WINDSOR TOWER LAMPS, Tudor City

WHY am I using the Streetlamps stamp here at Tudor City’s Windsor Tower at 1st Avenue and East 40th Street, the largest building in the luxury apartment campus found between 1st and 2nd Avenues and East 40th and 43rd Streets? I’ll get to that. I keep meaning to do a feature on Tudor City — I shot a literal roll of film there many years ago before I began using a digital camera. Somehow I can’t get a handle on it. And there’s plenty to interest me like ancient species of streetlamps, which I’ll get to.

The complex was constructed in 1925 by Fred F. French, who bought up several blocks of dilapidated tenements located in a particularly hilly section of Manhattan and constructed a group of Tudor-themed buildings that were supplied with British names. It’s semiprivate, but its parks and sitting areas are open to the public.

The Windsor Tower is the largest and tallest building in the batch. The Tudor City Landmarks Preservation Commission Dedication report describes it thusly:

But what the LPC report doesn’t mention are the Windsor Tower’s enclosed sidewalk on 1st Avenue, that admittedly looks a little forbidding here. Relatively few buildings in NYC feature these: I know of building on Rector Street and West Streets downtown, quite a few on Roosevelt Island, one on Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights and this one, at Windsor Tower.

But what really gets me here are the lamps that illuminate the sidewalk. They’re survivors.

These lamps are actually variants of the incandescent Westinghouse AK-10 “cuplight” that used to be ubiquitous around here from 1950 until 1965 or so, used on both ornate castirons and more modern octagonal poles. They were also used as pendant lamps underneath road or railroad overpasses and usually appeared in their complete versions. But occasionally there just wasn’t room for a full “pendant.” That’s where these came in, essentially “cuplights” without the cup, just the incandescent bulb and the glass reflector bowl.

The Windsor tower is the only place I can find them now, but the most prominent place I remember was the BQE overpass over Furman Street in Brooklyn Heights. They’re long gone from there of course.

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10/20/21