New York City Street Light Trivia
![]() ![]() Those on the ancient Manhattan Bridge, were apparently set in place in the 1950's, when the city planned to smash an expressway from that span, to the Holland Tunnel. They managed to stay alive, on the Brooklyn bound side, until the mid 1990s. |
![]() |
![]() If these poles didn't look spooky to begin with, their spires combined with these ballasts to make them look like demonic pitchforks. Most of the pitchforks hit the dust, along with the greater part of their miserable highway, in the mid 1970's, after a truck fell through a rather large pothole, forcing the closure of New York City's first elevated exp-messway. Naturally, now that they're gone, I miss the PitchForks terribly. |
Closure of the road didn't mean instant demolition. It took years until the city decided that the road was too far gone to rehab. Environmentalists and neighborhood groups then blocked the proposed replacement, the infamous Westway. The rotting hulk of the old West Side Highway was eventually torn down in stages, but the section stretching from the 40's to 57th St. lingered on for years. My friends and I took in many a pier concert from that highway. It was a great place to hang out and gave great views of the concerts below. A handful of pitchforks were still left, at the far northern end above 57th Street leading into the Henry Hudson Parkway, when that sole surviving section was rebuilt. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() The Van Wyck had lost more of them to bad drivers, rather than bad policy. The Whitestones lived in uneasy peace with the crookarms that often replaced the casualties. |
![]() Sadly though, they were fired from their positions on the 59th Street Queens ramps and recent construction has killed off the remainder on the East River Drive (FDR Drive) and left only a skeleton crew on the Brooklyn Bridge approach. An occassional speciman can also still be glimpsed at the Henny Hudson Parkway & LaGuardia Airport. They still persist on their namesake bridge, for the most part holding humongous LPS anti-fog vapor fixtures. Those with a sharpshooter's eye can detect two different versions of the poles. |
![]() |
Another movie, from the late 1940's, about juvenile delinquents, has
a good shot of them on an obscure bridge linking Queens with
Roosevelt Island, but I can't remember the name. They are probably
visible, albeit with vapor fixtures, on the opening credits of
Taxi, on the 59th Street Bridge's upper roadway, but I'm not
in the mood to watch it again, to see if that's so. Yet another 1950's movie, involving a mother racing to redeem her child from kidnappers, shows her frantically looking out for Kappock Street on the Whitestone laden Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx. |