Replicas of Vintage Street Lights Bring New Glow to District

Things looked dark for one Los Angeles neighborhood when workers ripped out rows of beloved antique street lights to make room for a road widening project.

Don’t worry, we’ll replace them, officials assured residents of the Adams-Figueroa Historic District, an 80-year-old area between Exposition Park and downtown.

New light poles went up, all right. But they were sleek, high-intensity “cobra” street lights--not the ornate, warmly glowing lamps that had been relegated to the scrap pile by the road widening crew.

Nine years later, the neighborhood’s luck has changed, thanks to a Caltrans worker who managed to track down the Ohio company that originally manufactured the 1906 vintage street lights.

To the surprise of transportation engineers, the company had saved the original ironwork molds for the distinctive, fluted poles and the elegant lamp fixtures.

And to the surprise of the neighborhood, state and city officials agreed to purchase copies of the originals and install them near Figueroa Street and Adams Boulevard.

Homeowners will join officials at 11:30 a.m. today at the Auto Club building at 2601 S. Figueroa St. to flip a ceremonial switch activating the 33 replicas.

“We thought we’d never see them again,” said Jim Childs, a graphic artist who is vice president of his neighborhood’s North University Park Community Assn. “Especially when they took the old lampposts and cannibalized them for parts.”

The original street lights were removed after Los Angeles transportation engineers asked state highway planners to widen Figueroa Street to handle traffic from the Harbor Freeway’s new elevated transitway.

The city Bureau of Street Lighting decided to use pieces of the scrapped light poles as replacement parts for damaged or worn-out vintage street lights still in use. About 1,000 of them exist in the downtown area, according to officials.

In 1994, Childs wrote letters protesting the loss of the antique lights to state and local leaders. Caltrans officials decided to try to replace them with the real thing.

Playing detective, Diane Kane, a Caltrans architectural historian, learned from city redevelopment agency workers that the manufacturer of the original lamps was still in business. Russell Poling, an executive with Union Metal Corp. of Canton, Ohio, stunned her with news that the original wood molds used in the casting of the ornate light posts were still in a factory storeroom.

“It was a custom design for L.A.,” Poling said of the ornate street lights. “Our forefathers were very bright. They planned ahead for this nostalgia to come back. They just didn’t know it would take this long.”

The new poles look identical to the originals, which were installed in the early 1920s. But the replicas have been redesigned on the inside to meet contemporary safety codes and standards. And they have 18-watt fluorescent bulbs instead of the 400-watt high-pressure sodium bulbs used in the cobra-style street lights.

For that reason, the larger lights will remain in place next to the replicas, said Orlando Nova, a Bureau of Street Lighting manager.

Although the $10,000 cost of each replica pole was covered by Caltrans and the federal government, Nova credited property owners who agreed to pay an extra fee for maintenance of the new poles “for making the project viable.”

Others predict that the antique look will be so popular that other property owners will want them, too. There is already talk of lining Figueroa between the Coliseum and the new Staples Center arena with the lampposts.

“We’d love to see the 1906 lights lining both sides of the street,” said Bingham Cherrie, head of planning at USC. “It’s part of giving the streets back to people in the neighborhood.”