Younger neighborhood folks, if they notice it at all, may be perplexed by this olive-colored post at the corner of 69th Road and 110th Street in Forest Hills. It used to be a stoplight, and thousands of posts of this type controlled traffic at NYC street corners from the 1920s until the mid-1980s, when almost all of them gave way to modern designs. In some cases, they were replaced by small cylindrial poles of the same size, but much more often, busier traffic warranted large guy-wired lights.
In 2009, I covered the death of this post. Unusually the city has simply left it in place with its disconnected wires exposed, which makes it one of the very few, if not the only, “olives” allowed to remain in place outside of Central Park.
3/14/14