Covered in Pacifiers, Trees Signal a Rite of Passage

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Small trees outside a building in Borough Park, Brooklyn, have become festooned with pacifiers, tossed on the branches when children outgrow them.

Rachel Rhine’s apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn, has a strange view: two small trees standing sentinel at the entrance of her building are covered in used pacifiers.

Through her window she has seen dozens of tender, early childhood rites of passage â€" families that gather to send off a beloved binky by hanging it on a branch.

“I see mothers picking up their little kid and the kid actually puts it on and they say: ‘O.K., say goodbye, no more. You’re a big girl now,’” Ms. Rhine said. “It’s kind of a celebration to say, ‘That’s where it goes and that’s where it stays and that’s the end of it.’”

The tradition at the Plymouth, a six-story complex on 48th Street near 14th Avenue, tenants say, goes back around 10 years and was started by a former superintendent.

“It was from all of these little pacifiers kids throw out of the carriage and the moms don’t even notice,” said Roberta Kahn, a doctor who has lived in the building since 1978. “So what should he do with them He hung them on the tree.”

The super, Miro Dugandzic, declined to be interviewed, but his daughter-in-law, Maria Dugandzic, said the idea to showcase the building’s pacifiers came from Miro’s wife, Andja.

Ms. Rhine said it was no longer only building residents who made use of the pacifier repositories; the trees have become something of a neighborhood institution. Children who have given up their pacifiers see the bushes as monuments to their new, pacifier-free lives.

“They pass by and they say: ‘That’s mine! You see the pink one there’” Ms. Rhine said.

Matthew Goldfine, a child psychologist at Columbia University’s Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, said the arboreal weaning ceremony “turns a negative experience into a creative, fun way of showing a child that you’re not alone in this: ‘We’re contributing to this beautiful and unique pacifier tree.’”

While many parents these days take their children to sew up their pacifiers in a stuffed animal at a Build-A-Bear workshop, the pacifier tree has deep roots in Europe. It is not clear where the Dugandzics, who are Croatian immigrants, got the idea, but Scandinavian children have been tying their suckers to tree branches for a long time.

Families have been leaving pacifiers on an elderberry bush on the Danish island of Thuro since 1963, a Danish folklorist, Hanne Pico Larsen, wrote in an e-mail. Other accounts date Thuro’s tree, which has become a pacifier-deposit tourist destination, back to the 1920s.

Across Denmark and Sweden, branches bow with the weight of a thousand self-soothers. The Skansen zoo in Stockholm is home to one of the more famous pacifier trees.

Back in Borough Park, admiration for the special little trees abounds.

“We all enjoy it and we all have fun, and everyone looks at it and wonders what’s going on,” Dr. Kahn said. “It’s just one of these quirky things in the neighborhood.”