WHEELER Reflector Co. primarily produced traditional style pendant street lamps. When NYC introduced the finned telephone pole streetlamp masts in the 1950s, the flat radial wave incandescent lamps in use on NYC side streets since the 1910s were apparently incompatible with them, and so the Wheeler “crescent moon” reflector was employed. Here we see it on a scrolled mast as it is part of a remaining flock of incandescents on a walkway, now largely reclaimed by nature, that connected the IRT 242nd Street station in Van Cortlandt Park with the long-deceased NY Central Van Cortlandt Park station.
The Wheeler crescents were designed to reflect incandescent lighting directly beneath them, instead of outward in all directions as glass reflector bowls do. The “Crescents,” besides appearing on finned and scrolled telephone pole masts, also made their way to Type G Corvington posts, as well as filling in as pendant lamps beneath overpasses. They could also be found on the Manhattan Bridge walkways before they were closed in 1965, not reopening with new lighting until the early 2000s. They were largely supplanted by mercury lamps in the 1960s; Wheeler also produced a side mounted “merc” that gained occasional employment in NYC.
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4/21/23
1 comment
Fine writing here with a curiouys history. Thanks.