The Type 6 Bishops Crook was used on streets with narrow sidewalks and narrow widths; the bases were quite a bit thinner than standard. There are about 3 complete or partial types of this post remaining in Manhattan.
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Archives
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MYSTERY POLE OF BROADWAY
February 9, 2012There’s a couple of ‘mystery poles’ in Manhattan, whose former use is hidden in the vicissitudes of time. Like this one on Broadway and West 142nd. It’s too far away from the corner to have been a stoplight, and there’s no bank behind it — sometimes banks will install their own string of lampposts on [...]
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BROADWAY BISHOP CROOK
December 31, 2011 -
LIGHTS OF LONDON
November 16, 2011Over the years my pal Allen Dade has passed along several dozen images of the strange and varied lampposts found in the London area. I know next to nothing at all about them — except they’re in the vein of the wrought and cast ison Bishop Crook and Corvington lampposts that, in newly cast versions, [...]
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5th AVENUE TWINLAMPS
November 9, 2011Since I was hired to work in the Flatiron district in Manhattan in November 2011, I started sniffing around for places to eat lunch before actually beginning work. I will be doing a number of posts from the Flatiron as it has spectacular architecture; although boxy glass towers have now begun to dot the landscape, [...]
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BISHOP CROOK BRACKET
November 8, 2011 -
YEAR 2011 LAMPPOSTS
October 17, 2011It looks like the first lamppost produced by industrial design firm Thomas Phifer and Partners, the winner of the City Lights contest administered by the Museum of the City of New York to replace the familiar octagonal pole with cobra head or straight mast lamppost has been installed on Church Street near Warren, south of [...]
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TUNNEL SURVIVORS
September 10, 2011 -
A la recherche du lampes perdu
August 1, 2011Sorry for paraphrasing your classic, Marcel, but after NYC has now replaced virtually all its everyday lamppost luminaires (light bulbs and the hardware that houses them, for 95% of FNY readers who aren’t into lamppost minutiae) I got to thinking about some of the local Little Neck lamppost anachronisms I found after I moved in on July [...]
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BREAKING THE RULES. Odd placements of fire alarm indicators
March 25, 2011Allow me a litle FNY esoterica. (You can argue the whole website is esoterica but I would disagree with you). Over the past few years, the NYC Department of Transportation and the FDNY have been removing fire call boxes (or decommissioning them) in an era of mobile wireless call devices. There has also been a misguided, [...]
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UPTOWN WHIRL. IND light stanchions
March 12, 2011 -
The Last WOODY
March 7, 2011I have just one photo today. It’s the last dodo, passenger pigeon, aepyornis, mammoth, tyrannosaur, brachiothere, trilobite, and someday, the last human. It’s the last of its type. Once, thousands of these wooden posts lined the parkways of New York and Long Island, built when they were literally parkways, running through wooded enclaves with tiny [...]
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The Lost Type 40S lamppost: a mystery and a resolution
March 1, 2011What you see in Forgotten NY’s Lampposts category is the merest scratch on a vast surface, a minuscule sampler of the manifold varieties of lampposts that have been used on NYC streets from the early gaslights to the new Matrix-era curved overlords of Fulton Street in Brooklyn (mark my words, they will someday gain sentience [...]
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TRIBAL CUSTOM: A Classic 1930s Design for Broadway, Astoria’s New Posts
January 19, 2011The Department of Transportation has installed a clutch of Triborough-style lampposts (I call them ‘Tribes’) along Broadway in Astoria. I was surprised to see them as I got off the N train at 31st Street and Broadway a few weeks ago, although the DOT has been resurrecting NYC’s legacy of lightpost designs since the mid-1980s, when [...]
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MACON MYSTERY: Odd post remnant on Nostrand Avenue and Macon Street in Brooklyn
December 25, 2010So there I was, meandering around in the cold dead Brooklyn winter, when I spotted a lamppost remnant on Nostrand Avenue and Macon Street. I have a radar for these kind of things, and can spot promising lamppost stubs and remnants quite easily. This one stumped me because it didn’t look like the usual base that [...]
