WHITESTONE POLES

BELIEVE it or not a set of these metal “Whitestone” poles, complete with SLECO “cuplights” could be seen at the Queens side of the Roosevelt Island Bridge at Vernon Boulevard and 36th Avenue in Ravenswood well into the first decade of the 2000s, when they were finally relieved of service by new cylindrical poles. The were called “Whitestones” by Jeff Saltzman, who created Jeff’s Streetlight Site in the 1990s, as they were first employed on the Whitestone Bridge in the 1930s. Over the next three decades, they were seen by the thousands on NYC’s parkways and expressways, carrying Gumballs and Cups in the early days, but later modified to hold mercury lamps such as the Westinghouse Silverliners and GE M400s. They finally fell out of favor and were mostly removed in the late 1960s.

You will still find a few around, carrying LED and sodium lamps, such as three on the Sands Street Brooklyn Bridge approach, some of the spaghetti roads connecting the FDR to the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan Bridge, and a lone sentinel at 17th Street and 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s amazing how the city “disappeared” them, given that Donald Deskey poles haven’t rolled off the assembly line since the 1970s, yet they still pop up everywhere.

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6/17/25