Essays
Light 'em if you've got 'em
from The City Paper
5 December 2007
What with Macy’s terrific Dickens Village (open now through New Year’s Eve), this is the time of year we like to think about Charles Dickens. Actually, in Philadelphia — where the world’s only statue of Dickens (Frank Elwell’s Dickens and Little Nell in Clark Park) is displayed — it always feels a little like the 19th century. Step off the train at Wayne Junction and you might as well be in London in the throes of the Industrial Revolution.
Dickens himself, who liked Philadelphia but found the grid boring, was one of the first great urban observers. He lived for and absorbed the city’s intensity. “It is as though [London’s streets] give something to my brain which it cannot do without if it is to work,” wrote the author of Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities. Writing in the first half of the 19th century, he was especially intrigued by the urban night. The simple street lamp — lit with whale oil — had transformed the city into a stage. Dickens called the resulting spectacle the “magic lantern.”
I’d like to call the street lamp a symbol of urban public life. Until a decade ago, Philadelphia had all but abandoned the street lamp in favor of the cobra-style highway light designed to illuminate the road and not the sidewalk. Today there are some 100,000 of these lights throughout the city. In almost all cases they cast the wrong kind of light in the wrong place, effectively making the city seem ugly, fragmented and less safe. Our city isn’t alone in this regard. Even the iconic Greenwich Village is lit in the manner of the New Jersey Turnpike.
The street lamp, on the other hand, designed at a human scale, values the life of the sidewalk. (Street lamps effectively light the roadway, too.) A lamppost has physical and emotional presence. While the lamp’s glow warms the night, the post measures the space. It claims the night for people.
The Center City District (CCD) began adding street lamps in 1996, installing about 2,100 to date. Without artifice, the 15-foot hunter green Center City luminaires are handsome and workmanlike, organic to the streetscape. They are true magic lanterns, the unsung heroes of the downtown night.
Most importantly, perhaps, according to a British Home Office report, studies show improved lighting cuts crime — and saves money. This hope motivates neighborhood groups and institutions to replace cobra lights with street lamps. So the Center City lamps have reproduced. You can find them in Germantown, Venturi-selected lamps in Manayunk, and scores of well-proportioned lamps in alleys everywhere. At present, the CCD is installing new lamps in two clusters; the University City District (UCD) is placing 84 — perhaps more — along Baltimore Avenue.
Replacing cobras with street lamps is like piecing the city back together again a block at a time. Progress is slow; results are fragmented. On Baltimore Avenue, where officials hope installation will begin soon, lamps will extend from 45th Street to 50th (perhaps to 52nd), leaving the edge of Clark Park — and Dickens and poor Little Nell — in the dark. That’s not UCD’s fault, but a matter of funding. Since urban public life, which so invigorated Dickens, isn’t a priority, little is budgeted to improve the experience of the pedestrian. But I’m ready if we wish to make it one. I spent some time recently thinking how and where the city ought to install street lamps on a grand scale. You can find those ideas in detail along with a photo collection of Philadelphia’s old and new street lamps at phillyskyline.com/possiblecity.
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