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Tired
of cars — and bikes — running red lights? How about no lights at all?
That’s the kind of #traffic #system #NewYork 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.
Source: New York Times
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