adma
Superstar
There doesn't appear to be any street lamps or sidewalks in the then photo. Perhaps those are lights tacked to the side of every forth building. The city didn't put much effort into street beautification back then eh?
You mean those "portholes"? Indeed, those were street lights: the byproduct of Yonge subway construction leading to the removal of wires and poles along Yonge--so it was indeed a form of "street beautification". (A few--on Dickinson's Prudential Building at Yonge + King, for example--are still discernable. Most of the portholes were later replaced by "wedge" lights; more recently, the paradoxical trend's been back to rather cutesypoo freestanding streetlights, here made possible by the Bloor-Yorkville BIA.)