City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (review)

Scholars have begun to write histories of nighttime. Especially before the advent of artificial light, night was sharply different from day. Many activities occurred only at night or only by day. Even now, the differences between night and day still shape our lives in many ways. Yet the differences are less than they once were. In City Lights, geographer John Jakle adds to the growing literature on "the landscape of night" by considering the history of artificial lighting in urban America.

Jakle has modest aims. First, as he explains in the preface, he seeks to "trace the evolution of lamp technology from oil and gas through various kinds of electrical illumination, focusing on the different qualities of light used to illuminate the night." Second, he intends to "outline how various kinds of lamps were applied to the outdoor lighting of public space, especially streets" (p. vii). Accordingly, the book is divided into two sections, with four chapters devoted to technological developments and seven devoted to major uses of light, from advertising business enterprises to highlighting civic monuments.

Judged by Jakle's own aims, City Lights succeeds. Jakle writes lucidly and vividly about innovations in illuminating technology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To suggest the ways in which people first responded to different forms of urban lighting, he draws skillfully on a range of sources, including novels, newspaper accounts, advertisements, technical reports, and trade periodicals. The many wonderful illustrations add much to the descriptions of technologies, people, and places.

Jakle's discussion of street lighting is especially interesting. Though scholars have focused on the use of artificial illumination for crime prevention, entertainment, and commercial spectacle, Jakle argues that the most important and pervasive use of street lighting was to facilitate automobile travel. Because some streets were more heavily traveled than others, engineers began in the late 1920s and early 1930s to design hierarchical lighting systems. The busier the street, the brighter the lights. In Jakle's view, the new lighting hierarchy had significant consequences. It reinforced the idea that streets were mainly traffic arteries; it defined the form of the city by visually separating urban places with different functions; and it made the marvelous qualities of artificial lighting seem mundane.

Because Jakle's purposes are more descriptive than analytical, however, the arguments in City Lights are not well developed. Jakle does not consider the relationship between the rise of hierarchical street lighting systems and the rise of zoning, which sought to separate residential, commercial, and industrial uses of urban land. Although he is interested in the contribution of artificial lighting to "the modernizing of American cities," he does not address the literature on the history of urban planning. He draws little from the scholarly literature about the automobile's impact on the metropolis. He also neglects some key studies of the cultural impact of artificial lighting. Though he cites Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Disenchanted Night, he does not cite Murray Melbin's Night as Frontier. Historians of technology are likely to be especially frustrated by the book's first section, which considers the development and adoption of new lighting technologies. Jakle ignores the big questions about the social construction of technology. To explain the rise and fall of different illumination methods, he makes three basic points: The new technologies were more effective, cheaper, and more "modern."

The story surely was more complicated than that. I wish Jakle had decided to dig deeper. But he did do what he set out to do, and a bit more: City Lights is a thought-provoking study of a rich subject.