"deskey 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…

PERIODICALLY, I post about the dwindling number of twin 5th Avenue Donald Deskey-designed lampposts; I did so in 2013 and 2016, and in the former year I listed the locations…

SINCE the beginnings of Forgotten NY in 1999 I have periodically talked about “Octapoles,” NYC’s standard silver-colored lampposts whose shafts have eight sides, hence my name for them. They have…

I was in Huntington Village on Long Island a few years ago to attend a book signing for Wayne Coffey’s “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done,” his account of the…

Ten years ago in 2008, Forgotten NY chronicled the remaining Twin Donald Deskey lamps on 5th Avenue, and found that their numbers were dwindling indeed. In the ten years since,…

I was looking out a bus window at Richmond Avenue and Arthur Kill Road in Greenridge, Staten Island, when I spotted a rarely-employed double bracket Donald Deskey pole. Never widely…

For over 18 years (as I write this in 2017) I have written about NYC’s infrastructure, as well as other hidden aspects like ancient ads, signage, and things people rarely…

The Westinghouse AK-10 luminaire, commonly known in the lampfan world as the “cuplight” because it could hold coffee if upended, has been a reliable performer since the late 1940s. In…

Many Chinatowns around the USA make full use of local decor, even down to the directional signs and lampposts, and beginning in 1964 or so, NYC began to add its…

CONTINUED FROM PART 1: 5 For Lighting, Streetlight Themes on the Queen of Avenues On the previous page in this series, FNY explored Fifth Avenue’s status as the great repository, and ultimately,…

BY THE THOUSANDS they came, back in the early 1960s, replacing the picturesque castiron Corvington longarms… It was a strange, exhilarating, depressing yet exciting time to be a six-year-old lamppost fan…

I have not often mentioned 5th Avenue’s signature stoplight, the Mercury, a bronze pole with red and green lamps placed catercorner on 5th Avenue from Washington Square to 59th Street…