New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950

NEW YORK NOCTURNE

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NEW YORK NOCTURNE the city after dark in literature, painting, and photography, 1850–1950

William Chapman Sharpe

Princeton University Press

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Princeton & Oxford

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Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13324-9 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Bembo and Radiant Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10

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To Heather and the boys, Alexander, William, and Patrick

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Only on a canvas of Darkness, such is man’s way of being, could the many-coloured picture of our Life paint itself and shine. —Thomas Carlyle, Characteristics

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CONTENTS

list of illustrations xi acknowledgments xvii Introduction The Dream Site 1 Seeing in a New Light 10 Dark Arts and the Urban Sublime 14 Getting Acquainted with the Night 26 One Story of the Night 32 Chapter One Gaslit Babylon 37 New York Lights Up 39 Walking the Night 42 Terror and Taming 46 Morality and Light 55 The Country and the City 60 Night People, Night Prowling 63 The Devil, the Moralist, and the Voyeur 66 Police Take Note: The Flâneur Flummoxed 70 Gaslit Barbary 73 Lullaby for Babylon 76 Chapter Two The Nocturne: Moonlight, Metamorphosis, and Modernism 80 Contemplating the Moon 82 The Softer Satellite in Eclipse 86 No More Than I Wish 91 As with a Veil 97 Fireworks in Court 100 Everywhere I Looked I Saw Whistlers 105 Unrecorded Miracles 112 The Photo-Nocturne 118

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Chapter Three Colonizing the Night 132 Conquering Some Realms for the Night 136 A Mighty Woman with a Torch 138 Armies of the Night 143 Lightning Powder 148 Living Like the Other Half 157 The Poor En Masse, the Rich One by One 161 Moonlight Reservation 165 Chapter Four The Empire of Light 170 The Lesson of the Moth 171 Nightlife Goes Native 177 Beneath the Singer Tower 184 Electric Eden 189 Empire of Signs 194 Picturing the Imperial City 199 The Apotheosis of Electricity 208 Chapter Five Skyscraper Fantasy 217 Lights, Height, Sex, Romance 222 Manhattan, the Night-Blooming Cereus 225 I Am Seeing Great Things 230 The Body of a Skyscraper 240 Down-Gazing I Behold 243 I’ll Make Them Big: O’Keeffe’s Exhibitionist Androgyny Nobody to Say: Pinholes 257 Lamé with Lights 262

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Chapter Six Staging the Night: Theater, Voyeurism, Violence 266 Better Than the Theater: Spectacle and Spying in Motion 269 Night Windows 272 The Feel of the Night 277 Nighthawks 285 Balcony Seats at a Murder 292 Darkness Invisible 304 Then See It! 313 Epilogue Night Now 319 Whose Night? 321 Fairyland Still? The Aerial View 330 The City of Dreadful Light 339 notes index

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Color Plates 1. Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, 1928 2. James Mallord William Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834, 1834–1835 3. Richard Haas, Burning Pier, World Trade Center, 1985 4. Camille Pissarro, Paris, the Boulevard Montmartre at Night, c. 1897 5. Childe Hassam, Winter Midnight, 1894 6. George Harvey, Night-Fall, St. Thomas’s Church, Broadway, New York, c. 1837 7. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso, c. 1866-c. 1874 8. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, c. 1872–1875 9. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875 10. James Alden Weir, Nocturne: Queensboro Bridge, 1910 11. Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, 1904/1909 12. Warren Sheppard, Brooklyn Bridge Celebration, May, 1883, 1883 13. John Sloan, The Coffee Line, 1905 14. Everett Shinn, Tenements at Hester Street, 1900 15. George Bellows, Excavation at Night, 1907 16. Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras, 1913 17. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted, 1920–1922 18. John Sloan, The City from Greenwich Village, 1922 19. Paul Cadmus, Architect, 1950 20. Georgia O’Keeffe, New York with Moon, 1925 21. Georgia O’Keeffe, Radiator Building, Night, New York, 1927 22. Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, Night, 1928–1929 23. Edward Hopper, Night Windows, 1928

000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Edward Hopper, Office at Night, 1940 Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942 William H. Johnson, Moon over Harlem, 1944 Jane Dickson, Peep Land, 1984 Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach, 1988 Yvonne Jacquette, East River View at Night, 1978

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Black and White Illustrations I.1. Andreas Feininger, Brooklyn Bridge at Night, 1948 I.2. Unknown artist, A Saturday Night Scene in the Bowery, New York, 1871 I.3. Henry Bunbury, A Connoisseur Admiring a Dark Night Piece, 1771 I.4. Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape by Moonlight, c. 1637–1640 I.5. Joseph Wright, An Iron Forge Viewed from Without, 1773 I.6. John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841 I.7. Edgar Degas, Café Concert aux Ambassadeurs, 1877 I.8. Giacomo Balla, Street Light, 1909 I.9. Alice Neel, Harlem Nocturne, 1952 I.10. Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Coal Cart, New York, 1911 I.11. David Lebe, Apartment View, New York City, 1981 1.1. N. Orr, cover for George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 1850 1.2. August Köllner, Pineapple Cart and Gaslamp, 1846 1.3. C. M. Jenkes, Astor Place Riots, 1849 1.4. Anonymous, Brutal Murder of a Negro Boy in Eighth Avenue, 1863 1.5. Anonymous, The Riots in New York: Destruction of the Colored Orphan Asylum, 1863 1.6. Serrel and Perkins, New York by Gas-Light—“Hooking a Victim,” c. 1850 1.7. Anonymous, Five Points—Worth Street Looking East, c. 1870 1.8. Anonymous, The Powers of Evil Are Fleeing Before the Light of Civilization, 1885 1.9. Alfred R. Waud, Writer’s Hand Lifting Roof, 1857 1.10. Matt Morgan, A Midnight Visit to One of the Cheap Lodging Houses in Water Street, 1872 2.1. Claude-Joseph Vernet, Night: A Port in Moonlight, 1772 2.2. Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Observing the Moon, 1819–1820 2.3. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, The Sleep of Endymion, 1791

2 13 15 16 17 20 23 25 27 28 35 38 41 48 49 49 51 56 57 67 69 82 83 85

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2.4. William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World, 1851–1853 2.5. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Grey and Silver—Chelsea Embankment, Winter, c. 1879 2.6. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Chelsea, c. 1871 2.7. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1876 2.8. Anonymous, A Knockturn in Black and Blue, 1878 2.9. Aubrey Beardsley, cover design for The Yellow Book, 1894 2.10. William Hyde, The Embankment at Night, 1898 2.11. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889 2.12. Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night over the Rhone River, Arles, 1888 2.13. Charles Roberts and anonymous artist, A New York Nocturne, 1898 2.14. Childe Hassam, Fifth Avenue Nocturne, c. 1895 2.15. Alfred Stieglitz, An Icy Night, New York, 1898 2.16. Alfred Stieglitz, Reflections—Night, New York, 1896 2.17. William A. Fraser, A Wet Night, Columbus Circle, c. 1897–1898 2.18. Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Singer Building, New York, c. 1909 2.19. Alvin Langdon Coburn, Broadway at Night, 1910 2.20. Edward Steichen, Brooklyn Bridge, 1903 2.21. Alfred Hewitt, In the Heart of Manhattan, 1907 2.22. Edward Steichen, Stars on Sixth Avenue, 1925 3.1. Butler, The Dewey Celebration Seen from Brooklyn Heights, 1899 3.2. Anonymous, A Night Scene from Metropolitan Life Tower during the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, 1909 3.3. Anonymous, Fireworks following the Inauguration of the Statue of Liberty, November 1, 1886, 1886 3.4. Mora, Vanderbilt Ball, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt as Electric Light, 1883 3.5. Anonymous, Edison Employees Marching in Formation, 1884 3.6. Charles Graham, Arc Lights in Madison Square, 1881, 1882 3.7. Gustav Doré, The Bull’s-Eye, 1872 3.8. Jacob Riis, 3 a.m. in the “ Sun” Office, c. 1890 3.9. Jacob Riis, Midnight in Ludlow Street Tenement, c. 1888–1890 3.10. Jacob Riis, Lodgers in Bayard Street Tenement—“Five Cents a Spot,” c. 1889 3.11. Jacob Riis, Men’s Lodging Room, West 47th Street Station, c. 1890

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86 92 93 95 101 107 107 110 111 115 117 119 120 121 126 127 128 129 131 134 134 139 140 144 145 147 152 153 154 157

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3.12. Anonymous, Turning Out the Night Lodgers from a Police Station, 1877 3.13. Sol Eytinge, Among the Tenement Houses During the Heated Term—Just Before Daybreak, 1879 3.14. Joseph Becker, Randall’s Island Poorhouse, 1875 3.15. Frederic Remington, Moonlight, Wolf, c. 1909 3.16. Frederic Remington, Shotgun Hospitality, 1908 4.1. W. Louis Sonntag Jr., The Bowery at Night, c. 1895 4.2. John Sloan, Movies, 1913 4.3. George Herriman, Mehitabel Dances with the Moon, 1927 4.4. Eddie Elcha, Crowd Outside Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, 1920s 4.5. Adolph Dehn, Up in Harlem, 1932 4.6. William Wolfson, Crazy Rhythm (Cotton Club), 1929 4.7. Palmer Hayden, Midsummer Night in Harlem, 1938 4.8. Anonymous, Singer Tower Illumination, June 19, 1908, 1908 4.9. Samuel H. Gottscho, Luna Park, Coney Island, 1906 4.10. Paul M. Haviland, Luna Park at Night, c. 1910 4.11. Anonymous, The Times Tower, c. 1910 4.12. George Luks, Armistice Night, 1918 4.13. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Skyscrapers, 1922 4.14. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Bridge, 1922 4.15. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: White Way I, 1922 4.16. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: White Way II, 1922 4.17. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Port, 1922 5.1. Anonymous, New York City at Night, c. 1935 5.2. Anonymous, The Woolworth Building at Night, c. 1913 5.3. Busby Berkeley, director, Ruby Keeler and Dancing Skyline, from 42nd Street, 1933 5.4. Adolph Fassbender, The White Night, 1932 5.5. Martin Lewis, The Glow of the City, 1929 5.6. Hugh Ferriss, Night in the Science Zone, c. 1925 5.7. Louis Hine, Empire State Building, Night View, c. 1930 5.8. Alfred Stieglitz, Evening: New York from the Shelton, 1931 5.9. Weegee, Simply Add Boiling Water, 1940s 5.10. Berenice Abbott, New York at Night, c. 1935 5.11. Stella F. Simon, New York at Night, 1931 5.12. Georgia O’Keeffe, City Night, 1926 5.13. Samuel H. Gottscho, View North from the RCA Building, 1933

157 158 160 166 168 172 174 176 179 180 181 182 185 191 192 196 200 205 206 209 210 213 218 220 221 225 229 234 235 237 239 246 248 252 265

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6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 6.6. 6.7. 6.8. 6.9. 6.10. 6.11. 6.12. 6.13. 6.14. 6.15. 6.16. 6.17. E.1. E.2. E.3. E.4. E.5. E.6. E.7. E.8. E.9. E.10. E.11. E.12.

