Feedback

Urban Space and Representation: David Nye

Abstract

The electrification of New York City began in the Pearl Street area in the 1880s. The extent of service was shaped by technical and economic factors, which limited electric lighting to wealthy customers. Less than 10 percent of all New Yorkers had electricity in their homes twenty years after it was introduced, and people's first contact with the new technology was primarily in public places. This paper will explore the public perception of space between 1880 and 1920, with an emphasis on electric advertising and the invention of the "Great White Way", the dramatic lighting of skyscrapers, and the ways these changes were registered by writers, painters, and photographers. What emerged was a new "electrical sublime."

Douglas Tallack:

This is David Nye, Professor of American Studies and the University of Odense, in Denmark but this year is a Leverhulme visiting professor at the University of Leeds. David’s books and articles are on American Studies from the late 19th Century to the present with an emphasis on the history of technology, his latest books are "Electrifying America", "The American Technological Sublime" and most recently "Consuming Power", all with MIT Press, the title of this talk is the "Electric" rather than the "Technological" - "The Electric Sublime in the American City 1870-1931". The questions, I’ve agreed with David and Eric Sandeen, will be at the end of both of the talks.

David Nye (Odense)

"The Electric Sublime in the American City 1870-1931"

Thank you very much for that kind introduction. I was looking up at that skyline logo and thinking how appropriate it was also for my particular talk because it suggests immediately the idea that the construction and the representation of the city are inseparable, it literally constructs the skyline in the time period that I’m talking about from 1870 to 1931 - that’s the period when the first skyscrapers were being built and, more importantly for my particular slant on this topic is that the technology of the skyscraper is highly electrical - that is if you don’t have electrical elevators and you don’t have electric lighting and ventilation you’re not going to build that high. And of course the icon of the city which comes standard for this project as well as for many tourists who go visit American cities like Chicago and New York especially, more than Los Angeles, is the lighted city at night. So my topic today really is the invention of this lighted skyline, this new kind of landscape from roughly the last decades of the 19th Century upto 1931, which is the Empire State Building, by the way.

Now at the start of this period the city at night is a difficult region to traverse, is dark, is dangerous, is lit by gas, the inhabitants still live, to a considerable degree, according to the rhythms of day and night as when it becomes night-time it really is dark and is not particularly attractive to go out, especially, I think, if you are an infirm person who might fall in the street without being able to see where you’re going, or, of course, a woman who might feel as unsafe. At the end of the 40 or 50 years that we’re talking about an entirely new environment is come into being - it’s glamorous, it’s scintillating, it’s, of course, strongly illuminated and it’s a powerful expression of the city’s dynamism. So the city sprouts with these skyscrapers, is festooned with electric lights and there’s a new vertical dimension to this city by the end of the time period with the electrified towers going up. American electrification as a whole also begins in cities and it’s important to realise that for most people the city and electrification where more or less synonymous. There are good reasons why this is the case - they’re partly economic and political and cultural and that’s what I’ll be focussing on but I do think it’s worth mentioning a little of the technological background here at the beginning.

All of the early electrical systems are direct current and that might seem like a footnote or a minor detail - why is that important? It’s important because direct current can’t be transmitted very far. It’s just not a technology that’s suitable to long distance transmission so is usually about a mile radius from a generating station. Another inhibiting factor is that the further you have to transmit it, the bigger the copper wires have to get, and copper is very expensive and so it becomes uneconomic beyond a certain distance. This is another way of saying that the concentrated market of a city or a factory is the ideal market for all these people putting up electrical installations in the early years, most notably Thomas Edison. They’re not going to prefer the countryside where you can only get about an average of 3 customers for a mile of wire when with a mile of wire extension from the central generating plant in New York you can get thousands of customers in every direction. So alternating current comes in only commercially in the 1890s but is not really wide spread until after that so it’s an important shaping factor in making the urban market the central and important market. This is in spite of the fact that there are other factors that are just as important which are to do with politics and culture. Politics is central from the beginning because the politicians give you permission to run wires over and under streets. They decide whether to continue with the gas lighting or whether to switch over to electricity and if so which kind - do you take the big arc lamps which you don’t need as many of but give a harsh glare, or do you select the incandescent lighting, which eventually does win out in these early years. I’m not going to go into the history of that in detail but I’ll just say that politicians were known to take bribes! I don’t want to shock you but there were some times completely non-political dimensions to this and another thing is that they could also decide in these city councils and boards of Alderman whether or not to have a public power service instead of a private one - some cities like Cleveland selected that - New York did not go in that direction, neither did Chicago. But it’s a choice and of course in Europe many places chose to have public power, Scandinavia or the Netherlands, New Zealand - those countries tended toward the public rather than private power - the United States predominately chose the other private systems until the New Deal period. But since I’ve treated this at considerable length in "Electrifying America" I’ll skip over that and say that if you’re interested in that you can go and look there.

