STROLL LORRAINE, PLYMOUTH OR LUCERNE streets in the neighborhood of Windsor Square. Take a look at the lampposts dotting the parkways. You’ll find a curious emblem on their cast-iron, hunter green bases: miniature shields proudly emblazoned with the letters “W/S,” like heraldic coats of arms.
The lamps you are looking at were custom-designed for the community more than 100 years ago. In fact, they’re identical to the images proudly depicted in early 20th century newspaper advertisements touting the neighborhood as a “residential masterpiece,” replete with strict building restrictions, underground utilities and “improvements the most modern, thorough and permanent the skill of man can construct.” The design of these ads suggests that the lamps were more than mere amenities. They were emblems of something larger: synecdoches for the good life.
In most American cities, the arrival of electric lighting followed a familiar pattern. It began with news in the papers that a rival city had introduced electric lights — described in grand, celestial terms, like “electric moons” or “artificial suns” or “new urban stars.” Fearing a loss of status or face, the not-yet-electrified city had to have them too.
When the modern lights arrived, city leaders installed them first on busy, commercial streets, where they became symbols of civic progress and public safety and invitations to stay out and shop. Elaborate lighting ceremonies, attended by thousands, elicited moments of quiet awe, followed by cheers of ecstatic delirium. Electric light represented the conquest of nature’s last frontier: the lawless, impenetrable night.
Los Angeles wasn’t the first city to get street lighting; nor was it the last. It doesn’t have the most streetlights; nor does it have the brightest. However, L.A. boasts more than 400 different models (more variety than anywhere else in the country) and its own city department (the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, established in 1925) devoted to keeping them on. Here, more than in any other city, the old designs recall a flavor of civic ambition that is particular to the West.
Take the Broadway Rose, installed in 1919. This ornate post features filigreed torches and ribbons of flowers growing up its shaft. It was commissioned right after San Francisco unveiled its own lamps along Market Street; determined to not be upstaged, Los Angeles even nabbed the same lighting designer. “This is one of the most elaborate jobs of ornamental electroliers [streetlights] ever made on the coast,” gushed the Los Angeles Times, “and is a 100 percent home product.”
Or notice the custom-designed lanterns installed along Wilshire Boulevard in 1928, stretching from MacArthur Park to Fairfax Avenue. The edges of the light boxes are ornamented by bare-breasted female figures, like the caryatids supporting temple pillars. When the lights switched on, boosters claimed, Wilshire Boulevard became the brightest street on the West Coast.
But perhaps the best way to appreciate the personality of Angeleno streetlamps is through the smaller residential models ordered by various developers to broadcast the wealth and status of future neighborhoods and their upwardly mobile inhabitants. Like the Lalux 11, a concrete, off-the-shelf model produced by a mysterious L.A.-based manufacturer that no longer exists, the round pedestal, urn-shaped capital and fluted shaft conjure the columns of classical antiquity, but not ones you’ve read about in books. The flutes along the shaft collect at the pedestal like thick dollops of paint, as if the concrete is melting in the sun. They’re pastiches of progressivism and fantasy: neoclassicism on acid.
In a city known for its horizontality, streetlights work as guideposts — providing identities to roads that continue for miles. They also define boundaries on a granular level, more intimate than neighborhoods or streets. These days, we don’t give them much thought — they usually grab our attention when they aren’t working, or when they’re peeking in our windows, uninvited.
But if you happen to spot a rusty cast-iron lamppost, there’s a good chance that it will be the oldest object in your field of vision. Older than the road markings. Older than the signs. Older than the buildings. It isn’t an exaggeration, therefore, to say that they anchor us to our history, reminding us of the now faint yet uniquely Southern Californian idea that you can dream up or build or become anything at all, just so long as you own the land.