John Sloan, Night Windows, 1910 Edward Hopper, Night on the El Train, 1918 Edward Hopper, Room in New York, 1932 Martin Lewis, Night in New York, 1932 Edward Hopper, Night Shadows, 1921 Vincent van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night (Place du Forum in Arles), 1888 Scott Hyde, Third Avenue Elevated Station, Third Avenue at Sixty-seventh Street, 1950 Weegee, Murder on the Roof, 1941 Weegee, Heat Spell (Children on the Fire Escape), 1941 Weegee, Joy of Living, 1942 Weegee, Balcony Seats at a Murder, c. 1940s Weegee, Dead Gunman, 1942 Weegee, I Cried When I Took This Picture (Fire in Harlem), 1942 Weegee, Riot in Harlem, Mannequins, 1943 Morgan and Marvin Smith, A Street-corner Orator, 125th Street, c. 1938 James W. Kerr, Times Square Dim-Out, 1944 Mark Tobey, City Radiance, 1944 Madelon Vriesendorp, Flagrant délit, 1978 Doug Safranek, Still Open, 1994 Robert Frank, Times Square, 1959 Andy Freeberg, Endless Lust, 1983 Jane Dickson, Witness ( J. A.), 1991 Keith Haring, Subway Drawing, 1980s Alex Katz, New Year’s Eve, 1990 George Segal, The Aerial View, 1970 Yvonne Jacquette, Night Wing: Metropolitan Area Composite II, 1993 Robert Sefcik, Nightview of Lower Manhattan, 1981 Edward Sorel, Contemporary Streetlights Cast a Cold Pallor on Ominous Streets, 1982 Anonymous, Manhattan Skyline Seen from Calvary Cemetery, Queens, 1952

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would warn my hearers that they must not try my thoughts by a daylight standard, but endeavor to realize that I speak out of the night. —Henry David Thoreau, Night and Moonlight

The first dark glimmer of this book came to me one Sunday afternoon long ago, as I looked at James McNeill Whistler prints in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Since then, many institutions and people have helped me grope my way forward. I gratefully acknowledge assistance received in the form of fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Barnard College of Columbia University: in tuo lumen videbimus lumen. I thank the publishers of books and journals where some earlier versions of my text appeared: the Smithsonian Museum, Interspace, VU University Press in Amsterdam, the University of Delaware Press, Princeton University Press, and the University of Rouen Press. Text in chapter 2 has been adapted from “New York, Night, and Cultural Myth-Making,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2 (3) 3–22. Text in chapter 3 has been adapted, with permission, from William Sharpe, “What’s Out There? Frederic Remington’s Art of Darkness” in Nancy Anderson et al., Frederic Remington: The Color of Night [exh. cat.]. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2003. Text in chapter 5 has been adapted with permission from “So Nocturnal, So Bacchanal: The Sexual Theater of New York at Night,” Modern American Landscapes, Vol. 26, European Contributions to American Studies. I also thank the many museums, libraries, and individuals that aided me in my quest to understand the nocturne in its various manifestations, including the Tate Gallery, the Glasgow University Library, the Courtauld Institute Galleries, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of the City of New York. Particular thanks to Huston Pascal at the North Carolina Museum of Art who graciously introduced me to Yvonne Jacquette, and provided me with books and images of contemporary New York; and Nancy Anderson at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, who invited me to write about

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Frederic Remington’s night paintings, in the process supplying me with a treasure trove of information about New York circa 1900. In early stages of this project, I was guided by the insight of four remarkable scholars and teachers at Columbia University: Allan Staley, Karl Kroeber, Carl Woodring, and John Rosenberg. Conversations with two fellow lovers of art and literature connections, Michele Hannoosh and Christopher Benfy, helped me focus my ideas and get the book going, as did Leonard Wallock, my lodestone in all things urban. I fondly remember enlightening chats with Summer Braunstein, the late Guy Bauman, and Meir Widgoder, who provided vital material on New York. My thinking progressed due to chances to lecture at the universities of Rome, Venice, Bologna, and Pavia in Italy, and at the conferences of the Italian Association of American Studies. Thanks to all my Italian benefactors, including Rosy Colombo, Rosella Mamoli-Zorzi, Massimo Baccigalupo, Gabriella Morisco, Mario Maffi, and so many others. I also benefited from the stimulating company of my confederate in night studies, Elizabeth Bronfen of the University of Zurich. My friends, colleagues, and students at Barnard College, past and present, helped me refine my ideas; my gratitude in particular to Connie Budelis, Kathryn Humphries, Christopher Baswell, Margaret Vandenberg, Jennie Kassanoff, Monica Miller, Jim Basker, and Maura Spiegel for their suggestions and insights, and Elizabeth Hutchinson for valuable practical advice. I want to thank my editor, Hanne Winarsky, and the capable staff at Princeton University Press as well as the anonymous readers for their excellent advice on how to improve the manuscript. I owe a special debt to my research assistants over the years, including Peggy Lipton, Stephanie Coen, Taylor Asen, Nellie Hermann, and Drew Sawyer—it has been a pleasure to work with you! There’s a large French component to this book’s gestation. Historian of French art extraordinare Robert Herbert supplied invaluable guidance at the start and end of the project, not to mention opening my eyes to the Claudian landscape of South Hadley, Massachusetts, on our bike rides. In Nice and Paris as well as stateside, Bill and Louisa Newlin provided friendship and good cheer from the beginning, and generously lent their Rue Galande apartment when I was doing research in Paris. Near Paris, Patrice and Gudrun Delamine opened the doors of their house, home, and lasting friendship, as did the University of Nice’s Jacqueline Ollier, who through her organization Interspace also gave me many deeply appreciated opportunities to lecture and publish my work. Also in Nice, Françoise Butaye and Yves Monloubou offered heartfelt encouragement, conviviality, and a place to stay at many stages—on y revient! Likewise, friends and neighbors in the villages of La Bruguière, La Bastide d’Engras, St. Laurent la Vernède, and Fontarèches made life worth living when I was working hardest on my

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writing. I thank them for welcoming my family and me so warmly and so often. Merci mille fois pour l’accueil si chaleureux! And in Toulouse, I could not do without the expert criticism and generosity of urban scholar Nathalie Cochoy and her husband, Franck. Closer to home, I want to thank my in-laws, the Hendersons and Greenbergs, for help with “the art spirit,” in multiple senses. Their support of all kinds has mattered enormously. Ephraim Rubenstein, the best and most literate artist I know, keeps on teaching me how to see. I count Francesco Rognoni as an honorary New Yorker, and our long conversations here on Manhattan streets, as well as the frequent invitations to lecture and live it up in Italy, have been a constant source of inspiration and delight. Two stalwart friends on the Upper West Side made sure this book was written; Peter Platt and Mark Getlein sustained me in ways large and small through the final stages. Their belief in the project, editorial wisdom, and profound love of a good meal made all the difference. Finally, my immediate family—my nowdeparted parents, my siblings, and my wife and children—all contributed in their own fashion more than I can say. Especially Heather. It would be tempting to suggest that if those named above deserve credit for easing this book out of the gloom and into the light of day, then any shortcomings therein are due at least in part to them as well. But let the bright bits be theirs. I’ve lived long enough with my Caliban to echo Prospero’s words: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

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acknowledgments

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NEW YORK NOCTURNE

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INTRODUCTION Now the nights of one period are not the nights of another. Neither are the nights of one city the nights of another. —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood1

The Dream Site In the early 1850s, Henry David Thoreau took a series of long nocturnal strolls in the countryside near Walden, mapping out lectures on night and moonlight.2 Thoreau had his eyes on the shadowy forest, yet his eagerness to subdue the kingdom of night for poetical purposes echoes the exploitative fervor with which urbanites were beginning to explore the city after dark. “I shall be a benefactor,” wrote Thoreau, if I conquer some realms from the night, if I report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy of their attention,—if I can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep,—if I add to the domains of poetry.3

Writing of natural processes that had changed little in thousands of years, Thoreau seems unaware of how desperately outmoded his projected conquest is. He gives no hint that artificial lighting and feverish nighttime activity had already rendered his slumbering landscape an object of nostalgic curiosity for city dwellers. By the mid-nineteenth century, the silvery dreamland that Thoreau wandered while his neighbors slept would have seemed to many New Yorkers as remote as the African interior. And yet, although he was seeking something primeval, Thoreau’s desire to “add to the domains of poetry” by aesthetically annexing the land of the night put him in the mainstream of modernity. Like many other writers and artists, capitalists and pioneers, he was participating in one of the epoch’s great adventures: the colonizing of the night. While his timing was perfect, Thoreau was simply in the wrong place. The action was elsewhere, in the great cities. It had been only a few decades since urban life in Europe and the United States had begun to feel the radical alteration caused by the advance of light into hitherto dark hours. But now

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Figure I.1. Andreas Feininger (1906–1999), Brooklyn Bridge at Night, 1948. Gelatin silver print, 16
20 in. (40.6
50.8 cm). Getty Images

the race was on to capture broad swaths of nocturnal territory for profit and pleasure. The installation of gaslight in London’s West End in 1807 ignited a series of innovations that permanently rearranged the rhythms of everyday life, transforming traditional patterns of industry, commerce, leisure, and consumption. The concept of “nightlife” was born, along with the twentyfour-hour workday. With reliable lighting came safer streets, late shopping, and vastly expanded entertainments. The illumination of the city changed the very way people thought about—and thus lived in—the night. Darkness, so long a barrier to human activity, quickly became a stimulant. The ability of the city to transcend the rhythms of nature, to banish night so that its own artifice could reign supreme, came to symbolize the essence of progress, the culmination of technical prowess and cultural sophistication. Drawing human moths to its flame, the decked-out city of night ostentatiously burned its candle at both ends. By the twentieth century, a shimmering skyline and a blaze of electricity signified human life at its richest, most promising, and most seductive: “bright lights, big city.” The physical paraphernalia of light, from the lamppost to the gasworks or the power plant, became permanent daytime reminders that a visual newfound land was being charted every evening. Artistic renderings played a vital role in this revolution, not merely recording the novel sights of the city after dark, but also educating their audiences

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in the modes of perception through which this “darkness visible” might be experienced. In ways we are only beginning to appreciate, the impact of gas and electricity reshaped the arts and the psyche, not to mention the experience of urban life.4 City dwellers realized that a new arena of human interaction had opened up. Its joys and perils needed to be interpreted—morally, aesthetically, and socially. How did the city look to those who ventured forth, the flâneurs prowling the streets in search of inspiration? How were their responses communicated through poems and novels, guidebooks, paintings, prints, and photographs? How did nocturnal imagery evolve as people made efforts to comprehend first the gaslit and then the electric city? And how was the cityscape framed and transfigured, so that it came to seem like a stage set, a fantasyland, or an intimate interior? New York Nocturne explores how writers, painters, and photographers helped turn the unscouted terrain of the urban night into a legible part of contemporary life. As we read the map of nocturnal modernity made by such figures as Walt Whitman and Ralph Ellison, Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper, Alfred Stieglitz and “Weegee,” I want to stress that my emphasis is not so much on social or technological transformation as on how that transformation was registered in literature and the visual arts. The works of innovative image-makers, rather than the experiences of ordinary people, are the focus here. But along the way, I refer to the still-unfolding histories of illumination and nightlife as a means of establishing concretely how technological change altered urban experience, something implicit in my interpretation of art and literature. Thus, New York Nocturne concentrates not on nocturnal urban “reality” as lived by various socioeconomic groups but on how creative individuals have in memorable ways depicted and reinterpreted that ever-evolving reality for themselves and their audiences. Looking at the visual and verbal ideas that engaged the makers of night imagery, we will often arrive at fresh readings of familiar works, now that they are seen in the context of the nocturnal genre. Some of the images and texts presented here are classics, chosen because they have had a lot of cultural visibility and impact—those by Edgar Allan Poe and Emma Lazarus, Edward Steichen and Berenice Abbott, James McNeill Whistler and Joseph Stella, for instance. But I also use many lesser-known works to gauge the depth of an idea or image, and see if something unexpected will turn up to compel attention. Since showing what’s special about nocturnal imagery is at the heart of my endeavor, I try to identify just what working with the night contributed to the art of each figure I analyze—and what each figure contributed to the growing body of nocturnal expression. We will see, to take just a few examples, how representing nocturnal subjects and atmosphere helped Whistler achieve a desired notoriety, lent Steichen an “artistic” aura, enabled Frederic Remington to be recognized as a painter rather than mere illustrator, helped Stella fuse a Futurist style with American

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the dream site

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themes, burned Weegee’s flash photos into public consciousness, and gave poets William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop a human moth-toelectric-flame image of the writer’s tormented act of creation. Since 1812, when the composer John Field first give the title “nocturne” to a series of quietly expressive piano pieces, the term has been applied to a wide range of imaginative works that, according to their creators, evoke nighttime thoughts and sensations. Because the history of the nocturne zigzags between music, the visual arts, and literature, study of the subject demands an interdisciplinary, multimedia approach. I will admit right here that regrettably, this book does not address the nocturne in either music or film—still unexplored topics that are well worth investigating.5 And long as it is, this book itself has had to be selective. For reasons of space and personal inclination, I have focused on what might be called “descriptive” nocturnes: works of writers, painters, and photographers that may well have musical or cinematic counterparts, but that give special privilege, verbally and visually, to the look of the city after dark. Although I will be comparing how the city is represented in various texts and images, trying to show what each has contributed to our composite picture of New York, the aim is not to compare the media themselves, or offer theories about their similarities and differences, advantages and constraints. Rather, I will try to show how ideas and approaches may be borrowed, emulated, subverted, or rejected, often quite loosely and by analogy, among people trying to represent in their own way, in their own medium, a shared topic: the city at night.6 Tracing the imagery through which ideas about the nocturnal scene entered cultural consciousness, this book concentrates mostly on exterior, outdoor views of the city. For centuries people have sought security at night behind their shutters and doors. Their relation to interior space remained largely stable even as improved forms of lighting and heating made indoor life more comfortable. But gaslight’s sudden arrival tempted them out of their homes with the promise of wondrous sights. For Americans and Europeans both, emboldened initially by gaslight and then by a succession of new techniques of looking and lighting, the night became an arena for action. Artificial lighting had opened up a new epoch in human endeavor. Scrutiny of the night seemed almost an obligation; like Charles Dickens’s vampiric lawyer Mr. Vholes, darkness courted inquiry. Freighted with associations but at first little frequented by the “respectable” classes, tractable in theory but challenging in practice, night assumed the allure and menace of an uncharted continent. It beckoned. As artistic perception of night and light evolved, nocturnes became an influential force in the development of modern art and literature. Discovering the city, and particularly New York, through the lens of nocturnal experience, image makers found exceptional artistic possibilities that shattered traditional forms and encouraged greater freedom of expression. As they