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LAMP BONANZA! More from the Bob Mulero archives
November 28, 2010Time to delve once more into the Bob Mulero collection of lampposts. Bob and I achieved our separate lamppost obsessions separately: while both us have been enthusiastically noting the state of NYC’s lamppost collection since childhood, Bob got the jump on me and began photographing them in the mid-1970s, a time when I was attending college [...]
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Wheelies: A Look at the Last Few Wrought Iron “Wheel Motif” Stoplights in NYC
September 4, 2010While walking uptown during Summer Streets 2010 I passed by two of New York City’s most picturesque relics at Park Avenue and East 46th, at the tunnel that takes the Park Avenue Viaduct through the Helmsley Building. On both sides of the street, you find two picturesque Corvington-esque light posts, but instead of a streetlight attached to the [...]
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SUNNYSIDE LAMPPOST YARD
March 21, 2010Those of you who have followed FNY for a long time know about my predilection for lampposts — an affinity I am hard pressed to explain. I do know I have been a fan of NYC lampposts, and by extrapolation stoplights, fire hydrants, street signs, and other ancillary materials, nearly since birth. Their lore and history [...]
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LIGHTS OUT for a classic Crook
March 1, 2010When NYC’s Department of Transportation wants something gone, it’s gone, and there’s not much you can do. Even though the DOT has been spending a couple of decades installing retro versions of the major genres of old-fashioned NYC lampposts that dominated the streets from 1910-1950 — bishop crooks, long-armed Corvingtons, Twinlamps and Type F reverse-scrolls, it [...]
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SHERIFF BISHOP CROOK
December 9, 2009Having visited Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn and pretty much found it just like it was when I first photographed it in 1998 (except for a missing church here and a new luxury crap condo there) I then visited another FNY old favorite a few weeks later – a rusted lamppost in a narrow strip, of unclaimed territory between a park [...]
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Warren Post: Restoration of a 1910s-era Lamppost in Tribeca
November 15, 2009 -
GREENWICH STREET POST
October 7, 2009News came this week [2009] that a 600 year old tree in Douglaston was rotting — it wasn’t dead yet, but it was getting there finally, and before more branches cracked off, it was decided to chop it down. (I must have passed that tree a number of times since moving to neighboring Little Neck, and damned if [...]
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5th and 19th
September 24, 2009Of course, one of my favorite corners in Manhattan concerns a lamppost, a Type 24M Twin, as a matter of fact. Barely a dozen of these posts exist anymore, with a few concentrated on 5th Avenue between 19th and 32nd Streets. There are also a few left in City Hall Park, and since they’re so close to [...]
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TRIBORO BRIDGE LAMPPOSTS
May 11, 2009Avail yourself of a walk down the new Hudson River Park walkway along West Street, 11th and 12th Avenues (stay out of the bike lane — they’ll kill ya) and you’ll see some nifty new T-shaped, aquamarine-painted walkway lamps. Note the bases and finials — they’re shaped like ziggurated NYC skyscrapers. It’s not a new design [...]
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LAMPPOSTS BY THE LETTER: Types A through G
April 5, 2009Paleontologists tell us that the legions of birds twittering in the trees, paddling in streams and migrating worldwide in the air are directly descended from the dinosaur line and are all that remains of the group of animals that brought the planet the marauding Tyrannosaurus Rex, plodding Brachiosaurus and brave Triceratops many millions of years ago. [...]
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23rd ST LAMPPOST DEMISE
December 22, 2008Remember that episode of Star Trek when the giant microbe ate the Enterprise? At the start of the show, Mr. Spock is looking into his scanner and suddenly gets a shocked look on his face. Any emotion from the Vulcan is a notable occasion, so Kirk asked him what the matter was, and Spock explained that a Federation [...]
