CITY LIGHTS.(The Talk of the Town)(the changing designs of street lamps)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 16-FEB-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A proper familiarity with the street lamps of New York requires a sustained interest beginning at an early, pre-self-conscious age--long before the native disdain for tourists kicks in and, with it, the automatic, jaded lowering of the eyes, the tunnel vision. Kevin Walsh, for instance, recalls his parents taking him on exploratory boyhood bus rides around Bay Ridge, in the early sixties. "I would sort of imitate the lampposts as they went past me," he said last week. "I would take a pencil and a spoon and a small light bulb from a flashlight, and make my own little lampposts. I did this until I was six or seven." Jeff Saltzman, over in Rego Park, was three years old when he first started "noticing the lights," as he put it. Instead of making 3-D models, he...

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