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worked, they created a new New York—a vibrant composite image that has developed as the actual city has, an image that to this moment influences how we respond to the physical city before us. Through study of that nocturnal image, we can learn a great deal about how it felt to live in the city in times past, and how the resonances of the words “New York” have multiplied over time. Why New York? Nowhere else did nocturnal exploration take a more exciting form. Even before the advent of electricity, New Yorkers were announcing that their gaslit whirl rivaled that of London and Paris, as illustrators and journalists, writers and artists cataloged the city’s infamies and chronicled its secrets. For New York’s self-proclaimed arrival on the world stage around 1850 coincided with the dawning recognition that night was a kind of global stage in itself. Inextricably bound up in the rhetoric of exploration, colonization, and discovery, nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury encounters with the night were suffused with a sense of adventure. “Daytime” activities—the constant construction and demolition; the influx of immigrants, industries, and capital; the ever-rising skyline—lent New York a protean form that rapidly achieved legendary status. But complementing the transformation of the built environment was another, equally mythic metamorphosis—one that took place nightly as darkness fell, and the workaday world seemed to don garments of fire and diamonds. Growing furiously, the city emerged from the gaslit era on nearly equal terms with London in size and Paris in ostentation. Then, in the 1880s and 1890s, New York aggressively assumed a more pronounced “electric” personality, assembling a nocturnal semiotic arsenal that no other city could match. Sustained by the legends that art and commerce were building, the allure of New York as the preeminent city of the night stemmed from a simple fact: no city anywhere had ever been so radiantly and thoroughly lit. Opening its first central power plant in 1882, just three years after Thomas Edison successfully demonstrated the incandescent lightbulb, New York electrified more rapidly and completely than any European capital.7 Streetlights sparkled in processions along the avenues, while brightly lit interiors of apartments and offices became visible to people passing in the streets or on elevated trains. Meanwhile, the proliferation of skyscrapers began to change the topography of the city itself, as their lights broke the ceiling of darkness that in cities had hovered at the five-story level since the Middle Ages. From the 1890s onward, seeing New York created a lust for light that no place else could satisfy. Returning to Ireland in 1964, Brendhan Behan wrote: When I arrived home from Broadway, where my play The Hostage was running, my wife said to me, “Oh isn’t it great to be back. How do you feel coming home?” “Listen Beatrice,” I said, “It’s very dark!”

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And I think anybody returning home after going to New York will find their native spot pretty dark too.8

New York stood out especially in its contrast with the countryside. The illumination of cities outpaced that of less populated areas even more dramatically in the United States than elsewhere, due to the private ownership of lighting companies. Whereas Europeans regarded lighting as a public service to be administered nationally, Americans treated it as a commercial commodity produced by and for the benefit of private enterprise, and lit each locality in direct proportion to the profits it could generate. Poorer and rural areas found themselves simply left in the dark. As the center of American commerce, the most highly visible and valuable piece of real estate in the nation, downtown Manhattan was quickly illuminated to the hilt. Citizens were calling Broadway the “Great White Way” even in the 1890s, and it was the intensity of light from advertising that created this impression. The spectacle shone all the more powerfully because it burst out at a time when not even 5 percent of American homes had electricity.9 It all amounted to a gigantic self-promotion, an urban publicity campaign that rapidly mythologized New York as the modern city, the ultimate city of light.10 By 1900, three of the most salient features of New York’s modernity—its skyscrapers, its brash, self-confident love of newness, and its dollar-driven, accelerated pace of life—coalesced and found their most spectacular form after dark. The boldness of the city’s lines, its soaring heights and uninhibited theatricality, marked it as a place apart, operating on a scale that eclipsed its European predecessors. A first step in changing perceptions of the night city came from those who championed the simple romance of elevated trains and watering holes. Realist novelist William Dean Howells and the painters of the Ash Can School tamed the threatening features of nightlife for middle-class audiences, as did O. Henry, whose stories of “Baghdad on the Subway” showed that urban chaos could be repackaged in ingeniously knotted four-page bundles. Between 1900 and 1915, with the spread of lavishly decorated lobster palaces, movie houses, and cabarets, going out at night gradually became the order of the day. By the 1920s New York had a mayor, socialite Jimmy Walker, who claimed it was a sin to go to bed on the same day you got up. The city lights produced a breathtaking skyline that outsparkled the rest of the world with its ambition, promise, and inhuman beauty. Visiting the city in the 1930s, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier remarked that New York at night is “a Milky Way come down to earth.”11 For over a century now, the sheer spectacle of New York at night has proved irresistible. Painters’ images of the city at night have become modernist icons in themselves: the soaring gothic arches of Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge (1922) open onto a promised land of light and height; O’Keeffe’s

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Radiator Building, Night, New York (1927) discharges urban energy from its floodlit, flowering top; Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure Five in Gold (1928) projects an apocalyptic vision of a fire truck hurtling through the night (color plate 1); and Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) presents a human diorama in a diner, its specimens drenched in the light of loneliness. The astonishing beauty of skyscrapers seen from a distance appears to engage in a nightly duel with the abrasive passion of city streets confronted close-up. Stella summed up New York’s nocturnal plenitude as a “battle of lights.” Artists, writers, and photographers have responded to this tension by portraying New York nights as an unpredictable compound of stunning extremes: they can be explosive or tranquil, brutal or romantic; they can deal in archetypes or absurdities. The coming of night may silence the city or make it more vibrant than ever, offering blinding visions of a radiant future or shadowy glimpses of the vanished past. For many, New York at night becomes quite simply the embodiment of dreams, whether fantasy or nightmare. “New York, the dream site,” the poet Adrienne Rich has called it.12 It’s important to recognize, however, that New York was not alone in creating a culture of the gaslit or electrified night. Around 1850, artists and writers throughout Europe and North America began realizing that the night offered them unexpectedly rich opportunities for exploring the clash between a disorienting urban world and the dislocated individual psyche. What Charles Baudelaire wrote of Paris was true of London and even truer of New York, but it applied to modern life, wherever it was experienced: cities change, Baudelaire said, “faster, alas, than the heart of mortal man.” People struggled to catch up, to understand or even conceptually mold that transformation. “As Baudelaire was very quick to see,” the critic David Harvey points out, “if flux and change, ephemerality and fragmentation, formed the material basis of modern life,” the artist had no choice but to respond to these developments: “The individual artist could contest them, embrace them, try to dominate them, or simply swim within them, but the artist could never ignore them.”13 Just as much as railways and crowds, machine-filled factories and mass culture, the urban night compelled attention. A volatile combination of ancient association and up-to-the-minute illumination, the artificially lit cityscape provided both a refuge from change and a testing ground for ways of confronting modernity in its most glaring manifestations. The technical challenges, the dramatic lighting, and the turbulent or mysterious content of night scenes called for new strategies of representation. Encouraging greater subjectivity and assailing the boundaries of realist art, nocturnes would play an important role in the movements toward symbolism and abstraction, imagism and pictorialism. Describing nighttime experience also required greater frankness about poverty and sexuality, greater openness on moral and formal levels regarding what could not be fully seen or known owing to extremes of darkness and light. It also spurred new

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techniques of image-making. The development of flash photography as an art, for example, sprang first from Jacob Riis’s struggle to capture the slum life of the city at night. Ephemeral yet persistent, the blinking lightscapes of electric and neon signs added another dimension to painting, photography, and literature from the early 1900s onward. For nighttime urban experience was more than a defining feature of modernity; its representation helped to create many of the artistic strategies and ideas we have come to call “modernist” or “modernism.” My underlying argument is that artistic grappling with the artificially lit city, of which New York is the outstanding example, should be recognized as an integral part of the processes that propelled European and American culture in bold new directions. By modernity, I mean not only rapid transformations of technology and socioeconomic structures but also Euro-American culture’s sense of itself as living in a world of accelerated innovation, where constant changes in the environment reach, in large ways and small, into every aspect of how life is lived and art is made. As Harvey notes, from the 1840s on, few could doubt that modernism, the artistic response to modernity, “was very much an urban phenomenon, that it existed in a restless but intricate relationship with the experience of explosive urban growth . . . strong rural-to-urban migration, industrialization, mechanization, massive reorderings of built environments, and politically based urban movements. . . . Modernism was ‘an art of cities.’ ”14 While the study of modernism can lead in many directions, I am drawn to the technologically inflected way the issues have been framed by Andreas Huyssen. Noting the close but often adversarial relation between modernism and the avant-garde, on the one hand, and social and industrial modernization, on the other, Huyssen writes tellingly that artists “drew their energies, not unlike Poe’s Man of the Crowd, from their proximity to the crises brought about by modernization and progress. Modernization—such was the widely held belief, even when the word was not around—had to be traversed.”15 As one of the most salient manifestations of modernization, the night city in particular had to be traversed. Gaslit or electrified, it would be crossed and confronted, literally, metaphorically, ceaselessly—just as in Poe’s story, which I discuss at length in chapter 1. The experience was transformative, not only for individuals, but for the arts and society at large. In speaking of the nocturne’s contribution to modernism, I want to emphasize the variety and complexity of that response. Though he allies modernism and the avant-garde as radical cultural responses to modernity, Huyssen distinguishes between what he sees as modernism’s political quietism and the avant-garde’s social engagement: “contrary to the avantgarde’s intention to merge art and life, modernism always remained bound up with the more traditional notion of the autonomous art work.”16 While these categories have had a useful history in helping us to define the art of the past century, the nocturne does not fall simply into one camp or another. Images

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of the artificially lit urban night inevitably represent a space of intersection between art and nature, technology and society. Whether viewed as autonomous, escapist, or activist, they engage in an effort that simultaneously accommodates and critiques the new night world. Nor do they present any clear consensus on the value of artificial as opposed to natural light. The painters Whistler and Stella were both interested in artifice and abstraction, and they shared the stereotypical modernist’s aversion to mass culture. But Whistler, like most of the New York painters, writers, and photographers who followed his example, gravitated toward dark, quiet, meditative scenes of fog and mist to express his carefully structured vision of the urban landscape, while Stella, although influenced by Whistler, found his abstract forms and critique of commercial culture in the pulsating electric signs of Coney Island and Broadway. One could argue that at first, modernists preferred natural darkness to manufactured light, until about 1910, when they had to accept the larger cultural changeover to bright nights. “Let the reign of holy Electric Light finally come,” declared the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in that year.17 But that scenario would miss the fascination with artificial light found earlier in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Degas, Theodore Dreiser, Riis, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Childe Hassam, and the deep ambivalence felt later by O’Keeffe, Hopper, Williams, Bishop, and Ellison. What makes the art of the night significant in the history of modernity and modernist expression is not any one political program, or any particular stance toward streetlights, but rather a sustained attention to the problem of how to represent an unprecedented reality and the complex of ideas, issues, forces, and sensations that came along with it. In a now-classic study of modernity, Marshall Berman took his cue from Karl Marx’s analysis that capitalism’s “constant revolutionizing” of social, economic, and physical life brings about a perpetually unsettled and agitated condition in which “all that is solid melts into air.” Examining the cultural impact of this dynamic, turbulent, urbanized landscape, Berman found that “the great modernists . . . attack this environment passionately, and strive to tear it down or explode it from within; yet all find themselves remarkably at home in it, alive to its possibilities, affirmative even in their radical negotiations, playful and ironic even in their moments of gravest seriousness and depth.”18 This seems especially true of how they treated the artificially lit night; it is a fertile, frightening, and exciting milieu in which they thrive. Moreover, if at first the art that modernists produced offered a series of defensive responses to modern life, soon it took a more active role. It became enmeshed in the production and consumption of that life, showing people how to live with, critique, and even alter their ever-altering reality. Since the mid-nineteenth century, nocturnal art has been teaching people how to inhabit the new night world, even as it asks them to reconsider the relation between the human, the urban, and the dark.

