SINCE the beginnings of Forgotten NY in 1999 I have periodically talked about “Octapoles,” NYC’s standard silver-colored lampposts whose shafts have eight sides, hence my name for them. They have been in use since 1950, when the first one went up under the 3rd Avenue El at East 50th Street. I have also frequently mentioned Bell luminaires, the bell-shaped lighting fixtures that at first housed incandescent bulbs in the late 1930s. The make was revived in 1980 at the Villard Houses at Madison Avenue and East 50th Street, which at the time was home to NYC’s Urban Center, a gathering space for architects and designers; I frequented its bookstore until its closure in 2010.
In 1989, the Urban Center hosted the only exhibit of NYC lampposts in my experience…until NYC’s Lamppost King Robert Mulero and I mounted our own exhibit in the summer of 2010 at the City Reliquary in Williamsburg. I have some photos of that exhibit at the Urban Center, which I plan on using in a future post.
Today, though, I was sent a couple of advertisements that shed some light…but not much…on the origins of the Octapoles and the Bells. The ad shown above featured the Bells as manufactured by the Daunt Corporation at 120-126 Sutton Street in Greenpoint, currently used as an event space and for video production. At this remove, nothing much can be found out about Daunt on the World Wide Web.
The Octapoles, meanwhile, were being manufactured by a firm called Vulcan, located at 233 Varet Street in East Williamsburg. The date on the ad is indistinct, but seems to be 1957; I have seen photos of the Octas as early as 1950, as I mentioned. The bracketed poles were only made for a number of yeasr in the 1950s, replaced by straight masts and later, by “cobra necks” that are the dominant form today.
Both the Octapoles and Bell fixtures, as well as other designs, originally had names attached to them as designers. But I haven’t found them. I know of only Donald Deskey, whose slotted-shaft lamps broke the hegemony of the Octas for a few years in the 1960s.
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2/15/24