Photo Gallery: Streetlights
| One never knows what one will find when one goes hunting and sniffing around the embankments off of the city's highways. Back in the fall of 1998, I was shooting around the Bronx River Pkwy by 233rd Street and Bronx Blvd. I was in the wooded area between the boulevard and the parkway, which still true to the whole parkway concept, is very much a park, complete with free access to the shore of tiny but active Bronx River and its vibrant community of water fowl. Lo and behold, what should appear under my feet from out of nowhere, but a partially decomposed corpse of an old woody lamppost. These had once lined the sides, ramps and center median of the Bronx section of the Bronx River Pkwy, but had been knocked off by the SLECO "Bigloops" in the mid 1960's. I pretty much had to assume that this speciman had been lying in this patch of grass and leaves for well over 30 years, just about fully intact, except for rot around the end of the mastarm. |
| Fast forward to November 6th, 1999 and it looks like I'm starting a new personal tradition. Two straight fall seasons and two straight dead woodies! This time the treasure was discovered in a most unlikely spot, the otherwise well tended grassy slope between Queens Blvd, the ramp leading from the northbound VanWyck Expwy to the boulevard, the Van Wyck itself and Hoover Avenue. This time it's the head that some woodie-butcher cut off from its body. Again, it is a case of a woody that must have last seen service well over 30 years before. As far as I know, the nearest any woodies got to this point was Union Turnpike, several blocks to the north and those were gone by the 1964-65 Worlds Fair. The Van Wyck until then fed straight into the woody-laden Grand Central Pkwy at that point, but by this location was several blocks deep in steel "Whitestone" style poles and Queens Blvd had castirons back then. Just how did this mastarm get here? We may never know. Easily discernable is the point where the diagonally placed brace fit onto the underside of the mast. At the far left end, the reddish patch is the metal plate that surrounded the hole through which a Westinghouse AK15 pendant style "cuplight" would have likely been attached on the last day this arm did any real work. Behind the brace bracket, the right end of the mast would have fitted right through a hole in the pole. |