Landmark Lampposts for a Greenwich Village Co-op: Go South, Young Man

"We do that kind of things all the time in New York City," says Don Wynn, president of the nearly 102-year-old Herwig, which specializes in reproductions of old lighting fixtures based on antique samples or illustrations. "In fact, I came up once and lifted rubber molds of a light-fixture bracket, and made a light fixture to mount on the original bracket," he recalls.

The co-op — the center building of which was home to punk-rock pioneer Willy DeVille, of the band Mink DeVille, until his death on August 6 — restored its façade and installed matching dual lampposts at each of its three front stoops. "When the buildings were built," early in the 20th century, "the façade originally was limestone," says managing agent Eric Ehrenhaus of Buchbinder & Warren. "And over the years, they painted the façade white and every three or four years they'd paint it again. Then [the current board] said, 'Why don't we remove the paint and bring out the limestone that was underneath?' So it was part maintenance, part aesthetic."

Yet while that part of the $40,000 project — which began in October 2008 and was completed last May, under architect Alfred Karman — was relatively straightforward from a construction/restoration standpoint, you can't just go to Home Depot and get reproductions of the original gaslights.

Photographic Memory

Step one was to find documentation of what the buildings looked like when new. The board "got an original photo, maybe archived by the city, and found Herwig to match what they saw in the picture," Ehrenhaus says.

"They sent us some photographs," Wynn remembers. "We blew them up best we could" in order to try and discern the size of the lampposts — which is harder than it sounds. "It's always difficult to try and scale off an old photograph," Wynn says. "We did it to the scale of the building."

Without specific model numbers or other detailed information, "We couldn't match exactly since we didn't know what 'exactly' was," he says. "So we used components of ours from the same era." Mixing and matching globe lanterns, posts and other parts from Herwig's century-old inventory of styles, he came up with a lamppost that "wasn't an exact reproduction, but it was very similar." The company has its own on-site foundry to make their aluminum reproductions.

Wynn is part of the company's founding lineage. "Bill Herwig founded the company in Chicago in 1908" as the Herwig Art Shades & Lamp Company, he says. "He had one sister, she had one son, and my dad's sister married the son. When Uncle Bob passed away in Chicago in 1947, my dad purchased the company from his sister and moved from California to Chicago take over." A major fire and a dislike of cold weather prompted the company's move in 1964 to tiny Russellville, Wynn's father had another sister.

Among its other New York clients: The landmarked Apple Bank building on W. 73rd Street and Broadway, the upper floors of which were recently converted to condominiums. "Apple Bank is one we keep doing over and over again, since they keep adding to it," Wynn says. "All the exterior light fixtures are mine. They sent me templates of the granite stones, and we had to build backplates to fit those templates."

When you're talking about preserving the look of New York City, it's worth all the trouble.