I’d like to turn now to the cultural expressions that are made possible through this intensive electrification of the city keeping in mind it is direct expression of the market place. It’s not public power, it’s not developed as a public service but it is private capital that’s investing the money and private individuals who are seeking to use the power for their own advantage in one way or another. During this entire period that I’m talking about up until 1920, anyway, when it changes very rapidly, from 1880 - 1920, we’re not talking about electricity in the home where you might naturally first think of it, most people did not have electricity at all until after 1910 and by then it’s maybe 10%. So that if you were experiencing electricity it was in the street, it was a public experience. The cost of just a single light bulb was half a days wages and to have one kilowatt of electric power would cost the equivalent of an hour’s labour - in other words your working class people simply are not going to buy a house full of electric appliances and bulbs, such things that we’re used to today, it’s far too expensive. The list of first customers that Edison had reads like the social register, you know, it’s the Vanderbilts and the Whitleys and J P Morgan - people like this. The chandeliers of the New York stock exchange are electrified very early.

So the average person experiences the home still as being dark - it’s very important to get that sense that the home is a dark place, whereas you go out into the street and it starts to become more and more light over the next couple of decades. The mansions of the rich are the first places electrified, then the street lights and the bright store lights and places like 5th Avenue and other fashionable addresses or like, for example, the hotels and apartment stores, theatres and the better restaurants. In many cases these places had their own private generating plant. It wasn’t enough to just have electricity, you’d get round border …….. and all those problems simple by installing your own steam plant and having your own electricity and perhaps selling a little extra to the next store over. So you should keep this in mind as well that it’s not a unified plan or system at the beginning. Rather it’s competition between individuals for social prestige or it’s competition between businesses for profits because you draw in people by electrifying a place. So no one sets out to make New York the most intensely lighted city in the world - that’s not a plan that they have in 1880 or 1890 or 1900. In fact many people actually oppose electric signs although not nearly to the same degree as in Europe, so there’s a contrast that develops quite noticeably around 1900 where a city like Paris which is the so called "City of Light" has mostly white light, even to this day. You go to Paris and walk around and actually see what kind of lighting there is, it’s banks of flood lights to show you the beautiful public buildings but it’s not a whole lot of electric signs, it’s not colour so much as white light and even in Piccadilly Circus where you say well there’s an example of where Britain had something similar, there was a lot of discussion if you look at the British press, early 20th Century, about that and they were opposed in many cases to such kinds of light. But in New York there’s not too much successful resistance. For the most part Americans embrace the new kind of spectacular lighting and I have slides that I’ll be showing in a few moments to give you an idea about that, and Eric Sandeen’s talk will then take up the Time Square issue in great detail, so we’ll be able to follow that theme up. But this is enough of general background to give you sense of the context.

Now, why did Americans respond to this electrified city with such enthusiasm? Why was the illumination of New York five times greater than Berlin or London? That’s five times more kilowatts per inhabitant. We get one clue by looking at a quotation from Louis Mumford, from his autobiography, he remembers crossing Brooklyn bridge as young man, and this is a little epiphany he had as he walked across Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan: "Three quarters of the way across the Bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights. Until before I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass against the indigo sky. Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light. The world at that moment opened before me challenging, beckoning , in that sudden revelation of power and beauty all the confusions of adolescence dropped from me and I trod the narrow, resilient boards of the footway with a new confidence." Now Mumford was hardly the first American to feel awed and uplifted in this way as I’ll show you in more detail now with the help of some slides. This is of course a familiar enough view of New York City not from up on the bridge where Mumford was but taken from beneath the bridge. And if I show you that picture by itself you would say yes that’s a standard view of New York - the skyline, the skyscrapers. Now if I show you the next slide that’s the same scene during the New York city black-out 1965 and I think most of us would say that appears unnatural. With the skyscrapers completely dark except for one hospital where they have an emergency generator, and you can see that they’re lit up. But it looks to us wrong to have these dark towers. That’s a measure of what’s happened in the last century - that is in 1880 it would have been natural for the buildings to be dark. Now we regard the dark buildings as unnatural. I’d like to take you through the chronology of this as the first demonstrations of electric lighting are in the 1870s, by the 1880s you begin with street lighting which becomes very extensively used at worlds fairs. In the 1890s the first electric signs appear in New York, in the 1900s they get something called "building displays" - that’s when you light up a building in order to be seen at night, by the 19-teens the white-way campaigns are initiated by the big utilities and by General Electric …..House and then what are called intensive whiteways, as you sold them the idea and go back and sell them a more intense version of the same thing - of lighting up the city. So that’s just an overview so that you can see where we’re going.

