The Cheerful Westinghouse OV-25 Silverliners
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They all face extinction soon as a massive reconstruction is underway on that incredibly hideous, rotting, hulking, erector-set nightmare of a bridge.* The Brooklyn bound side has already been denuded of it's lights and roadbed. *UPDATE 2003: The entire Williamsburg Bridge was indeed reconstructed over the past few years since the above was written, and needless to say, the old streetlights and their brackets no longer are there. |
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The Cheerfuls made do with a few crumbs, like Woodhaven, Junction & Northern Blvds. in Queens. They also received a token presence on the burgeoning highway extensions and reconstructions that preceded the 1964-65 Worlds Fair. Being small at the time, with limited exposure to many neighborhoods, perhaps I underestimate their actual numbers. |
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The Cheerful-Biggest Loop alliance took quick advantage of the demise of many Worlds Fair era long-masted crook-arm poles, whenever these were knocked down in crashes. Soon, all these highways became a hodgepodge of the two poles and their respective luminaires. The new Cheerfuls even had the audacity to intrude on the Disgusted's most prized conquest, the Long Island Expressway, at the sprawling Flushing Meadows interchange. |
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I did a double take one day when I noticed that they sported Sodium Vapor lamps. If they were able to hold those bulbs all along, why the hell did the city need to replace most of them? Perhaps they were retrofitted, or rewired. Most of them, in the same area, still have mercury lamps. Another mini run of them is around Highland Park by the Interboro (Jackie Robinson) Pkwy. Most of these rareties are hung on crook-arms and several are in grave danger. One, on a dangerous Highland Blvd. curve, is hitched to a pole that lists precariously, resigned to its fate of eventually being smashed to oblivion by a truck someday. |
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Others just have a ticket shoved into their diffusers, sticking
out as if the cops have given the pole a parking ticket. With
the mayor's quota for cops, to give more traffic tickets, growing,
I can see some anxious cops ticketing the lights to fill a slow
day. One last great cluster of them survives on the interchange, where the Cheerful IIs scored their greatest, backbreaking victory over the reeling Disgusteds, on the Long Island Expwy/Grand Central cloverleaf. They still maintain a presence on the Grand Central itself, the Van Wyck extension, and the ridiculous, one-way Nassau Expwy. |
Originally written in 1996.