OUT for my usual morning walk, I passed by two Little Neck dead ends, Cornell Lane and Jessie Court, which issue from the north side of Northern Boulevard east of Marathon Parkway. My initial intent here was to do a thorough examination of each lane but I demurred because: 1) both are semiprivate, but with many locals using them to access backhouse parking lots; 2) because Cornell Lane is semiprivate, when I have explored it I have gotten real or imagined dirty looks from Little Neckers who reside on the street, and I didn’t feel like defusing arguments from “Guardians” this morning; and 3) In 2009, I did a page on the two lanes that is so thorough, complete with interviews and historic maps, that I see no reason to completely repeat myself. (The real estate office I visited is now an optometrist shop).
What I did notice, though, is that the sun was positioned just right to shine directly on one of, if not the only, Westinghouse OV-8 light fixture (some say MO-8) remaining on a NYC street. It’s an open-bottom, cutoff luminaire that emitted a dim, greenish-white glow without a glass reflector bowl, used extensively across New York City residential neighborhoods during the 1960s and early 1970s as a counterpart to the OV-25 main-street lamps. It was phased out starting in 1972 with the introduction of high-pressure sodium lamps, though rare surviving units lingered on city streets for decades.
Some mercury fixtures survived in odd areas, some outlying neighborhoods like Little Neck. NYC’s department of Transportation is remarkably thorough when replacing outmoded styles, and during what I call the Light Emitting Diode (LED) Revolution in the mid to late 2010s, all mercury lamps except in semiprivate streets were taken out, with only an occasional yellow sodium lamp left in place (likely because the local distributor ran out of LEDs on a particular replacement run).
Unfortunately, after dayburning for several years, this remaining OV-8’s bulb seems to have died. You can still spot OV-8s on Forgotten NY pages from the 2000s.
Check out the ForgottenBook (HarperCollins, 2006), as well as Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013). I also have a chapter in the anthology “New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg” (Reaktion, 2007). As always, “comment…as you see fit.” I earn a small payment when you click on any ad on the site.
10/6/26