Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
I first encountered a very odd Bishops Crook post in 1998, during the first flush of ForgottenMania, at the NW corner of Hudson and Duane Streets, opposite Duane Park. From the base to the top of the shaft it resembled most other regulation Bishop Crook posts, with the ornamented candy cane or bishop’s staff curving [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
Two prototypes of the slotted Donald Deskey lamppost were installed at Broadway and Murray Street on opposite corners near City Hall in 1958. Besides being the first appearance of this now-iconic NYC lamppost, this also marked the first appearance of the GE M400 luminaire, which burned greenish-white — a contrast to the warm yellow incandescents [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
There seems to be some strange stuff, lamppost and luminaire-wise, increasingly happening in Sunnyside, Queens. While NYC’s streets until mid-2009 were a glorious mish mosh of lighting styles, from the green-white mercury bulbs of the 1960s GE M400 and Westinghouse OV25 “Silverliners”on up to the brilliant yellow sodium lamps first seen in the 1970s and [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
And then there was one. The 65th Street Transverse Road through Central Park used to feature a few Type 8S “Curved mast” poles, complete with their original 1950s-era Westinghouse “cuplights.” Now we’re down to just one, and it has lost its glass reflector bowl, leaving a naked light bulb. I haven’t been over there [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Central Park Manhattan
In February 2010 I wrote about the Type 1 BC bishop crook post at Centre and Grand Streets in SoHo and its accumulated rust. King of NYC Lampposts Bob Mulero reports that the rust problem hasn’t really been alleviated, and the near-century-old post, with its gaslamp ladder rest hommage, seems to be listing a bit [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Soho
I thought I’d seen them all. The remaining Bishop Crooks from NYC’s golden era of castiron posts, 1915-1950, of course. Only about 12-25 of them remain — Bishop Crooks, Corvingtons, and Twinlamps from the period. Most of them were gradually purged away beginning in 1950, when the first aluminum octagonal posts were erected, followed by [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Hamilton Heights Manhattan
The Type 24 Bishop Crook lamppost is the most common of the remaining older NYC bishop crook posts, and it’s the model on which the many thousands of repro crooks that have been populating NYC streets were based on. It’s notable, though, that the form used to have nearly a dozen different variations, only a [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
What did I take away from the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens? Well, I was eight years old. I don’t remember much from back then. What I do remember are impressions. The Beatles on transistor radios everywhere. The waffles and ice cream. I had an orange hat with a feather on it. Fountains [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Flushing Meadows Queens
Following a tip about ‘ugly, futurisic’ lampposts appearing on the 9th Avenue and West 14th Street area, I found instead on West 15th a small clutch of the new davit-style lampposts of which the Department of Transportation is becoming increasingly proud. By definition, a davit-style post is one in which the shaft curves out to [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Chelsea Manhattan
Since we recently lost another of 5th Avenue’s classic 1910s-era Twin lampposts, at 32nd Street, there re just 4 left from a proud history of hundreds. Classic Twin: 5th and 19th Demise of a classic at 5th and 23rd “Five for Lighting” Donald Deskey posts of 5th Avenue However, soon we may be pronouncing the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue Midtown
Although Bishop Crook lampposts have proliferated all over town again over the past couple of decades, there was a time, between about 1962 and 1980, when they almost went extinct, except for a few survivors in downtown Manhattan. In 1980 it all changed when a flock of retro-Crooks, using the original molds (now available from [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Turtle Bay
It’s a shame how 5th Avenue is deteriorating so much, lamppost-wise. At one time there was an unbroken string of these Twins (in 2 different species, admittedly) from Washington Square to Central Park. Now, just four remain. We lost this one recently. Even 5th Avenue’s set of twin Deskeys, special editions debuting in 1965, are [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Midtown
For want of a better name, I’ll call these lamps, which illuminate pedestrian walkways, “Robert Moses lamps” because they appear on pedestrian walkways located on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Clearview Expressway, and Long Island Expressway (there are probably others), all bruited through Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods by NYC traffic czar Robert Moses in the 1950s. They [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Robert Moses
Temporary lampposts, used when a regular lamp has fallen over, been crashed into, or is under repair for whatever reason, consist of simple wooden conical bases in which the electric works are contained, and a simple pipe to hold the luminaire. Temporary posts of this type have neen used for nearly a century. My [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
I regret to mention that one of 5th Avenue‘s last original Twin lampposts, on the SW corner of 5th and West 32nd Street, has been removed and replaced with a temporary stoplight. Between 1892 and 1965, 5th Avenue was lit by dozens of Twinlamps of two separate species, one designed in the 1890s and another [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Midtown
When the Rouse Company remade the South Street Seaport area between 1981-1983, rehabilitating buildings, adding new buildings, and opening the tourist-friendly Pier 17 (where I still get tuna and pasta for lunch every so often) it attempted to add authenticity to the streets of the Seaport by adding a number of lampposts, unique to NYC, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Mnahattan Seaport
