THE early 1950s saw new lamppost designs appearing on New York City streets. The Art Deco, Machine Age and Art Moderne movements in architecture had given rise to new, streamlined…

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…

A golden oldie from 1999, here’s a Twin Type F lamppost on Sutton Square at the east end of East 58th Street at the East River. The base of this…

THERE was a time when Staten Island had separate towns, as Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens had before consolidation into Greater New York in 1898. The island was divided into four…

To my eternal regret I completely missed what was a lamppost graveyard in Tribeca, now one of NYC’s most expensive neighborhoods, for many years in the 1970s and into the…

FOLLOWING a relative period of inactivity due to various ailments, I have been gradually getting back into the swing and visiting realms where I haven’t appeared in recent years. One…

DUMBO, the section of Brooklyn beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, was by and large an industrial and maufacturing outpost for most of its existence; only lately has it become…

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…

In Forgotten NY’s piece about “monumental” subway stations clad in concrete on street level, I wrote about the Ocean Parkway station serving Q trains… Ocean Parkway is the only “monumental”…

WHILE traipsing the northern leg of the High Line recently I noticed something interesting about the green Corvington streetlamps along the West Side Highway, officially called West Street here, but…

It’s always a pleasure to check on 5th Avenue’s dwindling set of Twinlamps. A handful of the Queen of Avenue’s “twins,” actually the second Twinlamp design, remain along 5th between…

LARGE cast-iron stoplights I call “Wheelies” first began to show up in the late 1920s as wide boulevards began to appear and traffic got heavier. They appeared on narrower roads as…