Influential retailers on Fifth Avenue no doubt felt sympathy, but what hurt them at the cash register was traffic gridlock, and pressure grew to declog the avenue. It could take 40 minutes to go from 57th to 34th Street.

There had been an experimental traffic light in 1917, but it was short-lived. Thus it was in 1920 that the first permanent traffic lights in New York went up, the gift of Dr. John A. Harriss, a millionaire physician fascinated by street conditions. His design was a homely wooden shed on a latticework of steel, from which a police officer changed signals, allowing one to two minutes for each direction. Although the meanings we attach to red and green now seem like the natural order of things, in 1920 green meant Fifth Avenue traffic was to stop so crosstown traffic could proceed; white meant go. Most crosstown streets and Fifth Avenue were still two-way.

The doctor’s signals were so well received that in 1922 the Fifth Avenue Association gave the city, at a cost of $126,000, a new set of signals, seven ornate bronze 23-foot-high towers placed at intersections along Fifth from 14th to 57th Streets. Designed by Joseph H. Freedlander, they were the most elegant street furniture the city has ever had. It was a time when elevating public taste through civic beauty was considered a fit goal for government effort. In 1923 the magazine Architecture opined that “To understand the beautiful is to create a love for the beautiful, to widen the boundaries of human pride, enjoyment and accomplishment.”

Dr. Harriss’s towers would have looked at home in a railway freight yard; Freedlander’s towers were fitting adornments for the noblest of New York’s public spaces, like the forecourt of the New York Public Library or the Plaza at 59th Street.

For reasons unstated, the towers were not placed in the center of the intersections, but several feet north or south of the crosswalks — crosstown drivers could barely see them. The new lights supposedly reduced that trip from 57th to 34th to 15 minutes. Soon, traffic lights were like laptops in classrooms: everyone was in favor of them.