As part of its centennial celebrations in early 2013, Grand Central Terminal, at East 42nd Street between Vanderbilt and Lexington Avenues, has restored a 1919 lamppost that was taken out of service in 1985… The Park Avenue Viaduct, seen here at its southern end at East 40th Street during the August 2010 Summer Streets [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan
The Owls Head Sewage Treatment Plant, on the outskirts of beautiful Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is accessible by roads from Bay Ridge Avenue (69th Street) and from the Belt Parkway. The plant had always had species of oddball lampposts on its roads — this photo is from the 1940s, and these posts, which resemble the ones [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Street Lamps Tagged with: Bay Ridge Brooklyn
It’s not surprising, to me at least, that while the Brutalist, unadorned lamppost designs of the 1970s and 1980s are increasingly falling out of favor, their more ornate, scrolled cast iron cousins of the 1910s through 1940s have been slowly coming back to prominence. NYC first began to install new versions of the classic Bishop [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn East Flatbush Jamaica Queens
The blasted landscape of the old West Side Highway, closed in December 1973 and finally demolished in the 1980s, epitomizes the general deterioration NYC’s infrastructure was undergoing because of, as always, lack of $$$$, throughout the era. There were rumblings in the late 1980s that the Williamsburg Bridge would have to be permanently closed, and [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: highways
Octagonal-shafted lampposts didn’t appear on NYC streets until 1950. They are now the predominant, go-to lampposts of NYC and have supported a flock of different luminaires over the years. They have withstood all challengers to their prominence, from the Donald Deskey slot-shafted posts that appeared in the 1960s to the L-shaped Downtown Alliance posts that [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Kew Gardens Hills Queens
Since the Corvington Longarm Type 24M — and other old forms such as the bishop crook and Type F lights — were reintroduced to NYC streets beginning in the 1980s, the Department of Transportation has granted them a great amount of flexibility, taking them where they never went before, such as producing twin versions of [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Morris Park
This is the sole remaining original lamppost of the Tudor City project, developed on the east end of East 42nd Street in the late 1920s and 1930s by Fred F. French; it replaced the former gashouse and slaughterhouse district. The lamp bears great similarity to those in Forest Hills Gardens, which was built about a [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Tudor City
In the mid-20th Century, just when NYC was replacing its ornate cast iron and wrought iron posts with more sedate aluminum octagonal-shaped lampposts, Park Avenue got a set of posts all its own with a unique streamlined design featuring then-new greenish-white mercury lamps. They didn’t last too long, however, and by the mid-1960s they had [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Grand Central Manhattan
The slotted Donald Deskey lamppost was introduced on Broadway and Murray Street in 1958, and by the early 1960s they were being installed by the thousands on main avenues, side streets, parkways and expressways. The two slots on the shaft made it adaptable to hold fixtures like curved streetlamp masts, its most frequent use, but [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Subways & Trains Tagged with: Chinatown Manhattan
This is an early version of the Type F reverse-scroll NYC streetlamp at Elm and Pearl Streets in, I’d say, 1910 or so. The Type F was used on side streets in a smaller version with less ornamentation, and could sometimes be used on north-south avenues like 7th (though it was replaced by Twinlamps fairly [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Civic Center Manhattan
11/7/12: I am slowly getting back into posting after Hurricane Sandy (and today’s freak snowstorm)… Today, I’ll take a look at NYC’s rarest castiron post revival. The city has brought back many classic forms over the past 30 years, from the longarmed “Corvingtons”, Bishop Crooks, Type Fs and Twins, and even new versions of the [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps
Davit lampposts, which are a single curved mast instead of a shaft with a mast attached, are becoming the new black in New York City lampposts. A flock were installed along Columbia Street in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, they dominate the streets surrounding Barclays Center, and they took over Houston Street in Manhattan [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn DUMBO
It’s hard to find “Whitestone” type lampposts anywhere in NYC these days, though in the 1940s and 1950s, they were the lampposts of choice on the then-fledgling NYC expressway system. Officially the “Type 41″ single or twin arm posts, they originated on the Whitestone Bridge and its approach roads and spread to wherever elevated expressways [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Brooklyn Heights
Jamaica Avenue in 1977 during demolition of the Jamaica El. The train was rerouted in a subway under Archer Avenue in 1988; in true MTA fashion, the replacement line arrived 11 years late. I was living in Bay Ridge at the time and I’m sorry I missed out on Jamaica Avenue in transition, with the [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Subways & Trains Tagged with: Jamaica Queens
The City began to reproduce old castiron lamppost forms during the 1980s, and they’ve generally followed those designs, which appeared as early as the 1890s in some cases, very, very closely. However, one detail has eluded them. All castiron posts — Bishop Crooks, the Twins used on 5th Avenue, other main streets, and parkways — [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
The Twin, originally produced for use on 5th Avenue at the dawn of the electrified lamppost era in the 1890s, originally had a different design (the mast of one of those originals can still be seen at the NE corner of 5th Avenue and East 23rd Street at Madison Square). Later, a modified design that [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
