|
SL-200 Turtle
Beak |
 |
|---|
 This
is one of the rarest NYC mercury luminaires to spot these days.
These big-beaked open types were fairly common in the outer boroughs
of NYC. The Kings Hwy station of McDonald Avenue's Culver El
looms in the background.
Welsbach Corporation, the
NY firm that handles most of our streetlighting contracts, refers
to it as the SL-200 175w, but unfortunately the manual I got
that from doesn't ID the manufacturer.These fixtures were usually attached to short crook-arm masts on telephone poles. This rarety muscled it's way onto a long trussed mast, that usually remained the preserve of the M400 disgusteds. I shot this in 1992, on tiny Colin Place in Gravesend, Brooklyn, just off McDonald Ave, a block south of Kings Hwy. I assume that nobody in the DOT has had the guts to mess with this beak since. I recently found another turtle beak, on Cresskill Pl., off 101st Ave in Ozone Park, while hunting for a Portuguese liquor store that sold a Brazilian liquor. The liquor, Cachasa, is as hard to locate, as are the turtle beaks. Ironically, both can be found at this intersection. UPDATE 6/2001: Happy to report that the Colin Place beak is still hanging out and a Cresskill (101st Avenue) page now resides elsewhere on this site, in the Queens Sidestreet section. |