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WEST 10TH BISHOP CROOK
November 12, 2008Even as NYC’s Department of Transportation has been installing retro Bishop Crooks and retro M24 longarm Corvingtons, and even some scattered reverse scroll Type F’s and Lyres around town (forgive me, you have to be a lamppost maven to understand me at times) it unconscionably permits some of its ancient treasures to rust, wither, and die. [...]
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TYPE “G” SPOT
October 31, 2008Your webmaster recently took advantage of an amazing coincidence – a day off combined with pleasant weather – to walk 14th Street from west to east and then enter Stuyvesant Town to plunder — photographically –its cache of Type G lampposts. The Type G, seen here in a 1936 city catalogue of lampposts, closely resembled the Type 24M Corvington [...]
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GANSEVOORT PLAZA LAMPPOST
July 31, 2008I did a story on FNY the other day about the changes befalling Manhattan’s largest Belgian-blocked surface, the huge plaza where Greenwich, Gansevoort, Little West 12th Streets and 9th Avenue all meet — a changing of the guard, so to speak, of Manhattan street patterns — and, as is my wont I touched upon the fate [...]
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ForgottenTour 35, Lower Manhattan lampposts
July 12, 2008Forgotten Fans gather at two Type C 1910-vintage lamps flanking entrance of 1 Hanover Square downtown Well, your webmaster is never gonna get rich writing about lampposts, taking pictures of lampposts, or leading lamppost tours. This was the most sparsely attended ForgottenTour since Tour #4 in St. George, Staten Island, November 1999 — 3 people were on that one, [...]
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APPENDAGES. Utility pole attachments
March 11, 2008It’s true that they were invaders from another planet, ruthless, merciless killers who treated us the same way we treat cattle: as food stock. They were octopoid bloodsuckers in the book and tripedal, three-eyed mutants in at least two films. But damn, those Martians from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds had great modular machinery, and you have [...]
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LAMP SAMPLER from the Bob Mulero collection
February 14, 2008Lampposts are where Forgotten NY began, ever since the Department of Transportation replaced nearly every castiron post in Brooklyn and the rest of NYC with streamlined octagonal-shafts and Deskeys between 1950 and 1964 (the process started with a trickle in ’50 and gained steam with new expressway projects in the Swingin’ Sixties). The whole thing inspired [...]
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THE DONALDS: Remaining Fifth Avenue Double Deskey lamps.
February 3, 2008CONTINUED FROM PART 1: 5 For Lighting, Streetlight Themes on the Queen of Avenues On the previous page in this series, FNY explored Fifth Avenue’s status as the great repository, and ultimately, graveyard, of some of the city’s most notable lamppost styles. Various eras have seen styles that represented the architectural styles of their time installed on [...]
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FIVE FOR LIGHTING: Streetlamp themes on the Queen of Avenues
January 26, 2008Fifth Avenue is, as the late, great Channel 11 St. Patrick’s Day Parade compere Captain Jack McCarthy nicknamed it, the “Queen of Avenues.” It marches in an unbroken line from Washington Square North past the Empire State Building (the King of All Buildings), New York Public Library, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Central Park to Marcus Garvey Park, [...]
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SURVIVORS. Amazingly these ancient NYC lampposts are still in place
October 18, 2007Deadlines, deadlines…we all deal with them and your webmaster is no exception. I have plenty of photos, but not a whole lot of research prepared for today’s Slice. Fortunately, there are always lampposts to talk about; I’ve been fascinated with them since I first left my apartment in the stroller in oh, say 1958, when I was one. [...]
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LAMPPOST ALLSORTS: from the Bob Mulero Collection
May 30, 2007In a sense Forgotten New York always goes back to lampposts. When your webmaster was six I noticed the wholesale replacement of old styles by new ones in Bay Ridge and later, all around town. I filled note pads and tablets with drawings of lampposts — never ones of my own design, but slavish imitations [...]
