Thanks everyone.

Yeah I figured that a paper tag would look like a obvious reproduction so I used my laser printer to print on a sheet of aluminium foil to get that OEM tag look. I think I'm gonna reprint my Powerlite tags too since the originals were printed on foil.

Thorough work there! Like the fresh looking refactor gasket. And your tags are getting indistinguishable Mike!

Thanks Matt! All I can say is that I try on those tags for an authentic look! I didn't quite match the fonts but it's pretty much a match. Printed on foil, it looks just like the real thing! I have an ink-jet printer so I can only print on paper, so my personal tags look less authentic.

Good job. Although for a MH luminaire, the NEMA decal is typically red

With my M-250A2, it's got a 250W MH ballast but I used a blue 25 to make it more authentic since the 80s M-250A2s weren't made in MH (unless it was a custom option). With the nameplate above I used a H39 designation because MH didn't exist at that time so all the nameplates had "H" as part of the generic label with just the number stamped after.

Yeah Mike did a very good job making a copy of the tag for me. I printed it on foil for that authentic look. As for the tag, since this was originally MV I figured that a MV tag would look better on it than a MH tag.

Very nice, Looks great !!

OK so GE Crimefighters were made specifically for Chicago?....nice restoration BTW.

Yes, they were designed specifically for Chicago as a solution to curbing Chicago's rapidly growing crime rate in the 60s. The logic behind it was that if they blasted the light in all directions, there would be no dark areas for criminals to hide. However, the glare from these things (not so much the coated MV lamps but certainly the clear HPS lamps) is excruciating to the eyes of a nighttime driver and studies show that there is no relationship between more light and less crime.

Studies say one thing sure....but in my experience there's more crime is Dark areas,this however does not call for excess in using way more light than needed....besides there's really no other reason for Vandals to purposely damage lighting so they can't be seen.

Yeah, I guess 175w MV is sorta ok considering most residential streets were lit with this wattage but the M-400 based version with a 310w HPS is overkill for most roads.

Even though they were designed for Chicago, I believe other utilities and cities could order them if they knew the ordering number. I'd imagine they saw limited use here in Toronto back in the day.

In urban areas there will always be crime no matter how bright the streets are. Lighting only makes it easier for criminals to be caught if there's someone else out there. If it's a deserted area all the light in the world won't help. But a well lit area gives the psychological feeling of safety. Lighting can be effective if well controlled and can still be effective even if the place isn't lit like daytime. Back then energy was cheap so downtown boulevards were lit with 1000W MVs spaced 100ft apart on both sides of the road lol.

Actually, AFAIK, the crimefighters were only intended to ever be sold to/purchased by Chicago, but they must've done a pretty poor job of that since these have shown up throughout North America (but are very rare outside of Chicago). And with no internet, it's not like these were bought online as surplus items and shipped from Chicago across the country. Perhaps someone could have had a distributor special-order the item but they would have had to known the catalog number like you said, and these were not a cataloged item as far as I know.

Yeah, lighting does make people feel safer but you don't really need to over do it. Interestingly we never had 1kW MV lights, even the freeways used 700w MW back then. Our downtown boulevards were mainly lit with incandescent and in some cases HO fluorescent. Now it's mostly PSMH and HPS. LED hasn't really made it downtown yet.

Yeah I guess GE didn't really do a good job of restricting sales then. Perhaps the later models got restricted since it seems like only the 60s M-250R based ones are common outside of Chicago.

Yeah I've never heard of any other crimefighter model making it outside of Chicago. My M-250CF (the M-250R1 with the door mounted ballast) is a Chicago exclusive too even though it's got a regular refractor. The ballast runs 100W HPS lamps at either 70W or 90W. The 70W setting runs the lamp at a deeper orange color (just ever-so-slightly though, not LPS-like or anything) and takes longer to warm up. I've also run a 70W HPS lamp at the 70W setting and it warms up like any other 70W lamp. I'll have to try a 100W HPS lamp on a normal 70W HPS fixture and see what happens. The M-250CF also does hot restrikes very quickly. Like 10 seconds or less! I'd imagine that's much harder on the lamps though. And the lamps start like 80% full brightness already, so very good if it's crucial to keep the lights on a much as possible.

1000W MV flood lights were very common (and still are, as many were never changed out to HPS in the 90s) in Narragansett Electric areas. Blackstone Valley Electric (the one that used all the FCO HPS lights in the late 80s and early 90s) rarely used 1000W MV floods and all their flood lights were all HPS'ed in the 80s. BVE never used 1000W MV cobraheads). NECo used some 1000W MV cobraheads. They were an offering but weren't widely used except for downtown and some other odd places.