One of the more mysterious practices that I’ve noticed, and have mulled over in in the back of my head for years, is some banks’ practice of installing their own lampposts on the sidewalks outside their property. I’m not sure they’re maintained any more, as I do not often happen by at night. Year in [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Park Slope
Word comes from NYC’s King of Lampposts, Bob Mulero, that the perhaps centuries-old set of Special Iron Twin Standards on the Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard ramp to the Harlem River Driveway just south of the Macomb’s Dam Bridge have been altered and replaced. As first described in Forgotten NY in 2001, “they sort of represent [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Harlem Manhattan
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: City Hall Manhattan
In 1958, a new streamlined lamppost — completely different than the ornate cast and wrought iron posts that then lit NYC streets, designed in the Beaux Arts era, 1890-1915 — appeared on Broadway on Murray Street opposite City Hall. It featured a stainless steel shaft with two slots, a curved mastarm, and a new luminaire [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: City Hall
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Midwood
When modern octagonal-shafted poles, which are made of aluminum and are usually silver or gray-painted, first started appearing in NYC streets in 1950, the mast of choice was curved with a single thinner bracket, as shown here. In the early 1960s when GE M-400s and Westinghouse OV-25s, which were oblong and gave a greenish white [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
The Donald Deskey lamppost was introduced in 1958 at Broadway and Murray Street alongside City Hall Park, and was brought out as a standard NYC lamppost in 1962. It was designed by architect and industrial designer Donald Deskey, who is most famed for the interiors of Radio City Music Hall, as well as the Crest [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
There’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 [...]
Categorized in: One Shots Street Lamps
Over 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, [...]
Categorized in: Out of Town Street Lamps Tagged with: England London Manchester
Since 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, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Flatiron Manhattan
It 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Tribeca
Sorry 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: lamps
Allow 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, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Fire Alarms
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: IND lampposts subway
I 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Woody lampposts
What 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps
The 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Astoria Queens Triborough Bridge
So 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn
Time 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 [...]
While 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 [...]
I was desultorily ambling south on Lexington Avenue on the Monday afternoon of August 2, 2010 after a meeting with the director of the Museum of the City of New York on 5th and 104th (if my aims at the meeting bear fruit, I’ll let you know*, but there’s no reason to even hint at what may transpire, [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Upper East Side
In the summer of 2009 I was on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, having just completed another 40 or 50 blocks in my drawn-out survey of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn (two segments of this have already appeared in FNY) when, en route for the subway, I passed the City Reliquary at Number 370. It had been awhile since [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Williamsburg
On a way more brutally hot Saturday than my post-operational stamina had any right to be enduring, I weaved my way pitifully through Pelham Bay in the Bronx, a mendicant seeking what crumbs the neighborhood would toss an amateur seeker of hidden urban secrets. After gingerly crossing a broken glass-strewn, pockmarked, graffiti-smeared expressway overpass, I saw [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Pelham Bay
In downtown Brooklyn, there are a pair of streets called Fleet Street and Fleet Place — and even an additional alley on York Street in DUMBO called Fleet’s Alley. I had suspected that they were called Fleet in honor of London, England’s Fleet Street, the former newspaper and press capital there, as well as the street where Sweeney [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Downtown Brooklyn
On the outskirts of Chinatown and Little Italy (the two Manhattan neighborhoods bleed into each other), at Centre and Grand Streets, stands one of the oldest examples of the oldest working variety of NYC lamppost, the bishop crook. This particular specimen is classified as a Type 1BC, recognized for several archaic elements that later Crooks dispensed [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
Those 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Queens Sunnyside
When 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
Having 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Tribeca
News 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Of 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Flatiron Manhattan
Avail 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Harlem Manhattan Triborough Bridge
Paleontologists 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. [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Clinton Hill Manhattan Parks Ridgewood Sutton Square
Remember 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Madison Square Manhattan
Even 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. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Greenwich Village Manhattan
Your 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Stuyvesant Town
I 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Meatpacking
Forgotten 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, [...]