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ANCIEN REGIME: Before the Corvingtons and Crooks took over, there were all kinds of weird lampposts on the scene
February 17, 2007Streetlamps powered by electricity first appeared on New York City streets in 1892, and while from about (as far as your webmaster can tell) the 1930s on, they fell into four basic genres, the long-masted “Corvingtons“, twinlampsused on main streets and boulevards, bishop crooks, and the reverse-scrolled Type Fs. In the wild and woolly early days of [...]
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BRIDGES TOO FAR: Until recently, strange and wondrous lamppost designs could be found on NYC bridges
March 25, 2006Paralyzing inertia is my archenemy. Despite accumulating a wealth of knowledge about the relics and remnants of the NYC of the past throughout my teens, 20s and 30s, I didn’t begin to amass a library of photographs of these kinds of things until I was 40 years old, and while over the next few years [...]
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MERCURY FALLING: 1960s luminaires disappearing, in NYC at least
February 4, 2006In 1963, the life of a 6-year-old lamppost enthusiast changed irrevocably: the cast iron Type 24M “Corvington” poles that had dominated the streets of Bay Ridge disappeared seemingly overnight, with mostly all of them replaced by streamlined aluminum poles with octagonal shafts. Most of the shafts were topped by straightarm masts, some by cobra-necked ones, and [...]
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BELIEVE IT! NY’s craziest lampposts
January 5, 2005IT’S ALWAYS FUN when it’s time to do a lamppost page in Forgotten NY, because these vaguely anthropomorphic untility poles are what got me started with this Forgotten NY stuff decades ago. My parents used to take me for bus rides all over Brooklyn, and I could never be seen without a pencil, a spoon, [...]
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UNDER THE BRIDGE: Outmoded designs hide under bridges
February 22, 2004TO FIND RARE BEASTS, you have to know what environment they thrive in. The same principle applies to locating species of ancient NYC streetlighting…they like to hang out in the darkest corners of the city, where the Department of Transportation can’t find them. Lamp designs that are long extinct in bright sunlight are often found [...]
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GUMBALL RALLY — Weird Lampposts of Williamsburg
January 26, 2004WE’VE SPENT a lot of time in Williamsburg lately…it’s a great source of Forgotteniana, and as one of NYC’s most-established neighborhoods, a great place to walk around in with its bars and cafes that sprouted up when relatively lower rents in Williamsburg started attracting Lower East Siders from Manhattan. Things have pretty much settled down [...]
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TALES OF THE T-POLES. NYC’s variety of telephone pole lighting fixtures over the decades.
March 18, 2002Heavy snow in NYC winters is unpredictable. A series of winters with little snow can be followed by years of blizzardy winters. But a fearsome, freak blizzard in early March 1888 caught New York City completely unprepared, and caused property damage, injuries and death. It also changed how telephone and telegraph wires were connected to Manhattan homes [...]
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CHANGING OF THE GUARD: Documenting the beginning of the end of the ornate castirons in 1960.
November 18, 2001ROLL CALL OF LUMINAIRES I’ll admit it. There’s a big hole in my information on NYC lamppost manufacturers and makes, since I’ve not a clue of these designs’ actual names, nor their manufacturers. These are the luminaires that were still lurking about NYC when I first began taking note of lampposts back when I was a [...]
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DESKEYS. 1958′s lamppost of the future, in its twilight
September 28, 2001BY THE THOUSANDS they came, back in the early 1960s, replacing the picturesque castiron Corvington longarms… It was a strange, exhilarating, depressing yet exciting time to be a six-year-old lamppost fan back in 1963. My street, Sixth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was lined with the Victorian-era chocolate-colored “Corvington” long-armed mast poles (similar to the one [...]
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HOW TO FRAME A CROOK. How the Department of Transportation defaced classic cast iron poles in the 1980s.
August 1, 2001Before the days when the New York City Department of Transportation began to install replicas of classic bishop-crook, “Corvington” long-armed lamps and twinlamp designs, they defaced still-standing classic lampposts that were installed anywhere from 1892 to 1940 with bright sodium “bucket light” fixtures. They were put there in the early 1980s to replace incandescent bulbs in [...]
