establishment. The Dino Store has the Grand Army Plaza lease until the end of the year, and the artists behind it are thinking of ways they can make it more of a community space. “A friend of ours wants to do [a] carbon dating [event],” Leffert said. They’re also considering seasonal updates to the store, putting to use some of that immense backlog of saurian puns. And just in case they run out, Leffert is hoping that after a visit to the Dino Store, people will be inspired to come up with their own product concepts, or even send in ready-to-print flyers for the dino community bulletin board. A QR code placed in multiple locations inside and around the space leads visitors to a website where they can reach out to Rex, via email or Instagram DM.
For New Yorkers, the chance to stumble upon something prehistorically delightful in the middle of a mundane contemporary commute might feel much-needed. “I feel like it’s kind of a weird time. Everyone’s kind of down in the dumps, [so we’re] just doing something fun and playful,” Leffert said. He and Cassidy landed upon the idea that maybe what we all need is a nostalgic return to the past: a simpler time of paper news, and friendly T. rexes roaming the subway.