Hey, there! Log in / Register
Citizen complaint of the day: The highlight of Warren Avenue
By adamg on Sun, 04/19/2015 - 7:35pm
An annoyed citizen complains about one of the streetlights along Warren Avenue between Clarendon and Dartmouth in the South End:
Third light pole from the right was replaced with a pole that is 1-2 ft taller than the others. It looks ridiculous. Please replace it with the correct size. I know it sounds petty, but this shouldn't have happened. Whoever installed it clearly wasn't paying attention.
Neighborhoods:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
If I was with public works
I would immediately get down there and change the color of that lamp.
I know, right? People should
I know, right? People should be used to everything looking like shit, all the time, right? After all, this is Boston, right?
City Departments are being starved
Schools, public safety, health care and fixed costs (pensions, debt etc) are now eating up over 85% of the budget - and that seems to be growing faster than the budget as a whole. This means that we do everything else with 15% of the budget - including administration, parks, DPW, youth services and more. If that number grows from 85% to say 87% - even with increases to the available pool of money, we will need to cut "other" by 10%. With a parks department for a city our size that's already operating on a fraction of 1% of the budget - where do you cut without jeopardizing safety?
I've called this for years - and the chickens seem to be about to come home to roost. Next recession - forget light poles - it'll be lights out.
By Mark Twain. Re: Hartford lighting company.
The ways of city officials and corporations are often past understanding, and Mark Twain sometimes found it necessary to write picturesque letters of protest. The following to a Hartford lighting company is a fair example of these documents.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3196/3196-h/3196-h.htm
To a gas and electric-lighting company, in Hartford:
GENTLEMEN,—There are but two places in our whole street where lights could be of any value, by any accident, and you have measured and appointed your intervals so ingeniously as to leave each of those places in the centre of a couple of hundred yards of solid darkness. When I noticed that you were setting one of your lights in such a way that I could almost see how to get into my gate at night, I suspected that it was a piece of carelessness on the part of the workmen, and would be corrected as soon as you should go around inspecting and find it out. My judgment was right; it is always right, when you axe concerned. For fifteen years, in spite of my prayers and tears, you persistently kept a gas lamp exactly half way between my gates, so that I couldn't find either of them after dark; and then furnished such execrable gas that I had to hang a danger signal on the lamp post to keep teams from running into it, nights. Now I suppose your present idea is, to leave us a little more in the dark.
Don't mind us—out our way; we possess but one vote apiece, and no rights which you are in any way bound to respect. Please take your electric light and go to—but never mind, it is not for me to suggest; you will probably find the way; and any way you can reasonably count on divine assistance if you lose your bearings.
S. L. CLEMENS.
[Etext Editor's Note: Twain wrote another note to Hartford Gas and Electric, which he may not have mailed and which Paine does not include in these volumes:
"Gentleman:—Someday you are going to move me almost to the point of irritation with your God-damned chuckle headed fashion of turning off your God-damned gas without giving notice to your God-damned parishioners—and you did it again last night—" D.W.]
Frequently Clemens did not send letters of this sort after they were written. Sometimes he realized the uselessness of such protest, sometimes the mere writing of them had furnished the necessary relief, and he put, the letter away, or into the wastebasket, and wrote something more temperate, or nothing at all. A few such letters here follow.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3196/3196-h/3196-h.htm
World Class City
I agree with the citizen complainer.
Is this the font guy?
Must be.
Next up...
...people will be complaining about the lettering of the Green line.
We started with street sign fonts, now street lamp heights, and pretty soon we'll get complaints of "Reinstate the Watertown Line so the dang tourists know that we CAN spell".
Herb Chambers killed the real A line =(
The MBTA will code one of the extension branches the new "A" line and be done with it.
Well
at least they didn't submit their complaint in Comic Sans or Jokerman.
Hahah
A large chunk of my commute (McGrath and Cross st) have no functioning street lights at all.
