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…

IT’S one of a kind…but it used to be two of a kind. Back in 1998, I (nearly) panicked when this copper-clad, vertigris’ed lamppost at the eastbound Queensboro Bridge entrance…

I don’t have much to say today except to say my explorations of Newark, NJ have been shamefully few over the years, paling, for example, next to Jersey City or…

THE grand Manhattan Bridge plaza, which fronts the Bowery at Canal Street, was completed in 1916 and is the design of John M. Carrere and Thomas Hastings, who also built the New York…

IT’S been years since I’ve been on an airplane. I last flew in 2008, to spend a week in San Francisco. I had a ball climbing up the steep hills…

THE big bruiser at East 53rd and Lexington is the Citicorp Tower (since renamed the Citigroup Center). It was built between 1974 and 1977 and is 914 feet tall; its slanted roof,…

WHAT I have today is possibly the last specimen of what lamppost aficionados (all 14 of us) call the Cuplight, as it’s shaped like an inverted coffee cup with a…

As I’ve learned from decades of experience, there’s the right way to do things, and there’s the wrong way (of which I freely admit my occasional guilt) which is usually…

A group of white-painted monoliths between 2nd and 3rd Avenues between 29th and 36th Streets west of Green-Wood Cemetery were constructed by architect William Higginson in the first 3 decades…

In the mid-1970s a new variety of street lighting, or in this case, sidewalk lighting, was introduced in the Garment District, roughly on side streets between East 35th and 40th…

I have always been a fan of the original formula pedestrian lampposts on expressways built in NYC during the 1950s. To me they are simplified versions of Bishop Crooks that…

I was checking out some 1940 Municipal Archives photos and scrolled over to the Rockaway Beach boardwalk, known officially as Ocean Promenade on maps. I dug those boardwalk lamps, of…