TO FIND RARE BEASTS, you have to know what environment they thrive in. The same principle applies to locating species of ancient NYC streetlighting…they like to hang out in the…

WE’VE SPENT a lot of time in Williamsburg lately…it’s a great source of Forgotteniana, and as one of NYC’s most-established neighborhoods, a great place to walk around in with its…

For perhaps seven decades it stood sentinel on Rockaway and New York Boulevards, where New York City slowly began to fade out and Nassau County began to fade in.  …

  It’s 1950 and on Third Avenue, the el trains rumbling overhead, like the Triceratops and Tyrannosaurs of the Cretaceous, are blissfully unmindful of their upcoming doom. The shrews, rats…

Heavy snow in NYC winters is unpredictable.  A series of winters with little snow can be followed by years of blizzardy winters.  But a fearsome, freak blizzard in early March 1888…

ROLL CALL OF LUMINAIRES I’ll admit it. There’s a big hole in my information on NYC lamppost manufacturers and makes, since I’ve not a clue of these designs’ actual names, nor…

BY THE THOUSANDS they came, back in the early 1960s, replacing the picturesque castiron Corvington longarms… It was a strange, exhilarating, depressing yet exciting time to be a six-year-old lamppost fan…

Before the days when the New York City Department of Transportation began to install replicas of classic bishop-crook, “Corvington” long-armed lamps and twinlamp designs, they defaced still-standing classic lampposts that were…

Paraphrasing the old Donovan hit…first there was a lamppost, then there was no lamppost, then there is… In 1999 we mourned the (premature) loss of this original Queensboro Bridge light stanchion,…

The little olive-colored stoplight, with its serrated exterior and the fluted base, once was to NYC streets what the passenger pigeon was to the skies. They weren’t on every corner…traffic…

They used to light an underpass that brought traffic from Adam Clayton Powell Blvd (formerly 7th Avenue) under the Harlem River Drive. They’re a New York City lamppost with no…

Jane! Stop these crazy things! There are some streetlamps on the East Side in the 30s that resemble props from an animated Jetsons cartoon. But these venerable poles are now over…