The Westinghouse MO-8 once lit NYC streets by the hundreds or perhaps thousands from 1962 to 1972. Known as “open-bottom” or “cutoff” luminaires, they were designed to illuminate residential or…

Until about 2000, the Manhattan entrance to the Manhattan Bridge was a graveyard, or depository, for several outmoded types of lampposts… bishop crooks, Type F posts, and post-1950 curved mast…

Hundreds of these reverse-crooked, simple posts containing a parallelogramatical 4-paned glass surface light the streets of Society Hill near downtown Philadelphia. They are named “Franklin lights” because they were inspired…

To find working “radial-wave” luminaires with functioning incandescent bulbs, you have to leave New York City, though not that far. There’s a flock of them on Skillman Street, a residential…

Though the Staten Island ferry terminal main building was completely renovated in 2005 (which removed, among some other things, the ancient track indicators for the Staten Island Railway) there’s this…

The Twinlamp, originally produced for use on 5th Avenue at the dawn of the electrified lamppost era in the 1890s, originally had a different design (the mast of one of…

Even though I have been in Little Neck since 2007, I only discovered this curiosity on a lawn on 41st Road near Little Neck Parkway a few days ago. This…

This classic Type 24M Twin stood at the southwest corner of West 23rd and 5th Avenue for several decades, but sometime in the early 2000s a truck plowed into it…

When this storage facility at West 10th Street between Washington and West Streets was torn down a couple of years ago, this Type G wall lamp went with it. Photo…

Grace Court and Grace Court Alley are twin dead-ends issuing from Hicks Street between Remsen and Joralemon Streets in Brooklyn Heights. Grace Court Alley, like Hunt’s Lane a block away…

Several years ago, a couple of dozen electrically-powered gaslamps were installed along the block bounded by Poplar, Henry, Hicks and Old Fulton Streets in Brooklyn Heights. A few have been…

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…