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To anchor what might seem sweeping generalizations, I have chosen to concentrate on how the image of the nighttime city has evolved around five recurrent themes.19 Each theme comes to the fore in a particular period: the city seen as a morally perilous gaslit Babylon, circa 1840–1870; the power of nightfall to transform daytime ugliness into magical beauty, circa 1870–1910, during the heyday of the nocturne; the notion of the night as a colonizable territory and later an empire of light, from about 1890 to1920; the vision of the skyscraper city as a fantasyland of desire, from 1910 to 1940; and the lit-up streets and interiors of the city viewed as a stage of desire and self-definition, voyeurism and violence, in the 1940s and 1950s. My epilogue suggests how these themes have continued to shape much of what we see and read about nighttime New York since 1960, even as undreamt of intensities of lighting have pushed urban imagery into uncharted territory. New York Nocturne thus offers a cluster of interrelated arguments about how gas and electric light changed the nocturnal city, and how the artistic imagination responded by wrapping the night in simple but flexible metaphors through which the new reality could be apprehended.

Seeing in a New Light As a result of the invention of gas lighting our life has gained in speed, as it did with the discovery of steam. Since the invention of gas light our evening life has experienced an indescribable intensification, our pulse has accelerated, nervous excitation has been heightened; we have had to change our appearance, our behaviour and our customs, because they had to be accommodated to a different light. —Robert Springer, Berlin Becomes a Metropolis 20

Like a city, night has a history. The two come together explosively with the spread of artificial light.21 At night, lights attract, reassure, sustain. The intensity of our response to city lights in particular may be due to the way in which humanity’s collective action against the night has been able to lift spirits and make things happen. For since ancient times, night has been the most persistent obstacle facing people who wished to extend dominion over their surroundings. Until the nineteenth century, outdoor labor ceased at sundown and travel became hazardous; even indoor occupations were hampered by the erratic flame of candles and fires. Manufacturing processes central to the development of an industrialized society, such as smelting and casting, could not run efficiently because of the time it took for furnaces to be refired each morning. A familiar biblical adage summed up the prevailing condition: “The night cometh, when no man can work” (John 9:4). Or play. Hence the demand for artificial, practical forms of outdoor lighting was largely the product of urban societies. Torch-bearing slaves lit

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the way for prosperous Athenians and Romans returning home from banquets. The modern notion of public street lighting as providing fixed and reliable illumination for all passersby dates back to the late Middle Ages, when Paris and London required citizens to hang oil lamps in front of their houses. By that time the growth of capitalism, trade, and towns had led to the first twenty-four-hour clocks and generated the need for a form of lighting more powerful than candles—one that could expand production hours for larger markets and facilitate travel among them. The demand grew in courts and towns until it matured in the eighteenth century. Interestingly, it was not a concern for trade or safety that first opened the way for sustained nocturnal activity, though these factors soon came to the fore. Rather, the lust for light was driven by the self-conscious urbanity of the Baroque and Georgian social elites, who used the night as an exclusive space where the privileged could amuse themselves with conspicuously expensive displays of refined artifice. The high cost of candles alone meant that only the rich could afford to illumine, never mind provide, the musical evenings, soirées, and balls that marked the social season. The commercial culture of night took shape for the first time on a large scale in London in the 1730s and 1740s, with regular public entertainments at the pleasure grounds of Vauxhall Gardens and Ranelagh. From its origins, commercial nightlife not only functioned as a class marker, separating those who could afford to spend at night and sleep during the day from those who had to work; it also proclaimed a difference between province and metropolis, between those who followed agricultural rhythms of life and those who could ignore them.22 Decked out with thousands of lamps, first oil and later gas, made beautiful and exhilarating by the flicker of candles and the bursts of fireworks, Vauxhall and Ranelagh were ancestors of the modern amusement park. They worked profitable wonders with what in the daytime were flimsy wooden structures and a few acres of ordinary hedges and trees. Contemporary prints present Vauxhall as a fashionable wonderland. Soon the working classes too found reason to be abroad at night. Cheap entertainment increased; expanded working hours led to more nighttime jobs. The profitability of new industrial processes, particularly at foundries and forges, was becoming ever-more dependent on shift work and roundthe-clock operation. By the end of the eighteenth century there was a great demand for efficient urban and indoor illumination, although in practical terms little had changed from the earliest oil lamps.23 No Columbus arrived to open the nocturnal New World until the industrial engineer William Murdoch discovered in 1792 how to light his home and workshop by means of igniting the gas given off by burning coal. The first gas lighting was introduced in English factories around 1802, and on January 28, 1807, the first centralized urban gas street-lighting system cast its glow over Pall Mall in London’s West End. The technology spread so rapidly that by 1813, many

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streets of England’s larger towns were gaslit, and by the 1820s gas lighting had become a standard feature of cities throughout England and the United States. In 1823, London boasted forty thousand public gaslights along 215 miles of streets. By 1842, the late hours of commerce had spawned an Early Closing Movement that while acknowledging the picturesqueness of gaslights, futilely argued that the “health [of shoppers and workers] is more important than chiaroscuro.”24 In factories, hospitals, railway stations, markets, printing houses, and telegraph offices, and in the web of hostelries and services spun around them, the twenty-four-hour work-and-play day was being born. In New York, “Newspaper Row” opposite City Hall occupied the center of the city’s night work by 1850. In 1853, the Sun self-promotingly lit its building to shine like its namesake, but in fact the aim of putting out early morning papers meant that the entire journalistic industry helped lead the way in illuminating the U.S. workplace. With the arrival of continuous nocturnal activity and the gradual acceptance of the premise that “a great city never sleeps” (as the French poet Gérard de Nerval pointed out in 1852), came the need to learn how to live in the night in a new way.25 As Robert Springer remarked, “We have had to change our appearance, our behaviour and our customs.” The transition took some getting used to. For instance, in 1826, Richard Dighton’s pair of comic etchings portrayed the oil-to-gas changeover as a shift in how the public suffered: One of the Advantages of Oil over Gas depicts a negligent lamp-filler spilling oil all over a passing dandy, while One of the Advantages of Gas over Oil shows a woman and child knocked flat in the street when a faulty gaslight causes the shop front of druggist “I. Killen” to explode.26 But once these sometimes-deadly inconveniences had been accepted, the development of ever-larger areas for nighttime use—particularly for manufacture, shopping, and recreation—rapidly followed. Fatalities from gas—due to asphyxiation, explosions, heat exhaustion, and overexposure to fumes— became, like automobile deaths nowadays, regarded as deplorable but unavoidable, a necessary sacrifice.27 While still a zone of relaxation, romance, or risk, night now extended its associations in the direction of the mundane. Activities and sensations that once had been chiefly or even strictly tied to the daylight hours gained a nocturnal tinge: buying, selling, manufacturing, transporting, entertaining, and being entertained. As the urbanization of Europe and North America progressed, intensive, extensive nighttime activity became the hallmark of big cities—their splashiest trait. The public justification of gas lighting initially centered around its ability to protect travelers and prevent crimes against property. Because a dark street signified moral turpitude as well as physical danger, law enforcers, businesses, and respectable citizens urged that streetlamps be used to vanquish harlots and criminals who, theoretically, shunned the light.28 “A light is as good as a policeman,” went the popular refrain.29 Similarly, the popular

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Figure I.2. Unknown artist, A Saturday Night Scene in the Bowery, New York. In Harper’s Weekly, May 20, 1871. Museum of the City of New York Print Archive

dictum that “trade follows light,” originally had less to do with advertising than the need to reassure wealthy patrons of their safety.30 But as the different social classes learned to live in the urban night together, the accelerating commodification of nocturnal leisure rapidly ensured that a wide public could indulge in a variety of activities, from shopping and the theater to dining and dancing. And if gaslight meant safety for the upper and middle classes, then its reassuring glow could be exploited commercially at all levels of society. An engraving titled A Saturday Night Scene in the Bowery, from Harper’s Weekly in 1871, depicts crowds surging around market stalls and pushcarts under the city’s gaslights, supplemented by the smokier oil lamps of individual vendors. One key to the urban night’s appeal was artificial light’s apparent ability to transform whatever it touched. In Sketches by Boz (1836), Dickens gave an account of his daytime visit to Vauxhall: We paid our shilling at the gate, and then we saw for the first time, that the entrance, if there had been any magic about it at all, was now decidedly disenchanted, being, in fact, nothing more nor less than a combination of very roughly-painted boards and sawdust. . . . We bent our steps to the firework-ground; there, at least, we should not be disappointed. We reached it, and stood rooted to the spot with mortification and

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astonishment. THAT the Moorish tower—that wooden shed with a door in the centre, and daubs of crimson and yellow all round, like a gigantic watch-case! THAT the place where night after night we had beheld the undaunted Mr. Blackmore make his terrific ascent, surrounded by flames of fire. . . .31

As Dickens found, if the night enchanted, the day disillusioned. But every evening, for those who had time and money to spare, the lights cast their spell, turning the workaday city of dirt and disorder into a wonderland fraught with promise and mystery. “When the evening mist clothes the river-side with poetry,” as Whistler put it, “the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky . . . the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us. . . .”32 Those who could and those who dared set off to explore what amounted to a second city—with its own geography and its own set of citizens—that lay concealed behind the familiar daytime one. Urban adventurers and armchair explorers were helped in their journeys by the writers and artists who scouted the terrain and brought back images of what might be found there. Yet those who grappled with the problem of representing this alien landscape had to discover new artistic means to convey it. Artificial light was altering perception of the night city at the very moment that it brought it into view.

Dark Arts and the Urban Sublime Because what went on in nocturnal New York was in some ways an echo or amplification of developments in London and Paris, New York’s unique drive toward nighttime supremacy needs to be set in the context of its European cousins. In the process of adapting to the gaslit world, artists and writers such as Joseph Mallord William Turner and Degas, Dickens and Baudelaire, transformed earlier conventions, even as they shaped new categories and habits of seeing. In a movement that transcended genres, the fascination with the gaslit city permeated not only journalism and ephemeral forms of notation—the engraving, the sketch, the vignette–but also more respected arts—lyric poetry, the novel, the urban landscape painting. Americans applied and altered European models, discovering in their own country subject matter that would help build the mythology of nocturnal New York. A brief look at the history of nocturnal art gives insight into some of the sources of their vision. Before gas lighting, little could be seen in the night without the help of the fickle moon. Artificial means—torches, fires, candles, and oil lamps— were inefficient and expensive. The nature of the problem facing artists who wanted to record nocturnal subjects was caught in 1771 by a comic engraving.. In A Connoisseur Admiring a Dark Night Piece, a frowning gentleman

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Figure I.3. Henry Bunbury, A Connoisseur Admiring a Dark Night Piece, 1771. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Virginia

uses a lens to peer at a pitch-black canvas. In Western painting, the earliest night scenes depended on divine illumination: the star that guided the Magi, the angels appearing to shepherds, the radiance of the Christ child at the nativity. Whether the artist was Giotto or Monaco, Altdorfer or Tintoretto, supernatural light prevailed. The shift toward less miraculous forms of lighting was signaled by Caravaggio’s dramatic The Taking of Christ (1602), where a lantern held by a figure resembling the painter himself illumines the face of Jesus. Of all pre-nineteenth-century artists, probably only Rembrandt, in an etching such as Flight into Egypt (c. 1634), gave any idea of how feeble actual lantern light was—thanks as much to the black inks of the etching process as to Rembrandt’s love of chiaroscuro.33 As secular subjects gained in importance and the concept of landscape in its own right began to develop, artists placed greater emphasis on natural

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Figure I.4. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Landscape by Moonlight, c. 1637–1640. Schelte Adams Bolswert (1581–1659), printmaker. Engraving, 12 ½
17 ½ in. (32
44.5 cm) (plate mark). The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

sources of lighting and the integration of human figures into the landscape. Like the travelers, fishers, or hunters they depicted, Peter Paul Rubens, Claude-Joseph Vernet, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Turner needed bright moonlight to show the way. The main lines of the secular approach to night scenes emerge in Rubens’s painting Landscape by Moonlight (c. 1637–1640), and are clearer still in the etched version. Rubens lit the scene with moonlight, starlight, and what was to become the almost inevitable complement to the full moon: a body of reflective water in the foreground.34 The near universality of the moonlight-on-the-water motif can be explained in practical terms: one can barely see colors or detail in even the brightest moonlight, but a full, reflected moon provides the utmost in illumination and verisimilitude. The double light source (often augmented by a third: a fire on shore) also increases the visual interest of the picture.35 Writers, meanwhile, readily found urban material, but they were apt to stress the consequences of the inability to see: Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, like the Roman poet Juvenal before them, blamed the night for street crime; in William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Henry Fielding darkness leads to cases of mistaken identity; and night owls comically lose their way in works by John Gay and Oliver Goldsmith, as in their Latin predecessors. Gay devoted an entire section of his Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) to “Walking the Streets by Night.” He

