Looking at traffic lights in 1947, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania


I've never lived anywhere without traffic lights. I learned to drive, in Minneapolis, in the 1970s, and even before that I was familiar with traffic lights because I rode my bike around the city. And other than some minor modifications, like better lights and a computer-controlled system, they really haven't changed much since then. But since I like to collect old photos, it's fun to see how traffic lights have changed over the years when they were fairly new, like in this photo of Market Street in Philadelphia in 1947.


Of course, traffic lights were in Philadelphia long before 1947. In this photo, which I found at the Duke University Libraries Digital Collection website, you can see that, since they were positioned out in the street, the city had wised up and put concrete bases on them, presumably because the cars kept driving into them, and knocking them over.

People still have a lot of difficulty understanding traffic lights. I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and its reputation as the "number one city in red-light running" is justly deserved, I can tell you. I see cars run through red lights all of the time, almost every time I'm out. And it could be confusion about what the yellow light is supposed to mean, which is caution, and which a large percentage of drivers see as "hurry up before the light changes!" Luckily, in Phoenix traffic lights are red in both directions for several seconds, which allows for red light running to not always cause an accident. Traffic lights have to be REALLY red for cars to hit each other, which they do, sadly.

Green, of course, means go, and red means stop. One of my favorite stories by James Thurber was the time when he was a passenger in a car with a person who thought that the red and green lights were just Christmas decorations put up by the city. Thurber said that he would never ride in a car during the holidays again!

By the way, you're looking east on Market Street towards the Philadelphia City Hall (which is still there, by the way.) It was completed in 1901, and so there would have been people in 1947 who remembered it being built, with their parents, or grandparents, remembering it beginning construction in 1871.


Things had changed a lot in just a couple of generations! Thank you for looking at traffic lights with me in 1947!


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