Meadowbrook Parkway Lamp Posts

For lamp post aficionados, we catalog the various types of bulbs attached to the wooden lamp posts on the Meadowbrook State Parkway south of Merrick Road and the Loop Parkway. Because these highways are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, they are required to be maintained in harmony with the original design. Therefore, when the time came to replace the original lighting system, the state was required to install replicas of the original wooden lamp posts. More recently, we have seen the brown galvanized steel guard rails replaced with wooden guard rails that are more in keeping with the original design. (The original wooden guard rails, as nice as they looked, simply aren't very useful when a car hits one at highway speed.)

To be clear here, what are now presented as the "original" lamp posts are those with the long arm that those who came of age in the 1960's would know best. The first wooden lamp posts had an arm about half the size of the 1960's model and a more or less straight brace. Some of these survived here and there, such as the one to the right that I photographed alongside the Bay Parkway at Jones Beach in 2008 but is long gone. Originals such as this one are virtually extinct as far as I know despite being rather common for decades. One reason that they eventually had to be replaced by those with longer arms is that the roadways themselves became wider. The original parkways were four undivided lanes of traffic. Between the widening of the roads and the need to move the poles further from the highway so that they didn't get hit as often, the original design simply was no longer practical.

The big difference with the replicas is that each one is mounted in a concrete base, set a little further from the road than the originals. They also sport sodium vapor bulbs as opposed to the original incandescent bulbs. The mast and arm with the diagonal brace faithfully reproduce the posts that were common from the 1950's through the 1960's and into the 1970's. In the 1980's, after the state Department of Transportation took over maintenance of the parkways, the wooden lamp posts were allowed to disappear one at a time, for a time replaced in spots by an improvised wooden mast with an aluminum arm and a mercury or sodium vapor bulb, and finally replaced by the non-historic poles that now predominate the rest of the parkway system.

The bulbs are probably the largest point of discussion about the replicas. Several different types of bulbs and housings were common over the years. Photos from the 1930's and 1940's show a bulb with a triangular, ridged art deco design. The 1950's and early 1960's saw mostly a round globe, with the exception of the Northern State Parkway west of the Long Island Expressway connector at exit 29A and the section of the Meadowbrook State Parkway that was reconstructed in conjunction with the opening of the Nassau Coliseum. Those sections received mercury vapor bulbs with a triangular-topped, squarish globe.

The most faithful replica of the 1960's globe.

On its right, this double-arm post has the globe that was used on the replicas when they were first installed. I always considered that globe to be a bit "weak" compared to the original. Here, the difference is stark.

The globe on the right is a third variant; I am not certain whether it is the current iteration or the previous one. It's a bit more stylized than the one to the left; the double-arm post again offers an obvious contrast.