Lamp post design has always been a bee in the bonnet. Excerpts from the article below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/realestate/19SCAP.html? ex=1253246400&en=3f139fdc2bc75ac3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland "THE New York City Department of Transportation and the Department of Design and Construction will select a new standard design this fall for the city's more than 320,000 streetlights. The last citywide standard was Donald Deskey's "cobra head" of 1958, and the history of streetlight design suggests that the logic of uniformity poses problems in a city of widely varying streetscapes" Despite the implicit pressure for a single fixture, a 1934 report for the department found 76 types of streetlights, excluding special fixtures on bridges, viaducts, monuments and highways — like the Art Deco lampposts of riveted steel plates on the old West Side Highway. In that decade, the city began weeding out the many variants. By 1958, the count was down to 64 kinds of posts; that was the year that Armand D'Angelo, the commissioner of water supply, gas and electricity, called for a uniform post and retained the designer Donald Deskey. Deskey developed an elegant, streamlined aluminum post for his cobra- head lighting fixture, which complemented perfectly the new crop of modernist buildings. The design was approved by the city's Art Commission, but a letter to the editor of The Times signed by "R. Greengard" praised the variety of the city's streetlights and expressed surprise that "the city has hired someone to make all street lamps alike! The Deskey design soon lost its modern elegance, diluted in the 1960's to the current steel octagonal pole now used citywide. At about this time, preservationists like Margot Gayle and Henry Hope Reed were bringing attention to the city's classically designed sidewalk clocks, lampposts and other street furniture. An article in The New York Herald Tribune in 1965 recorded the protest of Dorothy Figel, a resident of Greenwich Village, against removal of an old gas- lamp stanchion on Patchin Place, where she lived: "They're going to light us up with that Martian-looking aluminum post with that horrible, greenish light, and it'll make us look like a New Jersey parking lot," she said. " Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AsburyPark/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
