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…

THOUGH Teddy Roosevelt has left the entrance of the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West (he is going to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, ND in…

In my now lost youth, I would bicycle all over Brooklyn and Queens from Bay Ridge before bicycling became a religion at whose altar politicians worshiped, creating green bicycle lanes…

THERE’S relics aplenty at the very same corner in Bronxdale where I highlit the NYW&B RR’s symbolic caduceus. I love NYC’s remaining curved-mast and bracketed streetlamps. This specimen at Matthews…

WHEELER Reflector Co. primarily produced traditional style pendant street lamps. When NYC introduced the finned telephone pole streetlamp masts in the 1950s, the flat radial wave incandescent lamps in use…