Boston's Gas Lights

This makes me nuts. The technology is now cheap enough to replicate the warmth of incandescant on mass scale. Too many earnest city managers want to "prove" they are going green and we're stuck with harsh lights as the demonstration of it. It's a mis-use of the technology. Ugh.
 
I really like the new LED lights. Waaaaay better than the ugly orange sodium lights. The white color actually makes a street feel safer and more inviting IMO.
 
cden4 said:
I really like the new LED lights. Waaaaay better than the ugly orange sodium lights. The white color actually makes a street feel safer and more inviting IMO.
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And they're full-cutoff fixtures with LEDs' true unidirectional light, focused on the street and sidewalk. Much healthier than blasting somebody's second-floor window full of light, making the abutting tree branches grow all weird with the excess ultraviolet spectrum, fucking with nesting birds' sleep cycles, and attracting bugs from a wide radius (again...too much ultraviolet pumped out by the sodium and mercury vapor fixtures fucks with other species' behavior). And it's true-color rendering; much harder to mis-judge objects than when they're all colored orange. We're not used to it because for 50 years the notion of "security lighting" has been to blast orange light in every direction, but it's actually much safer focused straight on the ground. Doesn't blind drivers, and it's easier to spot lurking danger when it's focused purely on the ground and not sideways. The only problem with them is that they have to be packed a bit closer together to light equivalent-radius surface. Not really an issue in the city where there's an over-saturation of street lights, but occasionally there'll be a dark spot on the road if there's a random fixture spaced too far. You'll notice the new decorative LED fixtures DCR installed on Nonantum Rd. last year are really close together.


It's got to propegate to buildings because they're bigger glarebombs overall than the street lights, but it should noticeably diminish the amount of orange skyglow at night. Probably not to the point where you'll be able to see any more stars, but you'll probably notice the difference going in for a night landing at Logan and cloudy/foggy nights won't look like the color of ass.
 
Now, I 100% agree with diminishing light pollution. Proper aiming and appropriate intensity are important. I simply don't think brite-white leaning toward green is an improvement.
 
I'm inclined to agree. I think the super-intense white light of newer streets lights makes sidewalks and other spaces almost too bright.

I think another reason the gaslights are popular and worth keeping as is has to do with scaling. They are definitely human-scale, not 20 feet in the air.
 
LEDs don't have to be super-intense white light. My friend showed me his setup with warm LEDs in his new house last week. It took him a while to track down the right model because they are labeled misleadingly. But they do exist.
 
That's an excellent point about scaling. The gas lights are definitely shorter than pretty much any of the electric street lights we have.

I really like what Brookline did with the lighting in Coolidge Corner and Washington Square. I don't know if they are LEDs (the color temperature is white however). There are higher lights that point down over the roadways, and on the same poles, smaller lower pedestrian-scaled lights next to the sidewalk. It has a really nice feel to it.
 
I really like the new LED lights. Waaaaay better than the ugly orange sodium lights. The white color actually makes a street feel safer and more inviting IMO
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I noticed this during the most recent snowstorm. I took my son to play at the new Esplanade playground and the white light was so much nicer than the orange lights.


There are higher lights that point down over the roadways
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I know that there are taller conventional fixtures at intersections on Charles St. in Beacon Hill and they're pretty unobtrusive, even though they're the spray light everywhere variety. I lived there for quite some time before I even noticed them.
 
I don't, but there was a whole lot of trash dumped next to it when I passed it a few weeks ago.
 
The Allston electric looks like it has one of the plastic tops that were installed all over the South End about 8 years ago. The South End ones have metal deflectors installed over the lamp to reduce light throw onto the adjacent buildings - you can see them through the plastic top, if you look closely.

The "gaslight look" ones in the South End replaced the white plastic spheres on exposed aggregate concrete posts.
 
masswich said:
and a strange electric - but looks like a gas light. Does anyone know the history of this one (it's on Allston Street in Allston):

http://goo.gl/maps/6nTWq
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Ancient incandescent lamppost. Probably 1920's-30's vintage. Just about all streets in Boston that didn't have telephone poles had those same utilitarian 'acorn' posts with until they started installing overhead mercury vapor fixtures in the 50's. Look at any old pic of Comm Ave. from the first half of the 20th century and those thingys went end-to-end, Kenmore-BC. There's still a few random ones like this around town that survived change-outs. A couple of them on the Comm Ave. mall near the Mass Ave. intersection and other sections of Back Bay. Lots of them in back-alleys.
 
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