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Figure I.5. Joseph Wright (1734–1797), An Iron Forge Viewed from Without, 1773. Oil on canvas, 41
55 in. (105
140 cm). The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

advises against employing the torchbearers or “linkmen” that hung around taverns and theaters, waiting for hire: Though thou art tempted by the Linkman’s call Yet trust him not along the lonely wall, In midway he’ll quench the flaming brand, And share the booty with the pilf ’ring band. (III, lines 139–42)

In “London” (1738), Johnson was even more explicit in his warning: “Prepare for Death, if here at Night you roam, / And sign your Will before you sup from Home.” Since night in rural areas remained untouched by gaslight and electricity, little changed in its visual aspect until well into the twentieth century. Thus artistic representations of moonlit ponds and haystacks, rivers, fields, and villages, served as a nostalgia-laden constant against which to measure the drastic alteration of urban nightlife. But even in the country, and especially in the English Midlands, the Industrial Revolution made itself felt. Wright’s An Iron Forge Viewed from Without (1773) contrasts the forge’s ruddy glow—which dominates the painting and pierces the holes in its decaying farm shed—with the faint silvery light of the moon reflected on the clouds outside. Not only does the painting comment on the shifting relation between natural and human lighting, it also enshrines the industrial process in the rustic place of the nativity, a dilapidated stable. As blazing industry and flaring artificial light changed the face of the night, hellish fire became a frequent, rather than exceptional feature of nocturnal

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art. In factory towns and thriving cities, artists embraced the opportunity to record an unsleeping world made bright with foundry fire or Babylonian festivity. P. J. de Loutherberg’s Coalbrookdale by Night (1801) depicts factory blast furnaces flaring in a devastated landscape, the natural illumination of moonlight and stars marginalized by manufactured hellfire. Of course, celebrations with bonfires and fireworks had been recorded from the Renaissance on, as were great conflagrations. Pierre Antoine DeMachy, a leading figure in French urban night painting, recorded both fireworks and fires in his The Foire St. Germain on Fire (1763) and Fireworks on the Place Louis XV (1782). In London, even before the commercial pleasure gardens were opened, crowds delighted to see displays of fireworks on the Thames and at Whitehall, such as those for which George Frideric Handel composed the famous “Music for the Royal Fireworks” in 1749. With the advent of gaslight, the flaming pandemonium of earlier eras was translated into a set of new conventions fraught with moral overtones. Painters and poets now used nocturnal settings to portray the industrial city as an inferno, an apocalyptic site of sin, judgment, and retribution. Edmund Burke had anticipated this development in his Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) when he observed that “night [is] more sublime and solemn than day.”36 Burke defined the sublime as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,” and he regarded awe-inspiring sights, such as violent thunderstorms or dizzying abysses, as “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”37 For Burke, the size and might of natural forces accentuated the feebleness of human endeavor. One might therefore think that the sublime was about nature, God, and light, not darkness and the Devil in cities. But interest in the sublime, perhaps the furthest-reaching aesthetic concept of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arose just as technology, industry, and urban growth threatened to rival the Almighty sources of sublime power. One could say of Burke what William Blake said of John Milton: that he was “of the Devils party without knowing it.”38 For in fact, Burke’s own ideas were heavily influenced by hellish scenes in Paradise Lost, particularly the passages in which Milton described Satan’s headquarters, the infernal city of Pandemonium: A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’d only to discover sights of woe . . . (I:59–62)

The “darkness visible” of the fallen, fiery city, echoing the biblical fall of Babylon, is the prototype for the “infernal sublime” of the industrial

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era. In linking the sublime to the nocturnal landscape, and then connecting the fearful darkness to Milton’s urbanized hell, Burke formulated a durable moral and aesthetic strategy for dealing with the city after dark. Whether drawing or being drawn into the inferno, the artist and writer could adopt a divine standpoint that implied the righteousness of the fiery spectacle that so fascinated them. Turner capped the whole genre with his incendiary, apocalyptic scene, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 (1834–1835) (color plate 2). The Parliament buildings burn so fiercely in the night that it is as if the very fabric of the British government has caught fire. The watching crowds appear to flow over Westminster Bridge to be pitched into the inferno. Even the reflecting water of the Thames seems to take flame, outshining a solitary gas lamp in the foreground. One hundred and fifty years later, Richard Haas’s Burning Pier, World Trade Center (1985) adapted Turner’s painting and the city fire tradition to the vertical geography of Lower Manhattan. Positioned on an overgrown Jersey Shore, the viewer faces a blazing pier that cuts across the lower half of the picture, while in the background the twin towers of the World Trade Center preside impassively over the scene. The natural world verges on reclaiming the urban one; ominously, the modern towers of Babel and Babylon are just touched by flame (color plate 3). Burke anticipated two further twists on the sublime that later loomed large in images of New York at night. First came the “mathematical” urban sublime of nineteenth-century artists and writers who stressed the endlessly repeated and standardized features of warehouses and avenues, built-up vistas leading forever toward a perspectival vanishing point. Given a new vertical dimension by skyscrapers, this approach seemed custom-made for New York’s apparently limitless expanse of sparkling lights. From here it was a short step to the twentieth century’s “technological” sublime (dating, in New York, to the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883), wherein awe at the mightiness of human construction replaces religious wonder at the divinely driven power of the natural world.39 Here, too, nocturnal New York proved both inspiration and example, projecting an all-encompassing script of light that stunned observers with its unnatural brilliance and cryptic, seemingly cosmic significance. Yet as the mesmerizing urban light storms painted by Stella, Mark Tobey, and others show, the Burkean sublime and its descendants not only profited from the moral confusion sown by artificial light, they promoted it. The sheer visual attractiveness of the urban sublime eventually overcame its spiritual horror. With the gas lighting of London, urban reality caught up with imagined sublimity. Artists and citizens confronted an artificially illuminated city for the first time in history. With its unbroken chains of lights and seeming infinity of murky byways, London offered the eye what Burke called

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Figure I.6. John Martin (1789–1854), Pandemonium (from Milton’s Paradise Lost), 1841. Oil on canvas, 48 ½
74 in. (123
184 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photographer: Gérard Blot. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux /Art Resource, New York

a “managed darkness” of Miltonic effects.40 The night view of London was sublime as Milton’s hell was sublime: unimaginably vast and luridly, frighteningly attractive, a battleground for the cosmic struggle of good and evil. Indeed, given that Milton’s Satan and his fallen angels dwell amid “a fiery Deluge, fed / With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d” (Paradise Lost, I:68–69), hellfire and gaslight appeared roughly equivalent, since the “candlewick” in gas lamps at first amazed people because it burned all night without being consumed. The painter of cataclysmic canvases John Martin conflated these two sources of “darkness visible” in his giant depiction of Satan’s capital, Pandemonium (1841). The apparently endless terrace that runs the width of the picture in front of Satan’s palace is lit by a row of lamps that unmistakably resemble the London gas lamps that burned on dissolute Pall Mall, near the notorious “hells” or gambling dens of the West End. Martin represented Milton’s infernal city to Burkean measure, with buildings of vast proportions dwarfing the poor devils writhing below. Anticipating the dazzling, Dantesque blaze of Stella’s Battle of Lights at Coney Island and New York Interpreted, the infernal urban sublime produced a universe in which hell comes to look a lot like London—and London a lot like hell. What New Yorkers learned from London reinforced the Protestant, Anglocentric American sense that gas lighting magnified dark deeds and sexual

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misconduct. Gaslight was at once an id and a superego, luring people into the very sins that it exposed. In night’s pleasure garden, paradise was repeatedly promised and lost. In London, the powers of darkness seemed almost to increase in proportion to the spread of gas lighting. Stormy nights, sputtering lamps, deep shadows, dense fog that the streetlights render even more opaque—these are the recurrent images of the Imperial City. From the harlot-ridden “midnight streets” of Blake’s “London” to James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, nighttime in London signifies temptation, transgression, and sin. Occasionally, as in the murders committed by Jack the Ripper in 1888, it even seemed to some as if divine retribution had fittingly taken the form of nocturnal sexual violence. In this regard, London gave warning that earlier, biblically inflected perils of the night would not readily yield to the new technologies; the Devil seemed to dance in gaslight. London’s otherworldly drama was complemented in Paris by a more secular effort to capture the novel look of streets and people bathed in artificial light. The natural order, it seemed, had been overthrown and the rhythm of nature now mattered less than the dictates of human will. “Gaslight has replaced the sun!” the Parisian journalist Jules Janin wrote in 1839.41 If light had once represented the monarchy—to the point where supporters of the Old Regime were hung from lampposts during the French Revolution—by the mid-nineteenth century the populace frolicked in a brightness that had unofficially become part of the Rights of Man. The Place de la Concorde was lit by one of the first electric arc lights in 1844. By the 1870s and 1880s, when powerful electric arc lights were introduced in central areas, Parisians not only felt themselves drenched with light, they were eager to have more. In Vincent van Gogh’s The Outskirts of Paris (1886), a solitary gas lamp shoots up amid muddy open fields north of the city, an incongruous outpost of the approaching nightlife that its presence implies. The disparate social, political, and commercial uses of gas lighting fell into place in the 1860s with the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. Haussmann’s plan destroyed many of the darkest, oldest quarters of the city and their narrow twisting streets, and replaced them with wide, brightly lit boulevards lined with glittering shops and cafés. Visitors coming to the city for the Exhibitions of 1867 and 1878 found Paris joyfully dazzling at night. “There certainly is no other . . . European city,” wrote Italian traveler Edmondo de Amicis in 1878, “where beauty, light, art, and nature aid each other so marvelously by forming a spectacle which entrances the imagination.”42 The electric lightbulb made its European debut in 1881 in Paris at a fair devoted entirely to electricity.43 In 1885, a plan to create a “Sun Tower” that would arc light all of Paris from a single source became a serious rival to the Eiffel Tower as the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition.44 By the time of the Universal Exposition of 1900, the illumination

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was spectacular enough to encourage night photographs, some taken by the novelist Émile Zola. Ingenious lithographers stuck bits of mica and tinfoil to their images of the Expo, in an attempt to imitate its unprecedented glitter.45 Whereas earlier depictions of towns and cities had offered moonlit reveries of silent streets, portraits of the artificially lit city now shone with the glare of shops, signs, cafés, and boulevards, treating all the hubbub as a “natural” feature of the sublunar landscape. While the Parisian regard for sheer splendor paralleled the New Yorkers’ pride in their own city’s size and showiness, it was the rapid pace of change that formed a deeper link. Both cities reveled in the disorienting spectacle of their own modernity. In Paris, the shock of enormous physical alterations in the landscape made the accompanying psychological convulsion of gaslight so much more apparent. It was soon evident that nights in the old city had provided privacy, mystery, and solace. In his prose poem “Le Crépuscule du soir” (1864), Baudelaire speaks of “refreshing darkness” carrying a reprieve from death for those caught “in the stony labyrinths of a capital.”46 But the brilliantly lit boulevards and arcades had metamorphosed the city into one gigantic entertainment. Wearied by the long perspectives of shop windows and mirrored cafés seemingly engaged in mutual self-reflection, the brothers Edmond de and Jules de Goncourt complained that the new boulevards had replaced the world of Balzac with “quelque Babylone amèricaine de l’avenir”—with “a futuristic American Babylon.”47 As Paris became the brightest star of the gaslit era, Baudelaire, Nerval, Guy de Maupassant, Georges Seurat, and many others felt that their city was being transformed into a spiritually vapid, relentlessly social space, dedicated to display and amusement, that threatened both privacy and imaginative autonomy.48 The artists Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Gustav Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt kept their distance from the urban landscape after dark. Claude Monet, who never painted a nocturnal Paris scene, wrote from the country, “How can one live in Paris? It’s a hell. I prefer my flowers and this hill encircled by the Seine to all your noise and all your nocturnal lights.” It was as if, a tourist wrote, “the great city had banished sleep for ever, and were condemned by God to the torture of an everlasting festival.”49 An upstart aesthetics that found beauty in the gaslit Champs-Elyssées also questioned conventional norms of behavior by scrutinizing prostitution and café life, and casting a seductive glow around dance halls and amusement parks. In Café Concert aux Ambassadeurs (1877), for instance, Degas managed to capture the sensory intensity of a Parisian night in the heat of the summer. He crams four female performers onto a slice of outdoor, gaslit stage, in addition to placing the heads of an audience in the foreground, and moonlight and fireworks in the background. The whole effect is augmented and fractured by the large mirrors behind the lead singer, the famous Émélie Bécat.

