LIGHTS OUT

In pitch-dark stretches of North Hollywood, the Hollywood Hills and Los Feliz, a hundred street lights wait for illumination that will never come. The concrete Doric columns are topped not by ornate globes but by dour metal caps the Bureau of Street Lighting installed decades ago to prevent birds from nesting inside. In the bureau’s parlance, these capped street lights are “out of service.” But they never actually were in service. Real-estate developers of the ‘20s and ‘30s, more clever than they were honest, plopped the street lights alongside empty lots. In the deceiving light of day, prospective buyers must have been impressed with their classical dignity--never suspecting the absence of wiring. The better part of a century later, the street lights are just as useless. “Strictly ornamentation,” observes Stan Horwitz, the bureau’s acting senior engineering manager. Even if they were somehow switched on, the street lights would be instantly obsolete, since they were designed to throw 90% of their light to the heavens and only 10% toward the sidewalk. Structurally, many survivors are unsound. “They begin to tilt,” Horwitz adds. “If it looks like they’re about to fall over, we’ll remove them.” And so the street lights that never were are finally uprooted--trees that never had the chance to blossom.