This is the first spectacular electrical demonstration here - which doesn’t look spectacular to us at all, this barren field in the middle of New Jersey next to Thomas Edison’s workshop, Menlow Park. It’s 1879 and train loads of reporters and other curious people come out in December of that year to see this field of poles with obviously rather modest and unimpressive little bolts - but they’d never seen anything like this before. This is incandescent lighting, this lighting is a violation of all their sense of what the world is like or how things are structured because up until this moment light has always been accompanied by several things: light and fire are the same thing - light is something which flickers, light is something that consumes oxygen in a room, it has a whole set of characteristics which disappear when these bulbs come on - they don’t flicker, they don’t burn out because of lack of fuel, they don’t behave in the way that light ever has before. To put it another way when Edison brings his lights on at that moment you could say that fire and light cease to be the same thing. It’s a phenomenological change and there are a lot of people who will go out and see demonstrations of this type for the next fifteen years or so depending on where you are - you have to get to more and more remote places to get them excited about it. So the other version is to get more intense lighting displays - department stores are very quick to realise this - that you can draw a crowd just because you’ve got electric lights regardless of what’s in the window, just the fact that they’re lit with electric lights in the early years. Edison promotes his system in downtown New York by marching his employees around in what look like German military hats but you notice that there’s an electric light bulb on the top! Now, this is funny to us but you have to realise that this was another way of seeing electricity as very safe because you can walk around with what looks like fire on top of your head - fire and light are still instinctively understood to be the same thing by most people in 1881 when these guys are marching around downtown New York. So that’s just another indication of how you could draw a crowd - these guys actually have wires running from the electrical equipment which is in the middle of that hollow square, so you had to march in formation and not get out of step or you could really short-circuit the entire display!

The first electric sign, as far as I can make out, was in Berlin at an electrical congress in 1883 and it spelt out the name "Edison". Suggesting already that this is a transatlantic interchange of things because the first sign is American made but it’s in Europe. By the time of the Worlds Fair in Chicago in the 1890s you have very intense electrical displays at Worlds Fairs as a way of drawing people and here’s the area that’s going to be electrified at night, which you may have often seen - the Grand Court at the Fair - but the night scene is not as often seen, this is what it looked like - there’s an electric fountain down here in the front. That electric fountain is able to shoot jets of water as high as 15 or 20 feet in the air and is able to move the jets around, there was a guy underneath the fountain with filters and he could change the colours. So if it was St Patrick’s day or something - depending on what day it was - they would have a band play songs which would be co-ordinated with the colours and the movements of the fountain. Huge crowds would come out to see this at night. The whole courtyard all lit up and there is a light that you can see there shining off into the distance that could be seen as far away as Milwaukee. Now when people came to that fair in the 1890s in Chicago, many had not seen a town electrified, it was still somewhat unusual, only the big cities were electrified. There was more light in the Worlds Fair grounds itself, more lighting there than there was in all the rest of Chicago. It was the most intensely lighted place in the United States or, for that matter, in the World. So it was more popular at night actually than in day, partly because it was also cooler and people didn’t have to work at night. There was a large electrical building, that’s the building you see in front of you there, which was the size of a football field. Inside was a whole series of displays including a big electric pillar of light bulbs - that was an Edison display that had a kind of rheostat arrangement so that they could go on and off darker, dimmer - that was thought to be quite an amazing display. All the different companies were there, that’s the General Electric sign in the background - we don’t have time to go into this but Worlds Fairs displays of electricity are very important to this whole time period - they always had big buildings like this.

