7.7/The Lived Worlds/The Body in the City

Light: The Visual City

The Amber Regime

The technology was fifteen years established. New York had begun swapping its blue-green mercury-vapor streetlights for sodium in the early 1970s, neighborhood by neighborhood, and by the late 1970s the amber was dominant across the arterials.² The fixture overhead was, on most major streets, a cobra head — a curved cast housing on a davit arm, mounted thirty to thirty-five feet up a steel pole, throwing an elliptical pool of light onto the roadway below. A 400-watt lamp in a Midtown arterial fixture pushed a great deal of light down through that housing, enough to read a newspaper by at the curb, all of it the same sodium orange.³

The amber was layered against other sources that kept their own color and lost their reflections to it. Neon signage stayed the red and blue and green of its own excited gas, but the wash it threw onto brick and wet pavement turned amber. Store windows spilled cool fluorescent white at sidewalk level, a competing 4100-Kelvin pool with a faint green cast. Car headlights in 1989 were sealed-beam halogen — warm and yellowish, complementing the sodium rather than fighting it — and the incandescent traffic signals were warmer still. The net was an orange world punctuated by neon and cold-white storefront, and it reached its fullest form on a wet night, when high-pressure sodium reflected off rain-slicked asphalt and every cobra-head fixture drew a long orange streak down the road. The amber was not quite total. On residential side streets a few of the older mercury-vapor lamps survived, cooler and blue-green, leaving occasional pockets where the sodium had not yet reached; and a handful of the brightest business districts, Times Square among them, had already begun lighting their sidewalks with metal halide, a whiter source that stood out sharply against the surrounding orange.

The Sallow Floor

Indoors, the light failed color in the opposite direction and with the same result: people looked ill. The workhorse of American commercial lighting in 1989 was the F40T12 Cool White fluorescent tube — forty watts, four feet long, on a magnetic ballast — and it burned at 4100 Kelvin with a color rendering index of about 62.¹ The phosphor ran rich in yellow and orange-yellow and poor in red and green, so that under it skin turned pale, sallow, faintly greenish; reds and greens read darker and duller than they were. A “Deluxe” cool-white tube existed at a CRI near 90, but it produced roughly a third less light for the same wattage and cost more, and a cost-conscious editorial floor bought the ordinary tube by the case. The fixtures were recessed troffers in the dropped ceiling, three or four tubes apiece, throwing fifty to seventy foot-candles flat across every desk — bright, shadowless, and unkind to the face.

The one relief was the window, and the window worked only near the glass. A Midtown tower of 1960s construction was glazed in single-pane bronze-tinted glass — PPG’s Solarbronze and its competitors — a body tint that passed roughly half the visible light and warmed what it passed by a few hundred Kelvin.⁴ North-facing offices that never saw the sun got their daylight secondhand, bounced off the limestone and glass of the buildings across the canyon, warmed again a little by the pale stone. In late November the sun never climbed past about 28 degrees at noon and sat near 13 degrees at half past eight in the morning, so its light arrived low and raking and already warm from the long slant through the atmosphere, warmer still through the bronze, and it drove deep into the floor. The result was a gradient anyone who worked the floor could see without naming it. Within ten feet of the glass, daylight dominated: warm, directional, and kind to a face. Past twenty feet, the 4100-Kelvin fluorescent took over, flat and greenish. In the transition zone the two mixed, warm window pools against cold overhead, a visible line across the carpet. An editor with a window office stood in daylight. An assistant at an interior desk stood in the sodium’s indoor cousin, and looked it.

Two Cities of Light

The light a New Yorker lived under depended on where the money was, and the divide ran between the boroughs as clearly as it ran across an office floor. Morris Heights in the Bronx was built in five- and six-story walkups on sixty-foot streets, a height-to-width ratio near one to one, and it stood open to a wide dome of sky. Low November sun cleared the rooflines and fell directly into the streets and through south-facing windows, throwing a strong warm beam across a vinyl floor and up the opposite wall. The trees were bare and mostly young — the mature canopy had died in the 1970s and the replantings were still thin — so the light came through in graphic skeletal shadows, and the dark red-brown brick of the walkups absorbed most of it, holding the contrast high: amber direct sun against cool blue shadow. It was the signature look of the late-autumn outer boroughs, warm and directional and hard-edged.

Midtown, twenty minutes south, was a different light world entirely. Towers of thirty to sixty stories over sixty-foot cross streets made canyons five and ten times as deep as they were wide, and the direct sun reached the pavement for only a few hours; most of a winter day the street floor lived in shadow. But the glass curtain walls bounced a fifth to two-fifths of the light that struck them, so the shadow filled with cool reflected daylight and sudden specular flashes off distant windows. Midtown light read cool, blue-gray, ambient, punctuated. The Bronx read warm, orange, raked. Neither was chosen; both were the residue of what had been built.

What both shared, after dark and indoors, was the incandescent bulb — the 60- and 75-watt A19 at about 2700 Kelvin, the near-perfect color rendering of a heated tungsten filament, the warmest domestic light the century had.¹ It was the light of the lamp beside the bed and the bulb over the kitchen table, in a Morris Heights walkup and an Upper West Side apartment alike, and against the sodium street and the fluorescent office it was the one source that showed a face as it was. In November 1989 it was still the default bulb in nearly every socket in the city, and its warmth was so ordinary that no one thought to defend it.

The Cooling

Across the decade the color of New York rose up the Kelvin scale, but not on the street. The arterial cobra-head lamps stayed sodium-amber through the whole period and well past it; the city did not begin trading its cobra heads for cooler white LEDs until long after the period closed.⁵ The cooling entered the city from inside — through the glass and the renovation, in the buildings where money was moving. A cast-iron loft in Tribeca or SoHo that in 1989 had held a warm bodega fluorescent and a few incandescent windows was, by the end of the decade, gut-renovated and lit with halogen track at 3000 Kelvin and recessed cans bouncing off white walls. New construction at the edges rose in glass curtain walls that returned cool blue daylight by day and burned 5000-Kelvin office-white by night. The metal halide that in 1989 had lit only a few showpiece districts spread outward across more plazas and rebuilt blocks, four thousand cool Kelvin at a time, each installation a little whiter than the sodium it stood beside.¹

The shift was legible as class. The warm amber that had been simply what the city looked like became, in the renovated interior, the mark of the unrenovated — and the cool white that had once read as clinical became the light of money and newness. Michael Ballhaus had shot Martin Scorsese’s downtown in After Hours in 1985 under exactly the sodium and incandescent warmth that still ruled the streets in 1989, and that amber was already, by the film’s own light, becoming a record of something rather than a description of it.⁶ The same block that glowed orange at the start of the decade was, by its end, increasingly lit from its windows in white.