Quote:
Originally Posted by missionhill
In Boston, some legacy street lamps: This one on South Street has probably been standing there since 1930. Iron base, wooden pole with replica lampshade. These modern replicas are widely deployed now in the downtown area, having replaced lots of postwar and later streetlamps like this one with reinforced concrete pole and arm arching over the street.
I'm even more of a street name sign geek. New York's old ones, with the name of the intersecting street shown like a popup above the main sign, the whole thing attached to a bishop's crook lamp post, were so distinctive. Now the whole country pretty much uses the standardized signs street departments can make on their own. |
That South Street pedestal lamp and its updated sibling are of a design you can find in several US cities, including Washington, DC.
Ditto the reinforced-concrete post with the curved mast arm on the right in that third photo. Those began to appear on US streets in the 1950s. Two other cities where you'll find them are New Orleans and St. Louis, though I think St. L has gotten rid of many of them in favor of a Eurostyle curved light post. The double-armed light post on the left, which also comes in a single-armed version,
is unique to Boston AFAICT and dates to the 1970s.
Boston had an older reinforced-concrete street light design that I've only seen there: it featured a French-curve support bracket above the mast arm.
I too mourn the disappearance of those Manhattan street signs; however, the street name in the pop-up oval (old white-on-blue enamel signs) or drop-down box (black-on-yellow post-WW2 signs) was the name of the street you were on. The cross street's name appeared in the main sign.
Federal sign standards also caused the demise of their less-distinctive successors, which were made from the same rectangular aluminum channeled sign blanks used in the majority of US cities now. All of them are now white on green, the standard MUTCD (Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the Federal Highway Administration's sign manual) color for basic information signs. Up until the late 1980s or thereabouts, each borough had its own color scheme:
Manhattan: black on yellow, updating those post-WW2 signs
Bronx: white on blue
Brooklyn: white on black
Queens: blue on white
Staten Island (Richmond): black on white
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