By 1901 in Buffalo, there’s a new technique that’s been developed which is to stud the sides of buildings, in the ornamental areas like the cornices, with small bulbs. These are all in colour, unfortunately there’s no colour film at that time - you can’t take colour pictures at night or in the day-time that are very good. So we can only get an idea of what this was like but I can tell you that the tower itself was done in gold and white light colours and as you went further up the tower the colours got darker hued. This was a display that was put on every night for the crowds - they would come here at dusk and as it got completely dark they would begin turning on lights first in the centre panel in the top of the electric tower, the tall building in the centre of that photograph, and then it would spread out gradually from there. The crowd always fell completely silent, they were struck dumb by this display. So that you can see that this is now 1901, it’s 20 years after Edison’s little light bulbs but we’re still getting big crowds just to see lighting being turned on at night - it’s just that it has to get more intense and more spectacular. This is kind of like, if you know the work of Maxfield Parish, I think the colour scheme would be a bit like that - a lot of pastel colours. Same kind of techniques are used at the St Louis Fair - that’s the Festival Hall. Here’s another picture from St Louis giving you the sense that they’re trying to combine what was done in Chicago and what happened in Buffalo. I have written an essay about the electrification of Worlds Fairs that traces this process up to the end of the Depression era. That appears in a book called "Narratives and Spaces" that Columbia University put out last year so if you were interested in that particular topic

These techniques are transferred - this is the Edison power plant in New York City. So that you can see that it’s not just a Worlds Fair phenomena but they used those fairs as places to test out ideas, to practice, and then they moved to the general public. The first skyscraper to be electrified at night is the Singer Building - this is in 1907, it’s the tallest building in New York, or in the world at that time and I’m going to be showing you that Singer building a little later in another context. But the Singer Building is the first to be lit up and this is what it looked like if you were across the east river and looked toward New York - you saw this pillar of fire, more-or-less, the only building that stood out and the other owners of skyscrapers quickly saw the point. This was an incredible advertisement for the Singer company in 1907, the tallest building, the only one lit up, people quickly followed suite. So that you might say this is the origin of the lighted skyline at this moment. And again it’s not a plan by the city of New York - it’s not even a plan by a co-ordinated group of business men - it’s simply competition. People realising "I could do that too, I could get a brighter light, we could build a taller tower" and so you get competition beginning. Also this kind of lighting goes out to the places like Coney Island - this is a tower that you might compare to the electric tower in Buffalo or again the Singer Tower but it’s at Coney Island and the lighting there is also very intense and follows quite closely developments of fairs. The origin of places like Coney Island is in fact the Chicago Fair. By 1915 in San Francisco you’ve got another kind of lighting which is flood lighting where the lights are hidden, you can’t see where the light comes from. They use a lot of sophisticated techniques there like putting search lights on boats out in the harbour to create a false sunrise, which is what you’re seeing here, apparent sunrise in the west, after the sun has gone down it comes back up. And their technique was different than before because before they would excentuate the difference between day and night but here the lights would come on gradually at the same time that the sun was going down so you couldn’t tell when natural light ended and artificial light began.

Now let’s turn back to New York City, I said that in the 1890s we began to see electric science coming in - this is the site later of the F… Building and this is just before they put up electric signs so that you can see that they’ve got another kind of sign there, just painted on the wall. But in 1891 this sign goes up. It was done very simply you had a guy on the roof of the building in front, the small building, and he would turn on the various signs and turn them off again. It must have been boring work - just to keep turning these things on and off , and then turn them all on at once and all off and start over. Electric signs make rapid progress from that point in1891 - by 1907 certainly Time Square has become an important cultural site and I won’t intrude into Eric’s territory too much, just to point out though that you get bigger and more elaborate signs like this Wrigley sign from the war years or by the1920s you get what is now the familiar icon - the intense electrification of Time Square - to the point where in fact there are no private work, city owned lights there at all, they don’t need them, there’s so much electricity. Here’s the scene at night - if you look carefully you’ll see there’re one or two street lights of the conventional sort but then there’s all this night light here again. That’s the day scene, that’s the night scene. Try to find the street lights there and think to yourself how much do they really contribute to the lighting. Nevertheless, when private utilities go out to the rest of the country, they sell them on the idea that you could have a great white-way just like New York. Wrigleys in the 30s was one of the first to use neon - that’s an example of that but again that’s your territory Eric, so I will just ask them to recall that this sign is there.