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Figure I.7. Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Café Concert aux Ambassadeurs, 1877. Pastel on monotype on paper, 14 ½
10 in. (37
26 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

With its garish gaslit colors and disorienting structure, the painting creates an alluringly dynamic, somewhat vertiginous effect. Camille Pissarro’s painting Paris, the Boulevard Montmartre at Night (c. 1897) conveys the city’s compulsive gaiety, the wide-open eye of the streetlight in the foreground standing guard over the insomnia of the city (color plate 4). With puritan underpinnings, this sleepless bacchanal was where New York was heading as the electric age dawned. What New York would eventually be to electricity, Paris was to gaslight: its kingdom and playground.50 A new art of night and the city emerged. Throughout the nineteenth century, urbanites everywhere were gradually forced to rethink the age-old perception of night: what had been once a time of indoor relaxation now became an outdoor space for social display and visual spectacle that seemed

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to demand everyone’s participation. The arrival of artificial light had, almost paradoxically, “invented” natural light, for no such conceptual category existed before the new technologies posed alternative forms of illumination.51 In New York, as in London and Paris, the scale and power of the transformation demanded immediate attention, as people alternately embraced and abhorred its effects. Soon the contrast between gas jets and the moon and stars became standard visual symbols of an ongoing struggle cast in moral terms, God and nature allied against humanity and artifice. But the choice was not necessarily clear: the churchgoing middle class might support the spread of gaslight for economic reasons, while freethinking artists might well value darkness for aesthetic purposes. With evidence of night’s vulnerability flickering before them, many nineteenth-century artists and writers felt compelled to dispute the lightloving absolutism of the preceding era. The simple difficulty of seeing in the dark provided an opportunity for recorders of the night world to blur or obscure the boundaries between objects, classes, and socially acceptable styles of representation or behavior. Night scenes ask us to reconsider noonday certainties from the murkier ground of midnight, to entertain the sense of psychological liberation that comes from probing conventions outside their familiar context. American nocturnal connoisseurs such as Poe, Whitman, Whistler, and Stieglitz challenged ingrained symbolic values by suggesting that one might discover more evil, ignorance, alienation, and ugliness in the light of day than in the subtle, poetic darkness that followed. Stressing the limitations of the quotidian, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Dreams acquaint us with what the day omits.”52 Their nocturnes not only portrayed original material but also suggested new ways of artistically responding to it. The process of perceptual education they undertook was inseparable from social acculturation, as their strategies of representation encouraged freer responses to simply being abroad at night. To take just one example: in London and Paris, gas lamps were linked with prostitution; in Théophile-Alexandre Steinlens’s 1894 lithograph, A Prostitute’s Prayer, a young woman kneels in front of streetlights rather than altar candles. But Americans, like the Futurists, put technology itself, the new religion, in the foreground. In New York in the same year, the impressionist painter Hassam used the light-reflecting qualities of swirling snow to paint halos around a row of gaslights as they trail off into the distance in Winter Midnight (1894) (color plate 5). By the 1900s, it would become commonplace to observe that the moon and stars had been eclipsed by streetlights, and a Futurist artist like Giacomo Balla could explore this idea literally. In Street Light (1909), Balla carries Hassam’s scene to its extreme: he devotes his entire canvas to one sizzling electric globe. In the upper corner he buries the now-secondary, feeble moon beneath a shower of jittering electric rays. A sublime new divinity had arrived.

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Figure I.8. Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), Street Light (Lampada-Studio di luce), dated by the artist 1909. Oil on canvas, 68 ¾
45 ¼ in. (174.6
115 cm). Hilman Periodicals Fund [7.1954]. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

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Getting Acquainted with the Night Someone frames upon the keys That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain The night and moonshine. —T. S. Eliot, Conversation Galante

What is a nocturne? In the wake of Field, Frédéric Chopin, and Whistler, the word has most often been used by musicians, writers, and visual artists to designate what dictionaries call “a dreamy pensive composition.”53 In its stricter sense it refers to the expression of romantic and lyric emotions evoked by nighttime, in contrast to the boisterous strife of the daytime. Its mood is more intimate and personal, more reflective than that of an ordinary scene. The urban nocturne, with its meditative quality, is almost a contradiction in terms. Its very repose implies the uproar and excitement of city nightlife lurking just around the corner. The nocturne invokes daytime hubbub and nighttime clamor in order to repress it. For example, what makes the title of Alice Neel’s painting Harlem Nocturne (1952) so appropriate is the mood that she establishes with the mysterious aura of light cast over her scene. While the title itself may be borrowed from Earle Hagen’s sultry rhythm-and-blues standard of the 1940s (“a nocturne for the blues played on a broken heartstring,” according to the lyrics by Dick Rogers), Neel gives her attention to a silent landscape, not pained people. Is it moonlight or city lights downtown that hovers over her stark winter tree and blunt yet inviting tenements, where every window is lit? In keeping with the nocturne genre, Neel plays on the tension between the still winter street and the implied offstage commotion signaled by the warm apartment lights. The bare tree separated by a chain-link fence from the crude geometry of minimalist housing has since become a clichéd image of poverty; it summarizes the urban brutalization of natural and human worlds. But Neel, who lived in Spanish Harlem during the 1950s, uses the crescent moon and the compelling glow in the sky—Is it shaped like a body? Is it the white world trying to engulf the homey tenement?—to draw her viewer into a silent reverie. Tenement, tree, and light all seem to take on lives of their own, luminous, substantial, humbly eloquent. And it is this potent interplay of shadows and light that the more general meaning of the word carries: a nocturne can also be any representation of “what is proper to the night, what takes place in the night.” As a particular kind of nocturne—the urban landscape lit by artificial light—the quiet contemplative city scenes of the modern era represent a historically unprecedented type of art that faces special formal challenges, as moonlight and darkness confront the glare of gas and electricity. For depictions of more public events, the venerable term “night-piece,” dating to the time of

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Figure I.9. Alice Neel (1900–1984), Harlem Nocturne, 1952. Oil on canvas, 24
21 in. (61
53.3 cm). Private collection. © Estate of Alice Neel

Shakespeare, can still be used.54 It includes animated images of fires, celebrations, riots, nights on the town, and the social interaction between lights, people, buildings, and streets. Thus all nocturnes are night pieces, although not all night pieces are nocturnes. Inevitably, public and private experiences of the night shade into each other; even the most dreamy nocturne hints at the brassy world it renounces, while even the brightest lights may become mirrors to the secret desires of anonymous crowds or hidden observers. The name “nocturne” covers a spectrum of responses to night, registering the dynamic relation between light and darkness, action and reflection. We can better understand the issues involved in the nocturnal discovery of self and city by taking a look at Robert Frost’s poem “Acquainted with the Night” (1926) in company with Coburn’s striking photograph, The Coal

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Cart (1911). Like many of Frost’s poems, “Acquainted with the Night” skirts the topic that it promises to scrutinize. Description is minimal; rhapsodies or laments about lights and loneliness are absent. But what Frost does capture is the modern necessity of encountering the urban night, pursuing truths about the human condition in an altered world. The poem is a perfect nocturne in the sense that it delivers an emotion “proper to the night”—not by revealing its source, but by using the imagery of rainy, deserted streets to project the reader into the same profound meditation as the poet: I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-by; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.55

By the time we are done reading, we know how the speaker has become acquainted with the night—through his nocturnal walking, listening, and looking—but little about what he has learned from this acquaintance. The phrase “unwilling to explain” characterizes the poem’s method. But there are clues. The poem is written in terza rima, the rhyme scheme that Dante used in The Divine Comedy. Although references to the city as an inferno abound in literature, here Frost is more concerned with the totality of Dante’s structure: the speaker looks down “the saddest city lane (Inferno), he looks up to an “unearthly height” (Paradiso), and he walks out past “the furthest city light” (Dante situates the starlit Purgatorio at the dark far ends of the earth, the antipodes of Jerusalem). Modern urban geography parallels the spiritual schema: there’s life at street level as well as a subterranean

Facing page Figure I.10. Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966), The Coal Cart, New York, 1911. Gelatin silver print, 8
6 in. (20.9
15.7 cm). George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn

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region (subways, dives, and basements) and an aerial realm of skyscrapers. Yet the poet provides no Virgil to guide his Dante, and by averting his eyes the speaker refuses to make even a mute confession to a modern stand-in for divine surveillance: the watchman. Frost provides all these parallels in order to discount them. What we learn about the urban night is that it is as reticent as the poet; there is no moral structure of meaning to its shape, no concern on its part either to claim the poet (“call me back”) or reject him (“say good-by”). There is nothing guiding the poet’s aimless walk, and the moment for decisive action, or even the value of the action, is equally unclear: “neither wrong nor right.” The poem recognizes a fundamental yet unstatable need to be acquainted with the night, even as it also recognizes the night’s indifference. It will never be, in Paul Simon’s words, “darkness my old friend.” Part of the poem’s power comes from ambiguity about the nature of the unhelpful “luminary clock”—is it a mechanism on a—tower, or is it the moon, with its implicitly supernatural creator, that proclaims time without judging it? Frost’s rainy night would likely have obscured the moon, but Coburn’s The Coal Cart suggests a fuller, New York–inflected answer. Frost’s night city is delocalized, while Coburn’s is site specific. Taken in Madison Square, the photograph beautifully captures the tripartite vertical structure of the city: the dark cart dumps its infernal fuel down a sidewalk chute into a basement where it will stoke the fires of Mammon, while the aptly named Metropolitan Life Tower (the world’s tallest building when it was erected in 1909) looms symbolically above, its clock face and upper lights fulfilling the celestial role of Dante’s stars. “Metropolitan life,” the photo implies, really is a spiritual drama on a cosmic stage—it transposes the nocturnal drama of the city into a medieval allegory of and for Everyman. Even if money is the new religion, and life insurance buildings overtop church spires, time moves us inexorably into the next world. Is this the “luminary clock” at an unearthly height? Amy Lowell wrote about the Metropolitan Life tower and clock in “New York at Night” (1912), a poem that Frost would have known: . . . and luminous Above, one tower tops the rest And holds aloft man’s constant quest: Time! Joyless emblem of the greed Of millions, robber of the best Which earth can give, the vulgar creed Has seared upon the night its flaming ruthless screed.56

Republished in the first-ever urban poetry anthology, The Soul of the City (1923), just a few years before Frost’s poem appeared, Lowell’s “New York

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at Night” assails the “luminous” tower and its self-interested glorification of “Time!” But working against the moral framework of so much urban imagery, Frost transmutes Lowell’s “joyless emblem” and Coburn’s radiant one into an existential mocker of meaning. Time becomes timeless. Like the clock, his poem is circular and repetitive; content, structure, and sound return on themselves; there is no escaping—or deepening—acquaintance with the night. Yet these are, so to speak, black, white, and gray visions of a city whose vibrant color clamors for recognition. A contemporary work, Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, shows us how Burke’s infernal urban sublime had by the 1920s shed its inhibitions to revel in the blazing ambiguity of a city careening between heaven and hell. Emphatically not a nocturne, the canvas nonetheless opposes immediate urban uproar to more distant and peaceful darkness. Three glowing “5s” seem both to rush toward and recede from the viewer, increasing or decreasing in size depending on our focus (color plate 1). In this “get ’em coming and going” scenario, Demuth emulates his source, a short poem called “The Great Figure” (1921) by his friend William Carlos Williams: Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.57

Williams was originally inspired by the sight of a fire engine moving across his field of vision, down Ninth Avenue at the end of Fifteenth Street. But his poem, with the words “red / firetruck / moving” at the center, seems to bear down directly on the visionary poet, whose words “I saw” echo the opening of Saint John’s vision in the book of Revelation. “Unheeded,” the golden Figure Five becomes a Manhattanized version of Saint John’s apocalyptic warning, both a harbinger of the fire that can destroy earthly Babylon and a forerunner of the golden city of New Jerusalem that could replace it. And as a lethal piece of speeding machinery, it can, “unheeded,” send the viewer straight to heaven or hell. The poem gains in force because Williams