Categorized in: Neighborhoods Street Lamps Tours Tagged with: Financial District Manhattan
It’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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps
Lampposts 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 [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan
CONTINUED 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue Donald Deskey Manhattan
Fifth 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, [...]
Categorized in: Roads Street Lamps Tagged with: 14th Street 5th Avenue Donald Deskey Manhattan
Deadlines, 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. [...]
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Lamps
In 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Astoria Newark Queens Sunnyside
Streetlamps 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 145th Street 5th Avenue Bridges Brooklyn Hanover Square Manhattan
Paralyzing 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bridges Queens Sunnyside
In 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Fort Schuyler General Electric Hoboken Jackson Heights Madison Square McCarren Park Queens Rosedale Westinghouse
IT’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, [...]
TO 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brighton Beach Bronx Brooklyn Bushwick Forest Hills Greenwich Village High Line Manhattan Ozone Park Queens Riverdale
WE’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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Fort Greene Gumballs Williamsburg
For perhaps seven decades it stood sentinel on Rockaway and New York Boulevards, where New York City slowly began to fade out and Nassau County began to fade in. When this Type 24M “Corvington” was first placed here, we were probably in the Hoover administration, the Babe and Lou were swatting them over the wall [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Corvingtons Queens Rosedale
It’s 1950 and on Third Avenue, the el trains rumbling overhead, like the Triceratops and Tyrannosaurs of the Cretaceous, are blissfully unmindful of their upcoming doom. The shrews, rats and moles scuttling about at the feet of the dinosaurs in that long-ago era were equally unaware of their coming hegemony, and the evolution of [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 3rd Avenue 3rd Avenue El 6th Avenue Borough Park Bronx Brooklyn Bushwick Canarsie Cobble Hill Ditmas Park Harlem Manhattan Riverdale
Heavy 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn East New York Jamaica Avenue Morris Park Queens Radial Wave Ridgewood Riverdale Sheepshead Bay Staten Island Van Cortlandt Park West Brighton
ROLL 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Eastern Parkway Fort Greene Queens Radial Wave Westinghouse
BY 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue Bay Ridge Belt Parkway Brooklyn Cadman Plaza Donald Deskey Fire Alarms Manhattan Queens Ridgewood Riverside Drive
Before 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 6th Avenue Bishop Crooks Chinatown Jackson Heights Manhattan Queens Soho
Paraphrasing 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Queensboro Bridge
The 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bayside FDR Drive Grand Central Terminal Harlem Manhattan Ozone Park Queens Stoplights
They 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Harlem Manhattan Westinghouse
Jane! 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Manhattan Queens Midtown Tunnel
Before 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bishop Crooks Corvingtons Manhattan Tribeca West Side Highway
As 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. [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bishop Crooks Financial District Grand Central Terminal Greenwich Village Lower East Side Manhattan
Wedges, 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Brooklyn Corona Dyker Heights General Electric Jamaica New Brighton Queens Staten Island Westinghouse
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 4-eyed fat kid [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps
Lamppost 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Carroll Gardens Flushing Queens Riverdale Staten Island
Throughout 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Jackson Heights Jamaica Ozone Park Queens Ridgewood
Here 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Flushing Inwood Manhattan Queens Throgs Neck
In 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, [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Cypress Hills Kew Gardens Manhattan Parkchester Queens Van Cortlandt Park
This 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, [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Lower East Side Manhattan
Throughout 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps
Constructed 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bayside Belt Parkway Brooklyn Queens Sheepshead Bay
New 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Astoria City Hall Park Financial District Manhattan Queens Riverdale Washington Heights
NYC 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 [...]
Categorized in: Signs Street Lamps Tagged with: Auburndale Central Park Far Rockaway Forest Hills Grand Central Terminal Manhattan Ozone Park Queens St. Albans
Appearing 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. [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 7th Avenue 8th Street Bath Beach Brooklyn Manhattan Maspeth Queens
Once 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. Twinlamps, and other castiron NYC lampposts, are classified by catalog. In [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: 5th Avenue City Hall Park Harlem Madison Square Manhattan Tribeca
Once 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 [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Central Park Corvingtons Dyker Heights Financial District Manhattan Queens Riverdale Rosedale Van Cortlandt Park
There 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 on [...]
Categorized in: Street Lamps Tagged with: Bronx Brooklyn Eastchester Manhattan Bridge Midwood Van Cortlandt Park