Now business men understood light as an economic weapon, certainly by 1910 and they saw that the electrification of one street would force the electrification of others, so if you’re a utility representative all you’ve got to do is get one block, it doesn’t matter where, to light up and the customers will tend to flock into that area and then all the other business men are forced to become part of the process of electrifying the city. So that for this reason the utilities prefer to work behind the scenes because they don’t need to draw attention to themselves, they’d rather have it look like some civic-minded group of local business men who want to put up the electric lights and it’s very carefully calculated in stages because the way they put up the street lights, you read this in their professional literature, is you make sure the lights do not shine on the store windows, they focus on the sidewalk and the street leaving the store windows rather dark so then they must put electric lighting in so that somebody can see what’s in the window. And then having done that, of course, they probably buy an electric sign to go over the store as well. So you get a progressive intensification of the amount of light there in a given street. So here on this street, for example, in Saratoga Springs, just to give you a sense of how this phenomena of what goes on in New York is spread out - they sell them the "great white-way" idea. So they build a white-way and the old street light is the one that hangs out over the street, and then you’ve got the two new lights which seem to blend in and do not seem to be the subject of the picture - they’re really trying in all these cases to make things look like they blend in. Los Angeles, of course, you’ve got to have a Spanish look so you’ve got fixtures that look Spanish.

By the 1920s, this is a photograph of Atlanta - they found a way to translate the metaphor of the "great white-way" into a visual reality, or at least a photographically visual reality, because of the …… of the photographic plate this appearance of blinding streets filled with light is created. Something you could not see of course in reality. There are big public displays celebrating the introduction of so called "white- ways" - this is the one in Chicago but you find the same phenomena in every American city.

By the 1930s you’ve got this fully electrified skyline where the street is, as you can see, fully lit up, that’s in New York of course, and the city skyline has come into existence as a kind of cultural icon, but again without anybody intending it. These are just to remind you of the early stage of how the street would look before then - this is Madison Square around 1905 - and there’s very little light by comparison although even then people talked about New York as intensely lit. Photographers and painters then deal with this landscape and I can only briefly suggest by some examples - here’s Edward Stykens famous photograph of the flat iron building. There’s a whole genre of paintings around 1905 similar to that Styken photograph which are called "nocturnes". Such paintings are impossible later on because the city is visually much brighter, you can’t do this landscape anymore, it ceases to exist in New York. Or you’ll get Steffan Hershe’s painting here which is a kind of negative statement about all of these technologies. Here we have the toothpaste ad which you can just barely make out, it says "It’s best because it’s better". And the marginalization of the Church, the traditional values of the Church, way off in the distance there, you can barely make out the steeple - totally insignificant compared to this underground world of tracks and lights, and the lighted building at night. Bernice Abbott, 1932, takes an image called "Beautiful Catastrophe Night View New York". Or you get the more futurist inspired paintings of Steller - this is one of several he did of Brooklyn Bridge in which the lighting of the bridge at night is one of the key elements, and again I won’t try to analyse this at length, I assume you’re familiar with Steller but if you go back and look at all these pictures there’s always an intense aspect of it which is electrified and he talks about the new age as being one of steel and electricity in his writings.

Finally, this is my last image here, I would like to suggest to you that John Slone has a much different view to Steller, that he is rather more critical of what the electrification of the city means and in a way this image provides us with a kind of capsule history of what had happened in those 40 years. The paintings from the early 20s, they’re from the studio roof of where he worked down in Greenwich Village so we’re seeing the downtown of New York from Greenwich Village, the 2 towers up in the left hand corner are the Singer Tower, which was the first great building lit up at night, and the taller one is the Woolworth Building. Now in rality they weren’t really next to each other quite like that but he, for reasons of the painting, put them together. He was very sensitive to, and interested in, the problem of how you paint night cityscapes and this is actually quite an amazing painting if you look at it and realise that all the sources of light are man-made, there is no moon, it’s night scene where the light comes from the bottom-up. Whereas in all traditional paintings the light comes from the top-down. So he’s really had to think about how to organise this so that the very bright area of the "great white-way" which lies furthest back doesn’t sort of pop out at you, doesn’t seem to be breaking the rules of perspective which he did want to maintain here. He does this through the way that he uses that elevator train that comes rushing out at you and the fact that the only sign that you can read, it’s maybe a little out of focus here, but there’s one sign in the whole thing that you can read which is near the front which helps to draw the eye there to show you that front-to-back relation. The word is very important too, it says "Moonshine" - the one thing that’s absent in this lighting. He’s also done something with the way that the light, the selection of the colours - the brighter colours are actually here in the front and although the "great white-way" is the brightest area in some ways in the painting, there are actually subdued more orange whites than the brighter colours in the front. He’s also, in a way, showing you the triumph of the vertical skyscraper city represented by the centre of Manhattan moving down on Greenwich Village, in a sense replacing Greenwich Village and its more horizontal, more human scaled landscape.

That’s the last slide so you can put the lights back on………

Feedback