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FOUR FACES OF QUEENSBORO. The Ed Koch Bridge’s original light stanchion
July 10, 2001Paraphrasing the old Donovan hit…first there was a lamppost, then there was no lamppost, then there is… In 1999 we mourned the (premature) loss of this original Queensboro Bridge light stanchion, at the eastbound entrance at 2nd Avenue and 59th Street. Looks like the egg’s on our faces and the yolk’s on us, because the ever-unpredictable [...]
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STOPPED SHORT. We remember stoplight designs of the past.
April 21, 2001The little olive-colored stoplight, with its serrated exterior and the fluted base, once was to NYC streets what the passenger pigeon was to the skies. They weren’t on every corner…traffic wasn’t so heavy as to mandate their universal presence…but as often as not, two of these, cater-cornered, was enough to control traffic and allow people [...]
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HARLEM NOCTURNE. Some extremely old posts in Harlem have survived.
March 18, 2001They used to light an underpass that brought traffic from Adam Clayton Powell Blvd (formerly 7th Avenue) under the Harlem River Drive. They’re a New York City lamppost with no other related genus or species–they’re in a class of their own. They sort of represent an evolutionary midway point between the Beaux Arts twinlamps and the [...]
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FUTURE LIGHTS. The odd lamps of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel
November 13, 2000Jane! Stop these crazy things! There are some streetlamps on the East Side in the 30s that resemble props from an animated Jetsons cartoon. But these venerable poles are now over sixty years old! (Come to think of it George is over 50 himself.) With their sci-fi, futuristic design, the streetlamps that line “Tunnel Entrance” and [...]
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THE LAMPS OF PRE-BECA
September 24, 2000Before it was Tribeca, it was the Lower West Side…and it had a lot of cast-iron lamps. Take a look at a former woebegone area. We’ll talk about the coelacanth and H.R. Giger, too. The photo in the title card, from Danny Lyon’s indispensible The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, shows the intersection of Washington and [...]
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FAMOUS CROOKS OF YORE. The evolution of NYC’s most popular pre-1950 lamppost.
June 9, 2000As many Bishops Crooks lampposts that are still standing…there are legions of these old warriors that are no more. As late as the early to mid 1980s, the streets of New York City were still greatly populated by these poles that imitated episcopal staffs. They kept a Little Old New York ambience wherever they stood. [...]
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WEDGE WAY IS UP. NYC’s 1960s non glass bowl lamps
November 9, 1999Wedges, scoopers, turtlebeaks and nozzles! When the talk turns to street lighting, as it often does with me and Forgotten Fans (remember those cone-shaped things that turned up on bishops crooks in the mid-40s? Remember when they changed the orange fire alarm lights from globular to cylindrical? Why did they tear down those weird vertical [...]
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WALKWAY LAMPS. Pedestrian ramps over expressways’ special lighting
April 18, 1999Lamppost design of yore can be seen in surviving original walkway lampposts that carry pedestrian traffic across busy highways such as the Long Island Expressway and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Many carry their original “cup” diffusers although several have been given the bucket sodium lamps that began appearing in the 1970s. LEFT, CENTER: Oddly, the dignified walkway [...]
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DWARVES. Lampposts that fit in small spaces
January 3, 1999Throughout the five boroughs, there are scattered some streetlamps that look as if they didn’t eat their spinach during their formative years. Their growth seems stunted. Actually, the city has valid reasons to install such short poles. The above pictures were taken in the vicinity of 23rd Avenue and 82nd Street near LaGuardia Airport. Lampposts [...]
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THE LAST GASLIGHT
December 2, 1998Here we present some old designs that don’t easily fit the above categories, including the remains of the last gaslight-era lamp left standing. LEFT: This unprepossessing little pole, at the corner of Broadway and West 211th Street in Inwood in Manhattan represents a last dinosaur. Of the thousands of gaslamps that once populated the streets [...]
