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

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 made drawings, "like little candy-cane figures with balls attached." Walsh and Saltzman, who are both now in their mid-forties, are perhaps the most knowledgeable street-lamp buffs in town.

There are more than three hundred thousand street lights in operation in the city today, and--this will be news even to most locals--some thirty-five to forty models, with names like Bishop's Crook, Lyre, Reverse Scroll, and Davit Pole. (During the Depression, there were nearly eighty different types, fewer than twenty of which have been preserved.) It's a thrilling time, in any event, to be a street-light enthusiast: last week, an international competition to design a new, citywide lighting standard, fit for the twenty-first century, began in earnest. It marks the first major call for original street-light design in New York in almost fifty years, since the Art Moderne inspiration of Donald Deskey (the designer of the Crest toothpaste tube and the interior of Radio City Music Hall) gave us the "cobra-head" modules that now lean, more like brontosauruses than like snakes, over so many of the city's avenues and streets.

The Deskey cobras, arriving at about the same time as the Jetsons, never quite inspired futuristic awe, and they have long been derided--at least, by those who regularly risk looking up while they walk. They lack ornamentation--by design, of course--and seem cheaply made, which they are. (This is not a drawback, in the eyes of the Department of Transportation.) "I thought they were hideous when I was a kid," Saltzman said. "I didn't even want to live on a street with one of them." The variety most common to his neighborhood featured tapering octagonal poles with curved "quarter loop" masts, or what Saltzman likes to call "Kojak lights," since they appeared in recurring driving footage from the old Telly Savalas detective show. (This was notable because, as Saltzman pointed out, "Kojak" was filmed in Los Angeles, not Queens.)

Walsh vividly remembers the near-wholesale replacement of cast-iron ...