Lights Dim on a Glowing Custom : A myriad of distinctive, decorative street lights was a trademark of Los Angeles, but their presence has dimmed as progress and practicality have taken the spotlight.

The legion of bare-breasted women lining Wilshire Boulevard has dwindled to a few hundred over the years, some wiped out by automobiles, some by old age, some by developers.

The seldom-noticed Greek-style figurines--dubbed “Wilshire Specials”--are perched 20 feet above the ground on ornamental street light posts dating back at least to the 1920s.

“We’ve found a few references to them in our records, but they’re kind of a mystery,” said George Eslinger, director of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting. “We don’t know who designed them.”

The bare beacons, stretching from Figueroa Street to MacArthur Park, recall a time when the city bathed in the soft glow of more than 250 styles of ornamental street lights.

Emphasis on ‘Pretty’

“The emphasis was on ‘pretty’ back then, not safety,” Eslinger said. “Every developer wanted to have a different-looking type of street light in his neighborhood.”

You can still find street lamps resembling torches, lanterns, acorns, teardrops and, on Hollywood Boulevard, stars. Redwood light posts mingle with the hedges on Bronson Avenue in the Mid-Wilshire area. Brackets in the shape of dragons hold up transparent globes on Olympic Boulevard downtown and on streets around City Hall.

“They make it fun to walk down the street,” said Eddy Feldman, author of “The Art of Street Lighting in Los Angeles.”

More Efficient Models

But like Wilshire’s bronze maidens, many of the old-fashioned lights have been replaced in recent years by the gray, curve-necked creatures known as cobra-heads, which throw out more light for less cost.

“They look like the monsters that invaded in the movie ‘War of the Worlds,’ ” City Councilman John Ferraro says unaffectionately.

After two decades, however, the invasion of cobra-heads is beginning to meet with resistance.

Protests from residents in West Los Angeles and the Los Feliz area, among others, have persuaded the bureau to drop plans to remove some poles with fluted shafts and acorn-shaped globes.

In addition, City Councilman Michael Woo has asked the street-lighting bureau to study the idea of producing replicas of the older styles that would be more energy-efficient than their predecessors.

Historic District

And the council, at the urging of Ferraro, has designated the Windsor Square area near Hancock Park the first historic street light district in the city. The green ornamental lampposts bearing shields with the insignia “W/S” will be refurbished and repainted by the city, with the residents paying for the extra costs through a special assessment.

The cobra-heads do have their supporters.

Woo’s office, which polls residents any time a street light conversion is contemplated, found that residents in two Los Feliz neighborhoods wanted the modern standards.

“Their feeling was that they would get better light, which would be a deterrent to crime,” said Larry Kaplan, a spokesman for Woo. “And since they’re more energy efficient, their street-light assessment bills would be more stable.”

Even author Feldman admits that the older, upturned varieties, pleasing to the eye as they may be, “don’t illuminate much besides the heavens.”

My tea is nearly ready

And the sun has left the sky;

It’s time to take the window

To see Leerie going by;

For every night at tea time

And before you take your seat,

With lantern and with ladder

He comes posting up the street.

--”The Lamplighter,” by Robert Louis Stevenson

The lamplighter was an esteemed figure in another age. In the 1860s, many Angelenos took pride in the teen-age horseman who, in the spirit of the Spanish dons, would gallop through town each evening, pausing to rise in his stirrups to light each gas lamp.

In the 1980s, the lamplighter is not so universally loved.

Eslinger’s office contains several artifacts, including a light reflector punctured by nine bullet holes.

“We take our shots,” he said, and it’s clear he means in more ways than one.

One public relations problem, he said, is that “a lot of people seem to feel that you (the city) owe us street lights and you (the city) should pay for it.”

Street lights, he pointed out, aren’t paid by general tax dollars but through special assessments. If residents want to keep the older, less efficient, harder-to-maintain lights, then their assessments will be higher.

Dim streets also arouse fears in the bureau regarding the city’s liability in the event of accidents or crimes. “This is a very litigation-conscious society,” Eslinger said.

Which brings the conversation around to cobra-heads.

“I don’t like the term ‘cobra-head,’ ” the director says. “I’d prefer ‘horizontal mounted luminaire,’ but. . . .” He shrugs--the street light bureau against the world.

Cobras around the city are being equipped with high-pressure sodium lamps, which use less electricity and distribute the light more efficiently. The city’s light bill from the Department of Water and Power last year was $15 million; the cobras helped save about $7 million, Eslinger said.

Aside from their reptilian bodies, their yellowish glow bothers some residents. “Bug lights” and “cell block yellow” are two of the less flattering descriptions.

“We call ours peach or champagne,” Eslinger said.

He pointed out that several cities, like Long Beach, use low-pressure sodium, which is monochromatic, rendering everything in its glow colorless.

“But with high pressure sodium,” Eslinger said, “you can distinguish colors.”

And indeed, when he steps under the dwarf-sized cobra-head light that he keeps in his office, his blue tie still looks blue.

Street lights--there are about 220,000 in the city--are replaced for various reasons.

An average of two to three a day are knocked out by automobiles, much in the way that a character named Benny the Cab levels one in the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

Light standards in poor condition are also replaced by cobra-heads on a rotating plan. “We try to see that each council district gets a fair proportion,” Eslinger said.

Others have been replaced on request.

Once, street lights with blue and yellow tile--UCLA’s colors--graced the streets of Westwood. Now, the only two on view stand outside the Board of Public Works meeting room in City Hall.

The blue-and-whites were yanked out of Westwood in the 1960s and, in their place, gray, Hydra-headed standards were installed.

“Westwood made the decision that it wanted to have the best-lit business community in the world, and it may have,” Eslinger says.

Insurance executive and cobra-hater Michael Cornwell has a 1914 real estate ad for Windsor Square that brags about the area’s “streets and parkings” and shows a drawing of the ornamental “W/S” lamppost.

For the last five years, Cornwell and others fought to stave off the installation of modern lights in their period-piece neighborhood near Hancock Park in the Wilshire District.

“I don’t think you need street lights so bright that you can read a paperback book in the middle of the street,” Cornwell said. “The cobras make the street look like a used-car lot. There’s also a feeling that when a street’s over-lit, cars tend to speed on it.”

Now, the area’s a historic street light district and public hearings are scheduled next month on a proposal whereby more than 100 of the “W/S” standards will be renovated. In addition, globe-type lights on cement poles will be installed on side streets that have no illumination at present. Residents will have to chip in an extra $398,000 in assessments. Author Feldman sees the Windsor Square fight as an example of changing attitudes toward street lights.

When he was on the city Municipal Arts Commission (now the Cultural Affairs Commission) in the 1960s, “someone from street lighting (bureau) would come in with page after page of old street lights that they wanted to wipe out, and the attitude was more or less, ‘If street lighting says they have to be taken out, then they have to be taken out.’ ”

Now, Feldman says, “the people have been alerted to the aesthetic qualities of these lights.”

The street light bureau’s attitude has changed, too.

Recently, the bureau contracted with a foundry to produce five aluminum-cast replicas of the Wilshire Specials, which have been painted to match the originals.

Eslinger said that the originals “have such historic and unique qualities” that the bureau has instituted a policy of preserving them for as long as possible, and, if any become hopeless damaged, resorting to the replicas.

The aluminum stand-ins are ready but they haven’t been needed yet, according to Dick Lucas, assistant bureau director.

“We haven’t had a knock-down (by an automobile) there lately,” he said.