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sets his modernist machine revelation against a background of classic nocturnal elements: the rain and darkness from which the clanging, howling vision surges, only to be swallowed up at the end of the poem. Demuth constructed his painting to be a poster-portrait of Williams and the city, a double homage. Emphasizing the vertical structure of poem and city, he put the poet’s name up in lights, turning “Bill,” who was becoming a “great figure” in poetry, into a billboard, and he celebrated the city’s nocturnal dazzle with the dynamically slanting ray lines of light and dark that rake the scene.58 Above all, he used the red and gold fire engine to convey the surging energy roaring through the tantalizing canyons of the night. The interplay of near and far, Babylon and promised land, is encapsulated in the letters on the right-hand side: what from a distance reads “ART Co.,” an inside joke between poet and painter about their life’s mission, becomes “TART Co.” on closer inspection. To succeed, artists and writers must sell themselves. Art and sex, painting, poetry, and prostitution, brazenly advertise their great figures in the night city. Works like these help us to discover how modern art has been recasting its relation to the night over the past two hundred years. And given the immense part played in Western culture by ideas about darkness, they also help to reveal something less apparent: how the urban night has come to mirror the electrified darkness within. The psyche is a city; as Bishop remarks of New York, if we want to know ourselves, we have to learn how to read “the neon shapes / that float and swell and glare // down the gray avenue between the eyes.”59

One Story of the Night The inexhaustible variety of New York mocks the very idea of “comprehensive coverage.” Hence, this book offers not so much a sweeping history as a multipart story about one century’s portrayal of Manhattan nights.60 In brief outline, the story goes like this: Night is a window that opens into the self and on to the world. Dimly or dazzlingly, nocturnal art reveals persistent ideas about the night that, however much they lurked in the background in earlier centuries, came boldly forward in the gas and electric eras. So strongly have these ideas shone that it is now impossible to look through night’s window without seeing them in front of us: the city after dark is a snare, a canvas, a foreign land, a fantasy, a stage. As an ensemble these ideas, which shape both artistic content and form, tell us a great deal about the experience of modernity. But although they are intertwined, we can still fruitfully examine them one by one. Nocturnal New York was at first viewed as a beckoning Babylon, not the promised land, its nightlife considered less glamorous than notorious. Chapter 1, “Gaslit Babylon,” tours the temptation-ridden city of New York’s

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early gaslight period. In the 1840s and 1850s, fascination with the lamp-lit world was tempered by the perceived need to judge it morally. A tension arose between the quest to throw light into every shadowy corner and the desire to celebrate the mysteries of the night. The strolling spectator, the flâneur, is the central figure in this early period of nocturnal exploration. Here my emphasis is largely literary; I discuss writers such as George Foster, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and the visiting Charles Dickens, setting them in the context of the city’s emerging visual identity in the popular press. Remarkably little “fine art” dealt with the gaslit streets in this era, and thus it was left mostly to journalists and illustrators to guide their audiences through the city’s gloom and glare. As with the Ash Can artists and the photographer Jacob Riis a generation or two later, the gritty, uncouth aspect of nocturnal material played a role in reshaping notions of just what form the art of the modern city might take. Impossible to ignore, the relentless march toward light did not thrill everyone. Using darkness as a cloak to ward off moral evaluations of their deliberately indistinct subject matter, early modernist poets, painters, and photographers battled those who demanded ever-more light and clarity on the streets, the canvas, and the image. Partly out of fascination, partly in reaction to the Babylonian displays and excesses of the night city, they began to develop a synesthetic art for art’s sake that discovered beauty in the seductively dim fringes of the gaslit metropolis. Chapter 2, “The Nocturne,” traces the evolution of nocturnal urban aesthetics from the 1870s to the early 1900s. James McNeill Whistler is the central figure here, flanked by a history of night painting before him and a history of poetic and artistic nocturnes after him. Whistler’s impact on aestheticism, symbolism, and imagism spilled so forcefully over into the photographic and artistic treatment of New York that nocturnal art and modern art were for a while practically synonymous. In Manhattan, the arrival of Whistler’s flat, Japanese-inspired aesthetic coincided with the birth of the city’s vertically structured geometry to produce an effect that was unmistakably American and distinctively “New York.” Figures caught up in Whistler’s fascination with the night include Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh, Edward Steichen, A. L. Coburn, and Childe Hassam. As the lights grew brighter, the ever-whiter nights of New York revealed a dark side. For the lighting of the city not only provided new images of aesthetic beauty and economic prosperity; it was also deeply linked to a discourse of imperialism and power: the power of Anglo-Saxon light over ethnically inflected darkness, of modernity over the past, of rich over poor, and of “native” Americans over newcomers.61 The effort to represent night’s subtle rewards coexisted uneasily with the struggle to control the night and its inhabitants on moral, political, and economic fronts. Chapter 3, “Colonizing the Night,” grapples with the notion of conquering and exploiting the

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night, circa 1890 to 1920. From the Statue of Liberty’s electric torch to Frederic Remington’s paintings of nocturnal confrontations between soldiers and Apaches in the Wild West, the frontier of the night was assaulted by explorers, settlers, and self-proclaimed benefactors eager to extend the discipline of light. Thoreau’s desire to “conquer some realms from the night” sets the tone for this chapter, which also examines how the flash photography of Jacob Riis and the undercover journalism of Stephen Crane thrust the light of the press into the darkest slums of New York. One of the most intriguing aspects of nocturnal New York’s history is that “the blank spaces” on the map, as Joseph Conrad designated the terra incognita of Africa in Heart of Darkness, were explored and exploited almost as vigorously in nighttime Manhattan. In the electric era, the ancient contest between light and dark was recast into an all-encompassing spectacle, a billboard-studded dreamscape where art and life, power, technology, and commerce, blended into a profit-oriented performance. Chapter 4, “The Empire of Light,” shows how, in the 1910s and 1920s, the quest to dominate the night produced an empire of signs electrically selling every commodity, including illumination itself. In Harlem and on Broadway, or out at Coney Island, agents of the light tried to promote “primitive” revelry with civilization’s most sophisticated scintillations. Among those who pondered the power of electricity were O. Henry, Claude McKay, and Don Marquis’s free-verse-writing cockroach, Archy. As we see in Willa Cather’s “Behind the Singer Tower” and Joseph Stella’s New York Interpreted, the evolution of nighttime imagery turned into a battle to liberate or command the subversive attractiveness of darkness and its ungoverned emotions. While light sought to control the body of the impoverished Other, the wayward Woman, the untrained Consumer, some still hoped that an art of darkness might be emancipating in more than aesthetic terms. Might people not, through the agency of the nocturnal image, come to know the darkness on less hostile terms? With the soul-stirring confluence of light and height, skyscrapers and floodlighting, the glittering city became a topography of desire, in which the buildings themselves seemed to take on sexual attributes, acting out a scenario of private yearning in public places. Chapter 5, “Skyscraper Fantasy,” treats the sexualizing of nocturnal sights from the 1920s to the 1940s. Here I discuss sexually coded images and texts by Le Corbusier, John Sloan, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Cadmus, and Elizabeth Bishop, among others. Flirtatiously, the erotically charged siren call of towers and canyons sent many a mixed message; its tantalizing ambiguity tempted and tortured. A teasing, evocative painting such as O’Keeffe’s Radiator Building at Night (1927) subverted the cliché of the “phallic” skyscraper by crowning one with flowery blossoms of steam and light, while the heroine of Janet Flanner’s The Cubical City (1926) boldly engendered Fifth Avenue as “the flaming provoking face” of a licentious young man.

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Figure I.11. David Lebe (b. 1948), Apartment View, New York City, 1981. Silver print, 16
20 in. (40.6
50.8 cm). Reproduction courtesy of the photographer

Pervasive and persuasive, the nightly fantasy was nonetheless threatened by the viewer’s sense that no show and no observer, however discrete, went unseen by someone else. Chapter 6, “Staging the Night,” considers the city night as a theatrical experience, an artistically exploitable arena of voyeurism and violence. A perennial feature of the urban night—the “stage set” quality of lit-up streets and squares, uncurtained bedrooms and spotlit public spaces—drew concentrated attention in the 1940s and 1950s. Building on earlier instances of “electric voyeurism” by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and John Sloan, works by Edward Hopper, Weegee, Ralph Ellison, and William Carlos Williams catch onlookers in the act, establishing a strange complicity between the artist, the viewer, and the usually sexual object of their gaze. Light can be a liability; visibility and vulnerability coincide. The dynamics of seeing and being seen, often in erotic contexts, raise

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a tangle of aesthetic and ethical issues, as do the activities of slumming, spying, gawking, gazing, art making, and “just plain looking.” In New York, someone is always watching. My epilogue, “Night Now,” reflects on some of the shapes, new and recurrent, that the night image has assumed since the 1960s. I consider works by E. B. White, Jane Dickson, Adrienne Rich, George Segal, Yvonne Jacquette, and others, and conclude with meditations by Thoreau and W. H. Auden on the deep human need to experience what only the night can give. In a mediatized new millennium, the “old” urban night of risky frolic in the light-checkered darkness seems to have become an endangered species, a vanishing terrain ripe for preservation drives and theme-park treatment—as the “new” Disneyfied Times Square, with its legislated light displays, so stridently shows. Yet the motifs of earlier eras survive and even thrive. Romantic celebrations of yesteryear—glittering skylines and rainy, reflective streets—do a brisk business as homages to “the city that never sleeps.” Meanwhile, against the ever-mounting pressure of indiscriminate illumination, many artists as well as activists have decided to “Take Back the Night”—to combat sexual violence, to recapture nocturnal beauty, to resist glitzy commodification or the raunchily “real” by searching past the clichés of Tinsel Town and Sin City. They often seek a deliberately mundane ground on which the sharp edge of mortal concerns will not be blunted by the immensity of Edison’s triumph. Struggling for perspective, others have pondered with skeptical awe the distant aerial view, each pinprick of light circled by its own halo of darkness. As light pollution covers the night sky, we find our stars by looking below us from the window of the plane, as we sink, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens’s words, “downward to brightness, on extended wings.” Having absorbed for over a century the energy of the light-soaked night, we find ourselves transformed by it, into it. As the work of contemporary photographer David Lebe shows, we humans now radiate our own lines of light for others to wonder at. The purpose of New York Nocturne is to show how this unfolding story of the night has compelled us to deal with an experience that is close to the essence of our modernity, an experience that also engages some of our most primordial instincts: urban life after dark.

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chapter

ONE

NEW YORK BY GAS-LIGHT! What a task we have undertaken! To penetrate beneath the thick veil of night and lay bare the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis—the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum—the under-ground story—of life in New York!

Gaslit Babylon So begins George G. Foster’s New York by Gas-Light, the sensational account of an after-hours tour of Manhattan in 1850. Worldly yet righteous, a sober connoisseur of urban abandon, Foster was a crusading journalist. He made his name by describing vice and denouncing it, boldly entering precincts his readers wouldn’t dare approach. Claiming to strip off the veils of mystery that propriety had hitherto draped around his subject, Foster was one of the first to make nocturnal New York his bailiwick: he penetrated salons and slums alike, “wrenching from them their terrible secrets.”1 Although more than 150 years have passed since Foster set out down Broadway, his night walk traverses a moral landscape that most New Yorkers would recognize today, even to the names of the streets. Modern readers might find his characterization of the infamous Five Points neighborhood a little overwrought: “Here, whence these streets diverge in dark and endless paths, whose steps take hold on hell—here is the very type and physical semblance, in fact, of hell itself ” (120).2 But the conviction that downtown and damnation overlap still rings true, and Foster’s stern take on what he calls “the moral geography” (120) of New York still carries force. Rousting out depravity in bars, brothels, and dives from Broadway to the Bowery, Foster presents a gaslit allegory of the unequal struggle between innocence and evil in merciless Manhattan. For Foster, as for so many image-makers since, “nightlife” or simply “the night” is a metaphor, a shorthand, a symbolic space as well as a temporal setting. It is the “dark side” of the big city where bright lights and deep shadows cast into relief the crime, lust, and indecent amusement that urban

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Figure 1.1. N. Orr, cover for George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 1850

flesh is prey (or prone) to. New York by night is Sin City, a steamy Babylon, a soul-ruining topography. In a now-conventional paradox, the darker the street, the more the city’s hidden urges creep into view. The night city is the real city, the story goes, for only at night can one confront the horrors that lurk, for the moment invisible and respectable, in the sunshine. A man in tune with his time, Foster was on to something larger than a good way to sell books and newspapers. He sensed that beyond the moral point there was a literal truth to the idea that the night was not just the repository of the city’s secrets, it was the city’s secret; it was the tail end of the day that wagged the dog-tired metropolis. With New York growing by leaps and bounds, he and other nocturnal urban pioneers realized that what happened at night made the city seem big or small, that the secret of its stature and modernity, its intrinsic appeal to locals and strangers, lay in its evident sparkle and rumored depravity. New York, nightlife, and the iconography of the night would henceforth evolve together, eventually becoming synonymous. During the period that ideas and images of the urban night first emerged as a vital strand of modern culture, a wide range of responses, from awe and eagerness to dismay and denunciation, jostled for attention. But underlying them all was the need for moral evaluation. In the early and mid-nineteenth

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century, travel in the new terrain was most frequently anchored by reference to sin (pervasive) and salvation (possible). Whether engaged in shocking exposé or creating new forms of expression to meet artificial light head-on, students of the night traversed a landscape repeatedly condemned as infernal, seductive, ruinous, and too worldly and knowing for its own good. Some, like Foster or Edgar Allan Poe, would try to “read” the urban nighttime in order to dissect the motives and mysteries that darkness was thought to shroud. Others, like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, would dwell on the nocturnal beauty and poetry that cities might taint but never fully corrupt. The lifting of the night’s cloak might reveal devils or divinity, but these explorers had a common mission: to report a pilgrim’s progress through gaslit Babylon.

