HARRISON ALLEY VINEGAR HILL

DUMBO, the section of Brooklyn beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, was by and large an industrial and maufacturing outpost for most of its existence; only lately has it become a tourist destination and a location for office buildings and new high rise apartments. Except for its easternmost section, concentrated around Hudson Avenue and Plymouth and Front Streets, known as Vinegar Hill.

At one time in the dim past, DUMBO and Vinegar Hill were suffused with one-block lanes and alleys, as recounted in this Street Necrology page. Over time, though, most of those alleys have been built over and eliminated. One fascinating and mysterious remnant, though, is Harrison Alley, a dead end with one address on Evans Street east of Hudson Avenue. It is thickly wooded and nearly impossible to photograph when trees are leaved, but I passed by on 12/31/23, when things were easier. I had to shoot through a chain link fence, as the owner of #1 Harrison, the pink house at the end of the alley, has privatized it*

*See comments for an apparent purpose of the privatization

When zooming in on the photo, I found something interesting: a remaining GE-M100 fixture! These were once installed by the thousands on city side streets along with Westinghouse MO-8s, their chief competition. Known as “open-bottom” or “cutoff” luminaires, they were designed to illuminate residential or side streets without a glass reflector bowl in a somewhat dim, greenish white glow.

Though their demise began as early as 1972, when yellow sodium lamps began their lengthy reign, examples were relatively frequent until 2009, when the NYC Department of Transportation installed new models of an updated GE M-400 on virtually every lamp in NYC. Today, only six years later, they are succumbing to the new light-emitting diode (LED) lamps, which shine a brilliant white.

They had, in turn, replaced the incandescent “crescent moons” installed in the 1950-1960 period that replaced the radial-wave reflector lamps, which had first appeared around 1915. I remember the “moons” and the “waves” from my youth, but around 1962, the first mercury vapor lamps began their takeover. 

You never know what lurks, if you pay attention.

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6/19/25