Vermonica

Walking Through LA’s Lighting History

The 25 streetlights stand in a precise row along the sidewalk. Each lamp looks completely different from its neighbors. Walk from one end to the other and you travel through nearly a century of how Los Angeles chose to light its streets.

Some lamps rise tall on slender poles. Others sit squat and wide. A few feature ornate baroque metalwork, the kind you might expect outside a grand theater. Others show clean art deco lines from the 1930s and 1940s. The oldest date to 1925, the year the city created its Bureau of Street Lighting.

Each lamp originally served a specific LA neighborhood. The crook-necked pole came from Benedict Canyon. The obelisk lit Bel Air. Dangling globes once hung in Little Tokyo. Labels at the base of each pole identify where it came from and what designers called it.

A Response to Violence

Artist Sheila Klein conceived Vermonica in 1993, shortly after the LA Riots damaged much of this East Hollywood neighborhood. The original location sat in a Rite Aid parking lot at Vermont and Santa Monica, right where some of the worst violence occurred. Klein borrowed the lamps from the nearby city streetlight storage yard and arranged them in this precise line.

The name combines the two streets: VERmont plus MONica equals Vermonica. Klein described her work as transforming the intimate scale of household candlesticks into an urban candelabra for the city itself. When the lamps glow at night, they still serve that original purpose of bringing light to a place that experienced darkness.

The Installation’s Journey

Vermonica stayed in that parking lot for 24 years, far longer than Klein’s original one-year plan. Then in November 2017, the Bureau of Street Lighting removed it without telling the artist. Construction work required clearing the lot. The lamps spent three years in storage while Klein, local historians, and community advocates pushed the city to restore her work properly.

In December 2020, the installation returned to Santa Monica Boulevard, now two blocks east of its original spot. The new location sits directly across from the historic Cahuenga Branch Library and next to the Bureau of Street Lighting offices. The lamps stand in the same order Klein designed. They light up each evening just as they did at the first location.

What You See Today

The installation spans 120 feet along the sidewalk. You can walk right up to each lamp. Small plaques explain each one’s design name and original neighborhood. The variety surprises most visitors. Some neighborhoods preferred elaborate decoration. Others wanted simple efficiency. A few chose designs that now look like relics from another era of urban planning.

Vermonica preceded LACMA’s famous Urban Light installation by 15 years. Both works use historic streetlights as sculpture. Both transform overlooked civic infrastructure into something worth noticing. Klein’s version focuses on diversity rather than repetition. Instead of 202 identical-looking lamps, she shows 25 completely different designs to demonstrate how varied LA’s streetscape once looked.

Visit at night to see the lamps glowing. Each creates a slightly different quality of light based on its original design purpose. Together they produce an uneven, varied glow that contrasts sharply with the uniform LED streetlights now standard across the city. Stand back and look at the whole row. Then walk close and study individual lamps. Both views reveal different aspects of how much thought and craft once went into lighting public streets.