Once Incredibly Common

The fact that I have to explain what this is would have astonished New Yorkers of the late nineteenth century. The picture is taken in a stairwell – you can see the sloped wainscoting along the stair on the left. And this thing is the base of a gas lamp. It’s missing the enclosure, which would likely have been a small glass cylinder (or something similar) on the far left end/ The thing that looks like a pipe is a pipe, which was filled with coal gas, and the bottom-most projection is the control portion of a valve (the valve proper is just above, inside the intersection of pipe). To light up the stairwell, you lifted off the enclosure, turned the valve on, lit the gas with a match, and put the enclosure back. To turn the light off, you simply turned the valve. (A long time ago, I read Time and Again, by Jack Finney, and as the protagonist is moving into a boarding house in New York in 1882, his landlord explains to him that you have to turn off the gas lamps, not simply blow out the…