DURING my initial photography for Forgotten New York, sometime in 1998-1999, I stumbled on two or three “Woody” lampposts on the entrance road to the Clearview Park Golf Course, just west of the Throgs Neck Bridge. I do not remember my specifci goal for that walk but I was living in Flushing at the time. I could have been tipped about them by people who knew I was developing a website. I have never seen these poles given a formal name, so I took to calling them “woodys” or “woodies.”
By 1999 there were only a handful, less than ten, remaining on the parkways (constructed by traffic czar Robert Moses beginning in the 1920s) they were designed to serve. Notably, they originally carried sodium lights before carrying “bell,” “cup” or “gumball” incandescent pendant fixtures, and sometimes even greenish-white mercury lights. Remaining posts were then fitted with Holophane sodium lamps, bringing it all back home, so to speak. When those poles failed, they were replaced with modern metal cylindrical highway lamps.
If you look at photos of NYC from the 20s and 30s, as I do, these poles could also be found in selected areas on neighborhood streets. On the Rockaway peninsula, they were installed on Beach 108th Street and Rockaway Freeway. I found some of those still in place when I began bicycling all the way to Rockaway from Bay Ridge in 1975.
These poles also came in different makes or styles and were employed on parkways outside of New York, in Nassau and Westchester Counties. Only the model seen here survived past the 1970s. I am unsure of the agency responsible, but retro-Woodies, mimicking one of those discontinued styles, were installed on a section of the Henry Hudson Parkway north of Dyckman Street several years ago.
By the time I found them, the lamps at Clearview were nonfunctional, and soon enough, they were replaced by standard issue octagon-shafted poles and Type B park lamps, which are there today.
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1/16/26