Gothamist: Heady Streetlamps

Todd Shirley

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 14:25:22 -0500

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...

Bob

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 22:33:12 -0500

Thanks for the dirt, dirtgirl. Maybe each fire alarm should have a camera attached so that they can see who is reporting the emergency.

dirtgirl

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 18:29:54 -0500

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.

Oded Marcovici

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 18:10:24 -0500

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

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:33:42 -0500

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?

la depessionada

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:19:33 -0500

Who knew? Maybe you could do the secret ballroom in the subway (unless you have done it already of course.)

Erin

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 16:37:35 -0500

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).

la depressionada

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:41:41 -0500

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.

sally

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 11:52:26 -0500

Thanks for the answer!

MT

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 11:48:10 -0500

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.