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What are the orange cylinders that have been appearing over the last year on the city’s streetlights? They’re placed on the light part of the “cobra-head” style lights and there seem to be a few different kinds. I’ve been puzzling over this for a while and can’t quite figure out who to ask besides Gothamist. Thanks, D.
New York is such a quirky city that the things we see on the street sometimes are unusual and mysterious (like the sticky stuff on manhole covers; odd looking, perhaps, but practical in that it helps stave off electrocution). The answer to this question, though, is pretty simple. The orange cylinders are new fire alarm indicators. If you see one, there's a fire alarm underneath.
Special thanks to Forgotten NY's Kevin Walsh for confirming the answer for us. There's a lot more on streetlamps here.
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THAT'S what those things are?!?! I've been scratching my head over those things for months now! Amazing the things you learn on Gothamist.
Thanks for the answer!
The red and green globes at train stations used to indicate when the station was open. Actually it was green open & token booth, yellow open no toke booth red closed. I don't know if the practice is maintained as token booths and their clerks near extinction.
Actually, la depressionanada, Ask Gothamist previously tackled those globes. Most of the color coding is kind of irrelevant now because the globes haven't changed with the stations (or the booth closings).
Who knew? Maybe you could do the secret ballroom in the subway (unless you have done it already of course.)
Since so few people know what the orange things are on top of the streetlights then what are they worth? I mean, since nobody knows that they indicate that there is a fire alarm below who is looking for them?
thank you gothamist.
i've been looking at those for months trying to speculate on their purpose. worse than that is that i had no idea who to ask about them. thanks.
bob,
far as i can tell the fire department has wanted to get rid of those emergency call boxes for years, because they result in so many false alarms. so i suspect that is the reason you can't find any information about them on their website and that they don't do a public education campaign about the orange cylindars.
there's good reason for the fire alarm boxes to stay, though. they are independently connected directly to fire dispatchers through hard phone lines. when the 9-1-1 system fails (which it did once last year for a few hours), when there is a phone outage in a community (as there are in neighborhoods from time to time), or when wireless circuits are busy, such as during the blackout or 9/11, it's a nice back-up system to report an emergency when you have no other way to reach police or fire officials.
Thanks for the dirt, dirtgirl. Maybe each fire alarm should have a camera attached so that they can see who is reporting the emergency.
Ummm, If those orange cylinders on streetlamps indicate fire call boxes, they are pretty inconsistant. An informal survey of my neighborhood in Brooklyn shows that of 8 orange cylinder streetlamps, only 6 had call boxes anywhere near them, and of those 6, some were directly below, some were across the street, and some were half a block away. Add this to the fact that those things are barely visible, and no one knows what they are for, and it seems like a waste of money to me...