How It Started

And How It's Going...

Sometime in 2006, I got my first version of the vision. I would compose a crossword that would be visible from three stories overhead. The tiles would be black and white, made of ebony and ivory, and the answers written in chalk, to be erased and refilled every time it rained.

It was a weird, childish fantasy, especially given what I knew about crosswords at the time, which was very little. But somehow, I’ve stuck with some version of the idea, on and off, for nearly 16 years since.

My needlepointy first attempt, mapped out above, shamelessly stole its design from SkyMall’s product, the Largest Crossword Puzzle. I added a single row to its border, humming “We Are The Champions” to myself. Then I filled it with new words and clues, hiring an old friend as clue editor. Don't remember how long we took, probably because I'm repressing the trauma.

Somehow, the crossword community failed to appreciate the results, much as it had been unimpressed when SkyMall had released its project a few years earlier. Superhuge crosswords, it turns out, are pretty easy to make and joyless to do when they’re not bound by “New York Times rules,” and the puzzle shown here had far too many “unchecked” squares to qualify for those. In an NYT-standard puzzle, there are at least two ways to fill each box, usually because it’s part of both an across entry and a down entry.

I was starting to learn. I inserted a small nod to crossword history, putting the first crossword grid, shown below, at the center of my new construction. But the whole thing basically went nowhere.

I’d have to try better.