Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community.
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
Categorized in: Forgotten Slices Street Scenes Tagged with: 5th Avenue Brooklyn
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
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
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
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
