Photos By Gail
If you’ve wandered along the gritty stretch of Canal Street where the LES meets Chinatown, you’ve probably passed right by a storefront that feels like a glitch in the matrix. Nestled among cell phone kiosks and dollar stores is New Hi-Tech Corp, a longstanding electronics repair shop at 47 Canal Street (founded in 1983) whose hypnotic display window turns more heads than any shiny gadget inside ever could.
What makes this store so visually arresting are the rows of dozens of vintage CRT television sets — each screen looping a single, isolated image of a human eye — tightly stacked behind the storefront glass. That’s right: eye after eye after eye, almost unblinking, unrelenting, and unmistakably weird. It’s a surreal visual moment, equal parts Orwellian surveillance fantasy and 1980s music video fever dream.
The effect is mesmerizing. Pedestrians pause, some uneasy, some amused, while others (guilty as charged) grab their phones to memorialize this uniquely New York scene. The eyes follow you — not literally, of course, but the sheer repetition and scale create a sense of uncanny presence that feels as much like a conceptual art installation as it does a commercial storefront.
Whether intentional or accidental, the aesthetic is pure outsider art. In a city increasingly scrubbed clean by chain stores and glass towers, New Hi-Tech Corp feels like a time capsule of Canal Street’s funkier, more chaotic past. The vintage televisions evoke a pre-digital age when fixing your electronics was an everyday ritual, not a novelty — and the fact that they’re still blinking to life behind glass in 2025 makes this spot feel like a sci-fi portal.
Inside, the store continues its mix of utility and eccentricity, but it’s the street-facing side that tells the story. New Hi-Tech Corp’s eye-lined window stands as a monument to visual strangeness in a city that should never forget how to be weird. Whether you’re in the market for a vintage tape deck repair — or just a one-of-a-kind Instagram moment — it’s worth slowing down for this curious corner of Canal Street.