In the Watches of the Night by Peter C. Baldwin

Author:Peter C. Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Night Life in the Electric City

Until the 1880s, gas lighting gave the nocturnal city a landscape of light and shadow. Brightly lit thoroughfares, with glowing shop windows and illuminated signs, intersected dark side streets that led through the slums. Public lamps were too weak and too few to illuminate a whole block. Unless supplemented by privately owned lighting on businesses or homes, gas lamps left dark gaps where faces could not be recognized and shapes were only dimly discerned. Uneven lighting reflected and in some ways encouraged the human qualities of the night city: the dramatic contrasts of safety and danger, wealth and poverty, work and leisure, virtue and vice.

Electricity produced a different visual experience of urban night. Far brighter than gas, electric streetlights could fill a city block with light instead of just the circle around the lamppost. Shadows shrank back, revealing facial expressions and house numbers. By the late 1920s, a wash of electric brightness had covered the old chiaroscuro landscape of the gaslit city. Major streets could now be seen at night with a detailed clarity once possible only in gaslit rooms. The glow even in dimmer side streets was usually sufficient to make faces recognizable. The big city might still be an anonymous world of strangers, but not because of darkness.

In other ways, one could argue that electricity merely updated the qualities of the gaslit city. Disparities in lighting persisted. Brightness remained the marker of conspicuous consumption. Nighttime entertainment still concentrated in the most brilliantly illuminated streets, and incandescent displays in shop windows gave an aura of luxury to retailing districts. Chicago’s Clark Street at night, observed a newspaper reporter in 1892, was “resplendent with flashing lights and gaily dressed promenaders from all quarters of the city. Here are grand hotels, fine theaters, variety shows, dime museums, shooting galleries, railroad ticket offices, dance-halls, and ready made clothing stores, all ablaze with light and filled with pleasure seeking humanity.” Ordinary citizens rubbed shoulders with gamblers and prostitutes inside glittering billiard parlors and “gin palaces.”1 All this seemed to echo the descriptions of gaslit cities fifty years before.

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