HERE’S a utility pole carrying power lines, telephone lines and cable TV lines, as well as wire devoted to other uses, at 38th Avenue and 57th Street in Woodside. Thousands pass it every day on Long Island Rail Road trains; I see it, if I am looking out the window, on every trip to Manhattan I make. But it’s likely that few consider the different eras of infrastructure are represented on this single pole.
Consider the two finned masts supporting the lighting fixture. I wish I knew what company manufactures these, but they first appeared in the 1950s and have supported all manner of NYC street lighting from incandescent bulbs (yellow), mercury (greenish white), sodium (much brighter yellow) and LED (bright white).
Cylindrical wood telephone poles (though probably not this one) go back to the 1840s when they supported telegraph wire at first, then telephone wire beginning in the 1870s. Later the poles supported electrical wire and cable TV wire.
Finally, the scrolled mast fixture is one of the few that have survived since the 1910s, when by the thousands they supported incandescent street lighting beneath flat, fluted-edge “radial wave” reflectors. Later, larger specimens were developed to support heavier incandescent lights with glass reflector bowls. After those were phased out, the scrolled masts, in a bigger and smaller size, supported fire alarm indicator lamps in globes or cylinders of orange plastic. Those were decommissioned approximately 15-20 years ago and today, they are just a visual signal and are no longer serviced; when the bulbs burn out or plastic falls off they are simply let alone. There are approximately 100 of these relics remaining in Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens; Manhattan and Staten Island have none. I always dig it when I find one I didn’t know about previously.
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