Street Lighting

American city governments have provided street lighting since the late 1700s, devoting particular attention to commercial districts. Long associated with luxury and security, artificial light has been used both to facilitate an increase in nocturnal travel and to promote urban space as modern, safe, and desirable.

Colonial cities took only a limited interest in street lighting. New York required that the owners of every seventh house light a lantern during the dark of the moon. City officials in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston all worked to expand street lighting at public expense in the 1770s and 1780s. By 1796, Philadelphia had 718 streetlights. Burning tallow, lard, or spermaceti, street lamps required frequent refueling, wick trimming, and cleaning. Despite all this trouble for city lamplighters, the widely spaced lamps did little to illuminate the street. They served mainly as faint navigation beacons amidst pervasive darkness, and they were often extinguished after midnight or on moonlit evenings in order to save money. Many streets were not lit at all, particularly in poorer areas near the edge of town. On a cloudy, moonless night, muggers and obstacles were virtually invisible. Travelers who valued their safety carried lanterns. Most people stayed inside.

Nineteenth-century municipalities supplemented or replaced oil lamps with gaslights. Gas street lamps were first introduced in the United States in 1817, when the Gas Light Company of Baltimore lit a lamp at an intersection in the center of the city. The company obtained a city contract to lay pipe through the streets and install more lamps, but progress was slow. The company ignored repeated city requests for expansion of the street lighting system, because such an investment could not be repaid from municipal lighting contracts alone. The company depended on revenue from private customers such as theaters, large businesses, and a few wealthy individuals; with such a limited clientele, it had little incentive to install an extensive network of gas lines.

Baltimore's experience was replicated in its rival cities. Illuminating gas, manufactured from coal or resin, was introduced in the 1820s and 1830s in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and several other urban centers; most significant cities in the Northeast and Midwest had gas service by 1860, as did some in the South. Private gas companies typically installed street mains at their own expense and billed the city to connect the mains to municipal street lamps. Gas companies targeted commercial streets and wealthy residential areas where profits would be higher. City governments were often unable or unwilling to force companies to extend mains to poorer neighborhoods, and they saw no need to provide expensive light for people who paid little in taxes. In addition to installation costs and gas bills, cities were usually responsible for employing the workers who lit and maintained the lamps. Some municipalities tried to recoup their lighting costs by levying special assessments on abutting property owners, thus undoubtedly discouraging poor people from demanding street lighting in their neighborhoods.

Stark disparities in lighting developed. Even the earliest gas jets burned 10 times as brightly as oil. On [Page 768]major shopping streets, gaslight from shop windows and street lamps encouraged nighttime promenading and a growth of commercial leisure activities. Oil lamps remained the dominant source of illumination in most other neighborhoods through the mid-19th century. The contrast between light and dark helped urban observers distinguish neighborhoods that were poor and presumably crime-ridden from those that were wealthy and perceived as safer. The sharpest contrast in lighting was between the city and the countryside. Gas lighting spread across most of the urban landscape in the second half of the century, as the price gradually fell to within reach of more people. Long-distance railroad travelers came to recognize the sight of bright windows and street lamps as a sign that they had crossed a border into urban space. Even the nighttime skies above cities took on a faint glow.

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