One of these things is not like the others
One of these things just doesn't belong!
Whoever installed it clearly
Or, to give the city the benefit of the doubt, maybe they were out of the correct height pole, and someone at the DPW thought it would be better to have a too-tall light there than none at all.
Or, they were paying
Or, they were paying attention, but just said, "f*&# it" rather than leave the work order open.
Abe Simpson
"Dear Mr. President, There are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. P.S. I am not a crackpot."
Between Florida, Arizona,
Between Florida, Arizona, Texas, Kansas, and now Indiana, how do you choose?
Try...
...going to visit Florida (because you saw that advertisement about it being magical and "it must be the sunshine", deciding that you're feeling REALLY good (must be the sunshine), and deciding to eliminate ALL states but Massachusetts, Texas, Idaho (for potatoes), and California (but renaming it L.A.)
Give it 50 years
No Florida. At least, no South Florida.
Send them to us
The lights on our narrow street in JP are tall enough for a highway. We'd love those beautiful, nicely sized neighborhood lights, odd sizes and all.
The complainer is absolutely
The complainer is absolutely right!! It does sound petty!
Which is too bad
It's too bad that expecting basic things to be done right sounds petty. Maybe people should just stifle themselves and learn to embrace mediocrity.
Who says it's because of mediocrity?
I'm one of this people driven crazy by crooked pictures and such, but it is petty.
Furthermore, these are old streets--there may have been many reasons why that light is higher that have nothing to do with anyone doing a "mediocre" job by someone "not paying attention," including stability of the pole or clearance of something we can't see in the picture.
Light pole diversity
is a sign of the "new" Boston.
Secret Urban Renewal Project!
Gentlemen, it's a new urban renewal project! (Groans are audible from the west end)
First, we're going to make every one in fifteen poles too high or low!
Then, we'll increase the reliability of the MBTA by replacing all trains with horse-drawn trolleys!
After that we'll bulldoze the whole west end all over again and build it all over again (by which we mean just ONE apartment, this time!)
Finally, we'll tunnel deep underground, and use a system of cranes to put not just our highways, but our entire glorious city underground! Then we can put new gardens and stuff on the land! Fine, it will be permanently nighttime! It's ok! It's urban renewal!
It looks like they can be seen from above
To reduce light pollution and make life easier for migratory birds and amateur astronomers, let's replace the light fixtures so the lights can't be seen from above. With a reflective fixture, the same amount of illumination on the street could be obtained with less cost.
I agree. These decorative
I agree. These decorative acorn streetlights look nice during the day but create awful glare at night, especially for people living directly next to them. The city already started to convert to LED, which is inherently directional, so using LED you don't even have to try to engineer a 'reflective fixture" to make it full-cutoff and dark-sky friendly. It just naturally comes out that way.
But the city's last update about the conversion was a few years ago. Did they give up on it? The technology is getting better every year.
http://www.cityofboston.gov/publicworks/lighting/led.asp
even if they don't fix it...
Even if Public Works doesn't go out and fix that lamp, these complaints have the value of discouraging repeats.
Whatever happened, whatever someone's intentions, and however minor the problem is compared to everything else broken in the city, the complaint is right. Chances are it will never be fixed, because fixes cost money (labor costs, time). Doing it right next time costs nothing, just better judgment.
Learning how to do things right in the trades requires feedback when things go both wrong and right. At least people are showing pride in the ol' Hub, even if some sound a bit persnickety.
LOL, I know, right? I'm sure
LOL, I know, right? I'm sure the DPW is deeply embarrassed about the whole incident and will do everything in their power to avoid a repeat.
More repeats!
They should make every other one this height! That would be cool.
Hmm,
When a South End resident complains about lighting, please refer to it from now on as Twattage.
the reply...
the reply...
"With the recent arrival of daylight, this lamp shining at a different height than the others is no longer a problem. Problem resolved, ticket marked closed."