When the Rouse Company remade the South Street Seaport area between 1981-1983, rehabilitating buildings, adding new buildings, and opening the tourist-friendly Pier 17 (where I still get tuna and pasta…

As part of its centennial celebrations in early 2013, Grand Central Terminal, at East 42nd Street between Vanderbilt and Lexington Avenues, has restored a 1919 lamppost that was taken out…

The Owls Head Sewage Treatment Plant, on the outskirts of beautiful Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is accessible by roads from Bay Ridge Avenue (69th Street) and from the Belt Parkway. The…

It’s not surprising, to me at least, that while the Brutalist, unadorned lamppost designs of the 1970s and 1980s are increasingly falling out of favor, their more ornate, scrolled cast…

The blasted landscape of the old West Side Highway, closed in December 1973 and finally demolished in the 1980s, epitomizes the general deterioration NYC’s infrastructure was undergoing because of, as…

Octagonal-shafted lampposts didn’t appear on NYC streets until 1950. They are now the predominant, go-to lampposts of NYC and have supported a flock of different luminaires over the years. They…

Since the Corvington Longarm Type 24M — and other old forms such as the bishop crook and Type F lights — were reintroduced to NYC streets beginning in the 1980s,…

This is the sole remaining original lamppost of the Tudor City project, developed on the east end of East 42nd Street in the late 1920s and 1930s by Fred F.…

In the mid-20th Century, just when NYC was replacing its ornate cast iron and wrought iron posts with more sedate aluminum octagonal-shaped lampposts, Park Avenue got a set of posts…

The slotted Donald Deskey lamppost was introduced on Broadway and Murray Street in 1958, and by the early 1960s they were being installed by the thousands on main avenues, side…

I won’t go nuts with the NYC Department of Records photos — in FNY, I have always relied on new photos taken by me — but it’s hard to resist…

This is an early version of the Type F reverse-scroll NYC streetlamp at Elm and Pearl Streets in, I’d say, 1910 or so. The Type F was used on side…