As for freeway lighting, it was all 400W MV here, both on the ramps and on the freeway itself. In the 80s when reconstruction projects of the old 50s and 60s freeways and construction of new freeways started up, RIDOT began using 400W HPS lights on the freeways with much taller poles. From what Dave D. has told me, there were all sorts of 400W HPS lights on these poles but in the 90s, they replaced them with M-400R2s. I don't really know why, but I guess maybe they just wanted them all to match lol. But now many of the M-400R2s have been replaced with M-400s. They're all still drop lens though; RIDOT doesn't mix drop lens and FCO, which is nice. There's one freeway near me that was redone in 1988 (RI-37) and got new tall davits on the freeway portion and the traditional short davits on the ramps. The tall poles all originally had 400W HPS OVMs, some with no PC socket and some with PC sockets and shorting caps. The ramps all originally had 250W HPS OVSs, all with no PC sockets. When I was little I always thought the OVS had the PC socket to the rear like the OVM since even back then I saw the similarity between the two lights. The first time I saw an OVS with a PC socket I was confused lol. Over time, the ramps have has M-250R2 spot replacements and the freeway has had M-400R2 and new M-400 spot replacements. RI-37 was the only RIDOT freeway to use all Cooper fixtures in the 80s instead of a bunch of random models.

I noticed that This end of the freeway has almost all the lamps burnt out so I'm thinking they're going to LED this end of the freeway soon. The rest of the lights are mostly all working. Here's a close-up of a pole with both original OVMs via a bridge overpass.

With RI-37, all the exits except #1 (Interstate 295) and #4 (Interstate 95) has tall 400W poles and all the freeway between exits does too. Exit #4 has The original poles to the I-95 construction, the 60s short davits with long arms, holding 250W HPS M-250R2s with individual PCs. These poles originally held 400W MVs. Exit #1, including the west terminus of the freeway, has NGrid-owned poles (originally NECo) with 250W HPS M-250R2s with PCs. Here's where they switch from RIDOT to NGrid. However, I know for a fact that those NGrid poles in the center of the freeway are NOT original to the freeway, as there are missing poles along the shoulders of the freeway. The original layout for the NGrid section of the freeway was an alternating shoulder-median-shoulder-median pattern. Plus, those poles are tall like the newer NGrid poles. The 60s and 70s NECo poles were shorter like this. And they had a more pointy pole cap.

Yeah I think the only other Crimefighters in the city are these which are also the 60s M-250R version.

I don't think 1kW MV floodlights were used by the utilities here. Private lighting here was mostly 175-400w Powerbrackets (or the Westinghouse/Sylvania equivalent) or 175w floodlights. Some older parking lots have 1kW MV B2213s though.

Over here MTO freeways were originally lit with incandescent gumballs in the 1930s and 1940s, then 400w MV clamshells in the 1950s, 700w B2213s or 400w B2215s in the 1960s, 400w B2255s in the 1970s. In the 80s MTO started using 250w HPS Unidors, and by the 90s they used either 250w OV-25s or 125s. In the 2000s the MTO started using M-400A3s and 125s (although high mast was the most common).

As for the Toronto maintained freeways, they used HO fluorescent in the 60s, then LPS in the late 70s, before switching over to HPS in the late 90s-mid 2000s.

I don't know if we really had freeways before MVs. RIDOT had some 1000W Holophane highmasts installed in the 70s (two installations ever) and one installation of 400W HPS Holophane highbays (same style with the bucket refractors) in the 80s. One of the MH installations was totally removed in 2006-ish and replaced with M-400 FCOs on davits. The 400W HPS highmasts are almost all gone, as the interchange is being reconfigured. The HPS poles are being removed one-by-one as they get in the way. They're apparently using those Holophane Mongoose lights (or Mongeese, as I call them in their plural form lol) but I'd assume they'd be going all LED now since they'd inevitably be going LED in a few years. Most of the major bridges have retrofitted to LEDs already and all new poles installed since mid-late 2014 (other than knockdown replacements) have been LEDs.

Very nice rebuild! Ya need to do mine next

Thanks! Normally I don't do a full rebuild on my lights but this one was special and in bad enough of a condition to warrant a full rebuild.

Ahh, the only freeway here old enough to have incandescent lighting was the QEW The original lighting installed in the 1930s was incandescent gumballs in the median. They were replaced with MV lights in the 1950s and 1960s. The majority of our freeways are now highmast HPS. Parts of the Conestoga Parkway in Waterloo got LED lighting during a rebuild a couple of years ago though but the majority of new installs by MTO are still HPS.

Not sure how I missed this!! Awesome restoration Joe!

Thanks Darren!