Get the latest news delivered daily!
Get the latest news delivered daily! 60 Watt Solar Street Light
One of LA’s smallest and most secret museums has reopened its doors, and on the third Friday of every month, tours at the Museum of Street Lighting will showcase some of the city’s oldest, quirkiest, and most ornate lights, lanterns, lamps, and globes.
The museum displays several dozen of the 400 or so that have stood guard over streets and bridges since the first gas lamps in the late 1800s, and with a visit time of less than half an hour, this is the ideal place to begin an illuminating alternative tour of LA history.
Coming out of the elevator, you cannot miss the huge and impressive “Union Metal Type 1906,” then after being led through some maze-like cubicles, the door to an anonymous-looking room is opened to reveal a blaze of light — both florescent and LED.
An audio tour plays while you step around the room, and it is surprising to see that some of the street lights are five or even six feet high. It is also disconcerting to learn that since they were often made of brass, steel or even concrete, they could weigh several hundred pounds, yet hung high over pedestrians and vehicles for decades.
Plaques show the year and the location where each was located, though the names and classifications often do not reflect the sheer style of the design.
A center divider on Lankershim Boulevard from around 1939 is uninspiringly called a “484-23 Steel Pendant Arm,” but looks like it belonged to giant night watchman, while one of the favorites among staff and visitors, the Globe Llewellyn, is a five-orbed beauty that would not seem out of place in a luxury hotel or Victorian ocean liner.
Despite the fact they soon became overlooked and taken for granted, the older street lights are more art than utilitarian street furniture. Knowing they would grace the streets of a growing metropolis, they were designed to impress, and so were decorated with crosses, arrows, and fruit, while some of the more memorable ones here feature dragons, flowers, and mermaids.
Another highlight is the “3-Light 5 Star Luminaire”, which looks like a stop light with red stars along the sides, and hung horizontally. As might be guessed from the name, it was on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1960s.
Some of the pieces in the museum are also very rare. The Bronson Avenue aluminum lantern is one of just five left, and today if you see an elaborate street light from decades ago, it is probably a reproduction.
On the final wall is a display case of various sized glass light bulbs, and above them the glare of more modern street lights that utilize sodium and LED, and seem like the helmets of futuristic robots. It is hard to find the same beauty in them, even if they are more efficient, easier to maintain, and more environmentally friendly.
The Bureau’s huge facility in Santa Monica, which stores countless street lights from all eras, often gets calls from movies and television shows, but the request is almost always for the older lights with glazed, frosted glass that give a film noir-style yellowish hue.
To hunt for historical street lights in the wild, head to Hollywood and downtown, the latter of which is a particular hotspot, and always remember to look up above street level. There are more than 200,000 working lights across the city, plus two other unique street light installations that reach back across the decades to when street lights were public art.
In 1993, artist Shiela Klein installed a selection of 25 various street lights in an anonymous mall parking lot at the corner of Vermont and Santa Monica (hence the piece’s name Vermonica), though in 2017 it was suddenly removed. Uproar ensued, and eventually the 120-foot-0long, 30-foot-tall Vermonica was restored in a new location on Santa Monica Boulevard, opposite the Cahuenga Branch Library.
The last stop on a possible street light tour is a favorite for Instagrammers and wedding photographers: “Urban Light,” Chris Burden’s 202-piece installation of restored streetlamps from the 1920s and 1930s, which is outside LACMA on Wilshire Boulevard.
For more illumination, India Mandelkern’s book “Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles” will be released in December, and her Instagram @streetlampilluminati will show you more of the multitude of street lights across Los Angeles.
Her favorite is the “Lalux 11”, a concrete model produced by a mysterious LA-based manufacturer that no longer exists. It has a Greco-Roman column design, and pomegranate motifs in bas relief on the base.
“These lamps were all over my neighborhood when I was growing up, and I’m glad that they’re still here!” she says, adding that she will be first in line when the museum reopens.
Where: 1149 S. Broadway, Ste. 200, Los Angeles
When: 10 and 11 a.m. Friday, Oct. 20 and 10 a.m. the third Friday of each month after that. Reservations are essential
Galvanized Poles Information: lalights.lacity.org/residents/museum.html