For a hundred years, a strange little sentinel has stood in the middle of a Beacon intersection, blinking red and yellow at drivers who mostly obey it, occasionally crash into it, and have grown to love it beyond all reason. This fall, the Howland Public Library is throwing it a birthday party in the form of a juried art exhibition.
"Beacon's Dummy Light: 100 Years" opens with a ceremony on Sept. 12 and runs through Oct. 30 in the library's Community Room. The show honors the city's most recognizable landmark — a traffic signal that isn't quite a traffic light, hence the name "dummy light." Mounted atop a concrete platform where a police officer once stood to direct traffic, the light blinks red on the end facing East Main Street and yellow on the ends facing Main Street.
The exhibition is open to artists of all experience levels who reside in the Hudson Valley, with eligible media including painting, drawing, collage, textiles and mixed media. Artists were asked to keep the Dummy Light as the central subject of their work, interpreting it creatively. Submissions closed Aug. 1, with artists notified by Aug. 14. The library explicitly barred AI-generated work.
The Dummy Light is a rare thing. Only four are known to remain in the country: in Beacon; Canajoharie, New York; Croton-on-Hudson, New York; and Toledo, Iowa. Chris Cimino, owner of the Last Outpost in Beacon, which sells shirts featuring the light's patent, has said the Beacon light was the first installed by the company that patented and built these signals — the Essco Manufacturing Company of Peoria, Illinois.
The light went up in 1926, though the exact date is lost to history. A social media post claimed May 5 as the birthday, but the Hudson Valley Post later issued a correction noting the actual date is unknown. What is known is that the light changed every 40 seconds, and to save electricity, police turned the power on manually at 8 a.m. and off at 10 p.m.
Over the decades, the Dummy Light has become more than a traffic control device; it's a community heirloom. In 2007, a workshop was held in Beacon about the possibility of moving the light from the middle of the intersection to a nearby sidewalk. Citizens in attendance strongly urged officials to keep it where it had been, arguing that the light was part of the community's character and should be preserved for future generations. The City Council voted to keep it in the middle of Main Street, making repairs after motor vehicle crashes as necessary.
Those crashes have been a recurring theme. Out-of-towners, in particular, have made a habit of plowing into the concrete platform. In 2022, the city completed a repainting and restoration project, adding bright yellow striping around the light and a full coat over the platform.
The art show is a fitting tribute for a landmark that has inspired painters, shirt-makers and postcard designers. It's also a natural fit for the Howland Public Library, a longtime Beacon institution.
So this fall, as the Dummy Light blinks its patient red and yellow over the intersection of Main and East Main, a few blocks away the library will be filled with paintings, drawings, collages and textiles all paying homage to the little light that could. It's a birthday gift, from Beacon to its most beloved traffic signal — one that has seen a century of change, survived countless collisions, and somehow kept blinking through it all.