Bishop Crook Lamppost Washington and Spring Streets

Bishop Crook Lamppost  Washington and Spring Streets Image 0One of the better photos I managed to squeeze out of my awful 110 camera in mid 1982. This old cast iron Bishop Crook lamppost stood at the corner of Washington Street and Spring Street, near the abandoned ruins of the West Side Highway viaduct spanning Canal Street, visible in the background.
This Bishop Crook lamppost was also one of the better of such lampposts, still scattered around the city at that time. Also known by some as Shepherds Crooks, or Bishop Creeks, these venerable New York City fixtures were disappearing fast until an explosion of retro replication began just a couple of years before this photo, kicked off by a set of such replicas placed around a huge midtown hotel by the Helmsley chain, now known, in 2012, as the New York Palace.
This Bishop Crook had for a lamp fixture what I dubbed as the Cuplight, otherwise known to earth as the Westinghouse AK10, probably installed in the late 1940s or very early 1950s. I would assume subsequent to that, any lamp breakage would have likely gone unreplaced, and possibly even cost the pole its life, during the anti cast iron Jihad that took place in the early and mid 1960s.