roslyn.lamps

FORGOTTEN NEW YORK
HarperCollins, ORDER from Amazon: paperback or hardcover

FORGOTTEN NEW YORK T-SHIRTS and more!

You're never quite sure how pockets of antiquity survive in any given locale. In the Long Island north shore town of Roslyn, there's a "street that time forgot" that hasn't changed anything in over 80 years.

LEFT: Skillman Street, near the junction of Old Northern Boulevard and Bryant Avenue, trails off west toward Hempstead Harbor... and preserves lighting fixtures from 1910 or so.

Before investigating Skillman, though, let's take a look at what's preserved on Old Northern Boulevard, which runs through the center of town. Where it forks with Bryant Avenue, we find a remaining incandescent Gumball. Nothing unusual here -- there are still a few dozen or maybe a couple of hundred still in Long Island. South of that, though, is a much rarer acorn; there used to be a number of these on Old Northern, but this is the only one left.

It's on Skillman and its tributary, Bedell's Landing Road, though, that we find a flock of ancient radial-wave luminaires. Amazing to find so large a group of them still in operation -- all of them were lit up when I happened by.

NYC has no remaining "rades" and even the ones in Port Washington and Plandome that I knew about were also replaced with more modern fixtures.

An abandoned house on Skillman claims a Sherlock (I call it that because it resembles Holmes' double-billed deerstalker hat). These type of luminaires first apeared in the 1940s. On nearby Bryant Avenue, lastly, is an old Crescent Moon with a baffle on it to reduce glare into a home on the left side of the road.

GOOGLE MAP: OLD ROSLYN

Photographed March 23, 2008; page completed February 16, 2009.

erpietri@earthlink.net