Photo from Notcot.com.I never set out to be anti-penny, but somehow it happened, and I have gone on the record more than a few times arguing that the penny should be eliminated.
While I stand by my belief that the penny is lousy as currency, someone has finally come up with a use for pennies that has made me reconsider my extinction argument: make a floor out of them! (You can also make a wall out of them.)
The penny floor can be found at the Standard Grill at the new Standard Hotel in New York, the one straddling the High Line. The Standard tells us that it used 250 pennies per square foot, or 480,000 pennies in all.
For those of you thinking about a home renovation, that’s $2.50 per square foot in flooring materials. That stacks up pretty well to glass tile ($25.00/sq. ft.), white onyx marble ($12.50/sq. ft.), porcelain ($6.00/sq. ft.), or even prefinished walnut ($5.00/sq. ft.).
For anyone going the penny-floor route, I guess the big question would be whether to opt for all-heads, all-tails, a set pattern, or a random effect.
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There is also a floor of them in the Congress Hotel in Tucson, Arizona. Very pretty, but distracting to me.
As a penny-saver (I guess, kinda like a collector) I always pick up a penny when I find it. I keep them in a jar, and I’ve made around $10 a year in the past 10 years doing it. Just a little work, like bending over, has earned a good amount. I also made a dress of pennies in high school. I think it is strange we would not respect every ounce of value we have created. If we donated all the pennies we leave here and there to charity we could feed a lot of people.
If the pennies are exposed (rather than encased in something), then they will wear pretty quickly… and with modern zinc-core pennies will change color once the copper coating is worn through.
The National Cathedral has a Lincoln memorial corner which includes some decorative pennies set in the floor, and the deterioration there has been pretty rapid and visible.
I wonder is it legal to mis-use legal currency in this manner. E.g. is sticking a penny to the floor the same as scribbling on a $1?
Also walking on the image of honest Abe seems wrong to me somehow.
John Delaney
Intrade
$2.50/sf is just the cost of the pennies. What is the end cost including whatever they use for grout? What about labor? Looks harder to lay pennies and have them line up properly.
If i’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: we can’t get rid of the penny unless the smallest denomination of the dollar is bumped to from 1 cent to 5 cents. Otherwise, cash debts may not be settled properly and that’s kind of a problem.
I use pennies for a variety of tasks where I need something of consistent thickness. One example lately is for painting some moulding before mounting to the wall. I want to be able to paint the edges without it resting on the saw horses, so I use a couple of pennies stacked and taped to the the horses to prop the moulding up just a bit. Business cards and playing cards are my other friends for shimming to consistent gap.
My favorite bar in college (The Other Place in Meadville, PA) is also covered in pennies. Everyone calls it “The Penny Bar” instead of it’s actual name. Pennies cover the bar top, tables, and walls, and there are replicas of the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials made entirely out of pennies.
If you go there be sure to try Jimmy’s pickled eggs – they’re the best I’ve ever had!
A couple of years ago, I had a pretty reasonable use for them.
I race sailboats a lot. The particular boat I sail has a number of small shackles that are closed with screw pins. So when getting ready to go sailing or putting the boat away we were always finding ourselves searching for a screwdriver. Generally we were cold or tired, or just wanted to socialize, so it was a burden to walk across the parking lot and get a screwdriver from the car.
But, it just so happened that a penny would fit perfectly in the screw head, and worked well with cold, wet or tired fingers!
So for $0.50 we had pretty much an endless supply of screwdrivers right there at the boat. We just scattered them around the area and when you needed a screwdriver, you just looked down to find one.