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MID-PERIOD LAMPS. NYC lamppost scene, 1940-1965
October 8, 1998In New York City, between the golden age of cast-iron lampposts, approximately 1895 and 1950, and prior to the brave new world of green-white fluorescent bulbs (which held sway between 1960 and 1972, when super-bright yellow sodium bulbs took over) there was an interregnum of sorts, when old-style yellow incandescent lights were installed on modern, [...]
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TARNISHED SHERIFF’S STAR. A very special lamppost
August 30, 1998This abandoned, rusty bishops crook lamppost in an empty lot in the Lower East Side is an important one, because not only is it an increasingly rare cast iron remnant…but it signifies a neighborhood that is no longer there. Years ago, the Lower East Side wasn’t dominated by housing projects like the Baruch, Seward Park, LaGuardia, [...]
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WALL LIGHTS. Cast-iron masts on buildings
August 30, 1998Throughout New York, lampposts are mounted on walls under special circumstances. Sometimes, there is not enough room on a narrow sidewalk to safely install a complete lamppost. At other locations, the city fears that truck traffic into a building garage is sufficiently great to not risk placing a lamppost on the sidewalk. And, at other [...]
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WONDERFUL WOODIES
August 23, 1998Constructed exclusively to light the network of parkways that Robert Moses constructed beginning in the Twenties, these distinctive poles are made of both wood and iron. Some are still in New York City but you have to know where to look! Once upon a time, wooden lampposts like this one dominated NYC parkways constructed by [...]
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BISHOP CROOKS
August 8, 1998New York City has preserved more of the classic Bishop Crook lampposts than any other of the cast-iron designs. In fact, the city has been busy since the 1980s bringing back the bishop crook design in newly installed posts, notably along Sixth Avenue in the Village and as far north as 23rd Street. The bishop [...]
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STOPLIGHT CLASSICS
May 28, 1998NYC stoplight design has pretty much been stuck in neutral since the 1960s, when cylindrical posts holding three-light stoplights as well as WALK/DONT WALK signs first appeared on street corners, joining the more massive guy-wired lamps at major corners that first appeared in the 1950s. This page will take a look at the stoplight posts [...]
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TYPE F –The 7th Avenue lamppost
May 10, 1998Appearing to be a hybrid of the bishop’s crooks and long-armed poles, these distinctive lamps originally found a home on Seventh Avenue, though today they’re generally used for decorative effect in bridges and parks. In the castiron lamppost era, Seventh Avenue boasted its own design, a sort of intermediate one between the Bishops Crook and Long-armed designs. [...]
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TWINLAMPS. Two..two…lampposts in one
May 4, 1998Once the mainstay of multilane boulevards in the pre-expressway era, cast-iron twinlamps once decorated highways like the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and Queens Boulevard and Horace Harding Boulevard in Queens. They did appear in other situations, however, and I’ve captured two on this page. LEFT and 2nd from left: One of the three Twinlamps [...]
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CORVINGTONS. When a long reach is needed
April 4, 1998Once upon a time, New York City avenues were dominated by a long-armed, chocolate-colored cast-iron pole that my fellow lamppost maven Jeff Saltzman (whose site you can reach here) calls the “Corvingtons” although I doubt the Department Of Transportation ever gave them a real name. While side streets mostly had Bishop Crook poles, or a [...]
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CRESCENT MOONS
March 23, 1998There are still a few of them left and some are actually working. “Crescent moon” style luminaires, called “crescents” because of their shape, were in vogue from the mid-40s until they were replaced by mercury vapor lamps in the early 60s. The “crescent moons” were very flexible in that they could be used both [...]
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Roll Call of Luminaries
June 18, 1997I’ll admit it. There’s a big hole in my information on NYC lamppost manufacturers and makes, since I’ve not a clue of these designs’ actual names, nor their manufacturers. These are the luminaires that were still lurking about NYC when I first began taking note of lampposts back when I was a 4-eyed fat kid [...]