Friday, September 16, 2022 – MERCURY WAS ATOP OUR FIRST TRAFFIC SIGNALS
FROM THE ARCHIVES
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 2022
THE 783RD EDITION
THE FIRST
TRAFFIC SIGNALS
CHRISTOPHER GRAY
NEW YORK TIMES (C)
| Joseph Freedlander (1870 – 1943)Mercury16 1/2″ bronzeIn the late 1920s, Freedlander was asked by the City of New York to design a series of bronze light posts for Fifth Avenue. The first, completed in 1931, was installed at 41st and Fifth, and 103 others followed between 8th and 59th Streets. Each traffic light was topped by a bronze statuette of Mercury. Only several survived |
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- May 16, 2014
Tired of cars — and bikes — running red lights? How about no lights at all? That’s the kind of traffic system New York had until 1920, when a series of tall bare-bones towers went up down the middle of Fifth Avenue, flashing red and green lights to the growing onslaught of automobiles. Two years later they were replaced with formidably elegant bronze and granite towers, sumptuous contributions to the City Beautiful, but destroyed within a decade, victims of increasing traffic.
The Library of Congress has a website of digitized photographs and early movies of New York, called American Memory. If you look at the half dozen movies set in New York it is clear that, except for a few policemen, traffic regulation amounted to “hey, watch out!”
My book “Fifth Avenue, 1911, From Start to Finish” (Dover, 1994) covers most blocks from Washington Square to 93rd Street, and there is nary a traffic light nor a sign to be seen in any of the photographs, although policemen were clearly on duty at many intersections.
But automobiles complicated the mix, and safety became an increasing concern. In 1913 The New York Times reported on the city’s “Death Harvest” — that’s the actual headline — from 1910 and 1912 for three different types of vehicles: the number killed by wagons and carriages, down in two years to 177 from 211; and streetcars, down to 134 from 148. But automobile fatalities nearly doubled, to 221 from 112. Ninety-five percent of the dead, according to The Times, were pedestrians. (In 2013, 156 pedestrians were killed by automobiles.)
Influential retailers on Fifth Avenue no doubt felt sympathy, but what hurt them at the cash register was traffic gridlock, and pressure grew to declog the avenue. It could take 40 minutes to go from 57th to 34th Street.
There had been an experimental traffic light in 1917, but it was short-lived. Thus it was in 1920 that the first permanent traffic lights in New York went up, the gift of Dr. John A. Harriss, a millionaire physician fascinated by street conditions. His design was a homely wooden shed on a latticework of steel, from which a police officer changed signals, allowing one to two minutes for each direction. Although the meanings we attach to red and green now seem like the natural order of things, in 1920 green meant Fifth Avenue traffic was to stop so crosstown traffic could proceed; white meant go. Most crosstown streets and Fifth Avenue were still two-way.
The doctor’s signals were so well received that in 1922 the Fifth Avenue Association gave the city, at a cost of $126,000, a new set of signals, seven ornate bronze 23-foot-high towers placed at intersections along Fifth from 14th to 57th Streets. Designed by Joseph H. Freedlander, they were the most elegant street furniture the city has ever had. It was a time when elevating public taste through civic beauty was considered a fit goal for government effort. In 1923 the magazine Architecture opined that “To understand the beautiful is to create a love for the beautiful, to widen the boundaries of human pride, enjoyment and accomplishment.”
Dr. Harriss’s towers would have looked at home in a railway freight yard; Freedlander’s towers were fitting adornments for the noblest of New York’s public spaces, like the forecourt of the New York Public Library or the Plaza at 59th Street.
For reasons unstated, the towers were not placed in the center of the intersections, but several feet north or south of the crosswalks — crosstown drivers could barely see them. The new lights supposedly reduced that trip from 57th to 34th to 15 minutes. Soon, traffic lights were like laptops in classrooms: everyone was in favor of them.
Most of the big avenues got traffic lights, of much simpler design, and mounted on corners. In 1927 the present system of red, yellow and green was generally recognized, but The Times said the yellow caution light had been abandoned in New York because it was a “temptation to motorists to rush through intersections.”
Cars continued to flood the streets and within a few years the police decided that Freedlander’s sumptuous traffic towers were blocking the roadway. It took some convincing, but the Fifth Avenue Association came around to taking them down and in 1929 Freedlander was called back to design a new two-light traffic signal, also bronze, to be placed on the corners. These were topped by statues of Mercury and lasted until 1964. A few of the Mercury statues have survived, but Freedlander’s 1922 towers have completely vanished.
In retrospect, the automobile appears as the opening wedge to a new kind of city. Pedestrians were zoned off the streets, to which they had formerly had unfettered access. The speed of automobiles, not horse-drawn vehicles, became the metric. Street cars, held hostage to their fixed routes, were often stalled by traffic. The streets themselves became layered with regulation after regulation, covered with signs, lights, arrows and stanchions, none of which were ever as elegant as the 1922 Fifth Avenue traffic towers.
Friday Photo of the Day
We are on vacation and be back in “person” soon
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Sources
Helicline Fine Art
NEW YORK TIMES (c)
Christopher Gray
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