Forgotten New York is in Association with the Greater Astoria Historical Society
The Greater Astoria Historical Society, chartered in 1985, is a non-profit organization supported by the Long Island City community. We are dedicated to preserving our past and using it to promote our community's future.
John Masefield famously wrote, I must go down to the seas again, and I am also a creature of habit — I am drawn to certain areas over and over, though I remain steadfast in my desire to eventually describe every neighborhood and subneighborhood in New York City to the last detail. I was at [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. LEFT and 2nd from left: One of the three Twinlamps [...]
