Midnight Ramblers

In The Watches of the Night, Peter Baldwin draws "maps of time" that present a counterpoint to the spatial turn of urban studies.¹ The creation of the modern city required the production of not only physical spaces but temporal rhythms of daily life as well. He shows that rather than simply turning night into day, gas and electric lighting helped create "a complicated new 'space' with its own schedule, its own rules of access, and its own codes of behavior" (p. 13). Each of these dimensions of nightlife, in turn, became battlegrounds of social and cultural conflict. He recasts these now familiar struggles over the regulation of the built environment in similar terms of class and gender contestation over identities, family, morality, and behavior in public. Baldwin is especially sensitive to the ways in which the time of darkness remained a (young) man's world. In spite of modern technologies that lit up the city's streets, pre-industrial rituals of the "midnight hours" subordinated all unescorted women, subjecting them to insult and humiliation, if not sexual assault, in the more hidden places of the city.

Baldwin showcases a brilliant cast of characters who parade through an overlapping four-act play each night on the stage of urban life. Drawing upon a thick and diverse literature of contemporary observers, he adopts their divisions or "watches" of this nocturnal schedule into three-hour segments starting at six o'clock. These time periods themselves took a half-century of gestation to become more or less established as collective mental benchmarks in America's urban centers. Before the advent of gas-lighting in the late 1810s began changing their nightscapes, the seasonal rhythms of the sunset defined city-dwellers' "quitting time" just as in the countryside. The University of Connecticut historian reminds us that city streets equipped with gas-lamps were an improvement over those without them, but they only illuminated small spots with large areas of blackness in between.

Nonetheless, gas lamps did provide enough light during the first period of fluctuating closing times between 6 and 9 P.M. to turn public spaces into beehives of activity. These public spaces became busy with rushing crosscurrents of different social groups, ranging from commuters going to and from their jobs, after-work shoppers and diners, watchmen and police, newsboys and match girls, pickpockets and streetwalkers (prostitutes), along with throngs of "sports," "swells," and "rowdies" during the first stage of an all-night spree. In the 1850s, the theaters—the most respectable and popular form of commercial amusement—set the opening curtain at 9 P.M. in the big cities. By then, most other forums of entertainment for the middle classes were closing down, including church prayer sessions, self-improvement lyceums, and benevolent association meetings.

By midnight, even the theater audiences and ballroom dancers had returned to the safety of their homes. As that hour struck, the shadow of darkness seemed to unleash criminals, gamblers, and sex fiends to prey upon the innocent. From 3 to 6 A.M., even these denizens of the night deserted the streets, leaving them to drunken stragglers and the night workers, such as bakers and pressmen, who prepared the way for the rest of the city to awaken with the dawn of a new morning.

This social geography of time reinforced the widening spatial divisions of the industrial city into fully equipped security zones for the rich and into underserved and dangerous slums for the poor. Baldwin's approach to the production of urban space parallels the pathbreaking work of the troika of Marxian urban geographers: Henri Lefebvre, Manual Castells, and David Harvey. The bright lights of Main Street became one of the most highly visible and symbolic triumphs of the modern, networked city of high technology. Like municipal waterworks, the installation of better systems to turn night into day were hailed as great civic achievements, monuments of progress. Until the 1880s, however, the illumination made from coal...