So, as installed, the Bishop's Crook (costing $3,000 each and paid for by the involved block associations) is "wrong." This is as historically incorrect as installing a copper roof on a landmark building where the original one was slate.
But the issues are not nearly as clear with an entire block. West 90th Street, for instance, has brownstones of the gas-lamp era, apartment houses of the Type F era and a modern building. Should the fixtures be uniform on such a street, and if so, what model should be used?
Jeremy Woodoff, deputy director for public projects at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, has studied lampposts, stop lights and paving intensively and feels that issues about street furniture must be resolved differently from those about individual buildings.
"There were Fifth Avenue twin posts in front of the Guggenheim Museum when it was built, but that doesn't seem incongruous" he says, adding that it was not even clear why some streets had Bishop's Crook lampposts and others had Type F posts for lighting.
INDEED, the idea of uniformity in our street furniture is relatively modern. A typical view of a street corner in the 1910's might show a Bishop's Crook, a Type F, an old gas fixture and several privately installed fixtures, some only a few feet away from one another. Only in 1958 did the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity embark on a campaign to replace all previous designs with the present "cobra-head" standard.
In 1973, Margot Gayle, the preservationist, persuaded the department to save a few dozen Bishop's Crook fixtures, and within a few years they were being reproduced for custom installations like those at the New York Palace. Now they are the default standard for most historic street furniture projects in New York City, in part because several suppliers have existing molds. The cost of creating a new mold for the Type F post would kill small projects like the Landmark West! one.
The Bishop's Crook lampposts on West 67th and West 90th Streets, are just part of a new heterogeneity in street lighting, which includes unusual modern designs like those on Central Park West and others in midtown by the Grand Central Partnership. Only in recent years has the Department of Transportation, which controls all street lighting, begun to encourage such diversity.
