The Tinted City
"City Lights" by James Bradley, in Metropolis (April 1996), 177 E. 87th St., New York, N.Y. 10128.
Since the 1970s, America’s cities have literally been cast in an entirely new light. During that decade, municipalities across the country began replacing their old incandescent and mercury-vapor streetlights with more energy-efficient, high-pressure sodium lamps. The change, says Bradley, a New York writer, has hurt city street life.
The sodium lamps emit a yellowish light that casts a strange, muddy pall over the streetscape and, apparently, the human spirit. Near his own Brooklyn home, Bradley notes, Eastern and Ocean parkways are much alike during the day. But on warm nights, Eastern Parkway throbs with life while Ocean Parkway is an urban desert. Ocean is illuminated by sodium lights, while Eastern is lit by newer metal-halide lamps that produce something much closer to the full-spectrum "white" light of the sun. In car dealerships and shopping mall parking lots, where bad lighting can hurt sales, metalhalide lights are invariably used. Costs are the rub. Metal-halide lights burn out relatively quickly. In 1992, the city of Toronto judged that a switch to the aesthetically superior lighting would triple maintenance outlays—yet made the change anyway.
Oddly, anti-light-pollution activists are adamantly opposed to the new technology. Astronomer David Crawford, executive director of the International Dark Sky Association, claims that it creates more glare than sodium lights. (And astronomers can more easily filter out interference from sodium lights.) But Bradley says that many specialists believe that the glare is caused by poor fixture design, not the lamps.
Where will it all end? Not in a world lit by metal-halide alone, Bradley hopes. As one lighting designer told him, using different kinds of lighting as each situation demands is the secret to creating a more "textured nighttime experience."
This article originally appeared in print