 Rockaway
Blvd. facing northwest, just off Guy R. Brewer Blvd, across from
JFK Airport, from 1992. This is the absolute last cast iron pole
left, on the last major street within NYC to loose it's incandescent
fixtures. It was well into the 80's before the last stretch of
Rockaway Blvd., from roughly Farmers Boulevard to the city line,
got sodium fixtures in place of the incandescent cups, gumballs
& bells. One stretch, passing JFK's eastern runways, still had mini versions of the cast iron pole in my Gumball photo (temporarily unavailable), many still with their gumballs. Even rarer, some of those minis were twinlampers. If they had only held out a few more years, the retro craze might've saved them. They even survived a horrific disaster, when an Eastern Airlines 727 crashed into the boulevard in 1975. They couldn't survive the bureaucrat who sadly discovered that 20 years of predecessors had somehow forgotten to replace them. This corvington style pole still stands to this day, still with it's little signs pointing to the Midtown Tunnel and Triboro Bridge. The last time any attention was paid to the pole, other than to change it's bulbs, the closer Whitestone & Throgs Neck Bridges probably hadn't yet been opened. The old bell fixture still works. |
 UPDATE 11/99: Still standing as the
millenium draws to a close, but twisted towards the side and
looking to be in pretty deep trouble.UPDATE 07/2000: Still twisted towards the side and looking to be in pretty deep trouble, but standing nonetheless. One highly hyped movie over the summer of 2000 was Shaft, starring Samuel L. Jackson, advertised on the billboard just past Guy R. Brewer Boulevard. Guy R. Brewer the person was a southern Queens big-wig from our generation's days of yore. His memorial boulevard used to be New York Boulevard. I've traveled along Brewer numerous times between here and the Belt Pkwy, but it was still New York Boulevard the last time I rode on it north into Jamaica, sometime back in 1971. |