New York Lights Up In the 1840s, the decade leading up to New York by Gas-Light, Foster’s city boomed; the texture of its culture thickened, the buildings, streets, and populace took on a new density and variety.3 For the first time, the city seemed big. Earlier in the century the cluster of settlement on Manhattan’s southern tip was still separated from Greenwich Village by open land. But by 1850 the northward march of development had pushed the solidly built-up grid to Twenty-third Street, and along some avenues up to Fiftieth Street and beyond.4 The sixty thousand residents of the year 1800 had multiplied ten times over, making New York the largest city in the Western hemisphere. By 1850 there were forty-six hotels, many of European luxury, and fancy restaurants, stores, and theaters in proportion.5 Immigrants swelled the human tides on Broadway, especially in wake of the Irish potato famine, and by 1860, when the first counts were made, 47 percent of the Manhattan population was foreign born. It was in this period that the self-conscious specialness of New York ripened into a basic assumption. The city now led the nation in finance, shipping, industry, retailing, printing, theater, and fashion. Foster declared, “In civilization, every powerful nation must have one intellectual centre, as every individual must have a brain, whose motions and conceptions govern the entire system. In the United States, New York is that centre and that brain.”6 For the first time, Manhattanites set their island on a par with European capitals. New York, though perhaps still poorer in wealth, stood bolder, brasher, and greater in promise.7 In 1845 Greater New York had half of Paris’s population; but by 1860 it had equaled it, at over a million. No city had ever grown so fast. Visitors marveled at the crowds on Broadway—“one grand kaleidoscope in perpetual motion”—and locals complained that the pace of business was “utterly obliterating everything that is old and venerable” to produce a “modern city of ruins.”8

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Already familiar with an Anglo-European tradition of urban panoramas whose recent best sellers included Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821), Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842), and G.M.W.. Reynold’s Mysteries of London (1844–1848), New Yorkers took pride in the new sensational literature that declared their own city the equal, in lurid imagination at least, of Paris and London. In addition to perusing Foster, New Yorkers thrilled to the seamy tales of Edward Z. C. Judson (“Ned Buntline”), whose Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life appeared in five volumes beginning in 1848. A U.S. reviewer of Buntline’s epic noted the author’s right to follow Sue: “doubtless New York affords as ample material for a soul-stirring romance, as even the great Babylon of Europe.”9 Explicitly confirming the “Westward course” of civilization, the era’s best-known foreign correspondent, Nathaniel Parker Willis, announced in 1850 “the imminent Parisification of New York.” As Manhattan becomes “the place where money is spent most freely for pleasure,” he claimed, “New York is to be what Paris is.”10 Thus, when Whitman began singing his city in the 1850s, it did not seem so much of a stretch to say, as much of Manhattan as of himself, “I know I am solid and sound, / To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.”11 Gaslight had a lot to do with New York’s growth and vanity. New York was not the first American city to install gas lighting—Baltimore claimed that honor in 1817. But as the emerging center of population, business, and communication, Manhattan rapidly became the leading city of the night. The first lights were installed downtown in the 1820s, and in the next decade the principal streets and squares, as well as the houses of the well-to-do, were gaslit.12 One reason for shifting to a centralized gas system was that oil could be stolen: showing an awareness of how Milton’s hell had reached Manhattan, Poe reported in his newspaper column “Doings of Gotham” for May 12, 1844, that “entire districts . . . are left, for weeks, in outer darkness, at night; the lamp-lighting functionaries flatly refusing to light up; preferring to appropriate the oil to their own private and personal emolument. . . . Three-quarters of a mile on the Third Avenue, one of the most important and most thronged thoroughfares, have been thus left in darkness visible for the last fortnight or more.”13 By 1850, well over half of the 15,007 streetlamps in the city burned gas, concentrated mostly downtown and in wealthier residential areas.14 Dependence on gaslight was such that when, in 1848, an explosion in the gasworks caused the simultaneous failure of all New York’s gaslights, the city “was thrown into confusion. People stumbled through darkened streets falling into holes and colliding with objects.”15 On his visit in 1842, Charles Dickens was sufficiently impressed with Broadway to compare the city’s illumination to London’s: “The streets and shops are lighted now; and as the eye travels down the long thoroughfare, dotted with bright jets of gas, it is reminded of Oxford Street or Piccadilly.”16

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Figure 1.2. August Köllner, Pineapple Cart and Gaslamp, 1846. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures. Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954

Even before night fell, gaslight had changed the daytime aspect of the city, as well as the way people thought about it. Lines of lampposts punctuate views of Broadway and Wall Street from the 1830s on, but just as indicative of how gas had entered the texture of urban life are two quite modest views. The first, an 1839 lithograph of the New Centre Market, uses a gas lamp instead of a tree as a framing device. In the second, an 1846 sketch of a pineapple seller, August Köllner confidently sets a gas lamp in the background to epitomize the environment he can’t take the time to draw; it is the sole mark of the urban in the picture. These views underscore the daytime impact of the night city, as does the fact that gas lamp standards were favorite places to post bills and hang street signs. Bill stickers of larger advertisements made their rounds in the wake of the lamplighters, pasting up their ads where there was gaslight to read them by.17 Artificial lighting made an impact on all areas of life, from high art and cheap amusement to finance, commerce, and industry. The American Art Union’s immensely popular gallery on Broadway, for example, was lit by gaslight into the evening so that working people could view the paintings, sculpture, and prints it offered for sale. In the 1840s, P. T. Barnum used powerful Drummond limelights to draw crowds on Broadway to his American Museum, Foster noted, “sending a livid, ghastly glare for a mile up the street” (71). Combining the effects of art and showmanship, A. T. Stewart’s

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Marble Palace, the grand prototype of department stores, lit its windows to magical effect in the 1850s, with other merchants following suit. “It looks like some fair palace of ancient story,” marveled the Cincinnati Commercial; “white parapets extended against the evening sky and innumerable windows full of lights. . . . Broadway is transformed into a beautiful fable, a dream.”18 All this lighting meant, in theory, safer streets, with more people abroad at ever-later hours. But lights might also signal dangerous pleasures. Foster takes his readers past infernally tinged “oyster-cellars, with their bright lamps casting broad gleams of red light across the street.” They are so seductive that “every instant sees them swallow up . . . a party of rowdy and half-drunken young men” (73). Whitman picked up on the hellish tint of the nocturnal city in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” singling out “fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night / Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses and down into the clefts of streets.”19 Eager to experience the tawdry side of night vicariously, New Yorkers thronged to hackneyed melodramas such as Augustine Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867), which ran on respectable Broadway, or they ventured on to the disreputable Bowery to take in the dramatization of Timothy Shay Arthur’s best seller Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854).20 By the time Foster’s book appeared, the resonant phrase “New York by gas-light” was already becoming emblematic of the city’s brightest attractions and darkest deeds.

Walking the Night While New York and excitement about the possibilities of night were coming to a simultaneous maturity in the 1840s, one other key factor in the creation of nocturnal culture was also arriving in Manhattan. This was the figure of the urban onlooker, whose inquisitive, inventive wanderings artistically linked night and the city. Walking around the European city with an eye toward describing its atmosphere and activity had, since the later seventeenth century, been the stock-in-trade of many artists and writers, poets and painters. These urbane observers participated in the creation of a new literary and artistic genre, the urban sketch, and a new authorial character, the strolling spectator, a detached and sophisticated reporter on the sheer human variety of the metropolis. It was he (always a “he,” even if a woman was holding the pen) who organized and explained the burgeoning city through a series of literary or visual “sketches” aimed at a growing middle-class audience. The success of the genre was enormous; it covered all large cities and engaged a vast readership. It is hardly an accident that many of the best writers of the day—including Baudelaire in Paris and Dickens in London—honed their skills by describing their cities’ new sights and sounds. Reporter, moralist, social critic, and man-about-town, the ostensibly objective spectator, or flâneur

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as he has come to be called, proved a valuable mediator in the urbanite’s effort to handle the flux of signs, sights, and social formations that define the modern city. Gifted observer though he was, the flâneur’s ultimate function was to interpret and, to a degree, obscure social relations. His readers came away reassured that their city was a wondrous storehouse of incident and character, that indigent urban “types” such as beggars and street vendors were “amusing,” and that poverty and misfortune were directly attributable to corrigible moral failings.21 Initially, American cities seemed too small for the flâneur’s talents; Washington Irving, America’s most successful writer in the early nineteenth century, made a reputation by describing his travels abroad. But in the 1840s, as a result of the urban efflorescence, the genre took hold on American soil. In addition to popular practitioners such as Willis and Foster, it attracted the likes of Poe, Whitman, and Hawthorne. Even Dickens applied his talents to the task of reconnoitering Manhattan’s streets, in the New York chapter of American Notes (1842). The flâneur thrived in the United States, where his glorification of commerce and benign sense of the crowd brought him closer to the cultural mainstream than his dandified European cousin had been. The urban spectator represented a culmination of the forces transforming the United States into the preeminent industrial civilization, a place where trade could live in apparent harmony with civic ideals. Dwelling on the commercial spectacle, the flâneur propagated the all-important links between looking and consuming, and between consumption and greatness.22 And while the hunger for this “slice-of-life” genre was almost universal, a skilled author could whet readers’ appetites still further, as the subtitle of Foster’s earlier book suggests: New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (1849). By the 1850s, New York was “the most represented city in the country” thanks to the popular press.23 But rather like gas lighting, which reached its peak number of customers shortly after electricity was introduced, the genre of the urban sketch flourished amid competition from a new technology that would eventually doom it. In 1853, Putnam’s magazine ran an illustrated series about city landmarks called “New York Daguerreotyped,” a timely title, since in that year there were already more photography studios on Broadway than in all of London. Photos of street scenes could be lithographed so as to be made into newspaper illustrations, and near the end of the decade Edward Anthony created stop-action stereographs of street life, so that viewers could get a three-dimensional sense of the city in motion. Several factors helped the flâneur survive and even thrive amid this photomania. First, the flâneur quickly incorporated the concept of photographic accuracy in advertising his work. Buntline claimed that his Mysteries and Miseries of New York was “a perfect daguerreotype of this great city,” while Willis titled the literary sketches that he published in the New York Mirror “daguerreotypes of the present,” implying that earlier styles of urban

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rendering, such as Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, were simply outdated.24 Moreover, new printing processes, along with New York’s increasing domination of the nation’s publishing industry, brought cheap paperbacks like New York By Gas-Light within reach of almost everyone. The two hundred thousand copies of Foster’s book titillated rural readers as well as local ones, helping to form the image of nocturnal New York for a national market.25 Perhaps most important, there were some places the camera still could not go. Even though photographers could freeze much of the activity that was the focus of the flâneur, no one managed to take indoor night pictures in the city until the late 1880s, the era of Jacob Riis’s investigations, and outdoor pictures had to wait for Alfred Stieglitz’s efforts in 1897. In the 1882 Mysteries of New York, a compilation of stories from the Police Gazette, the narrator roams the city with his illustrator sidekick, “Mr. Sketchley.” Thus urban darkness, in all its gaslit novelty, remained largely the preserve of the writer and artist until the twentieth century.26 There can be little doubt that gaslight added a new incentive for nocturnal perambulation. Its allure turned people into moths. In Hawthorne’s “Night Sketches: Beneath an Umbrella” (1838), the streetlight is a combination of flung gauntlet, dropped handkerchief, and military order: “The lamp throws down a circle of red light around me; and, twinkling onward from corner to corner, I discern other beacons, marshaling my way to a brighter scene.”27 The night’s call was hard to refuse because it challenged the citizen; modern urban identity was incomplete without it. Historian Joachim Schlör remarks that circa 1840, “the discovery of this new world . . . [becomes] part of the newly forming urban mentality: the complete city-dweller has to learn to master the night.”28 If navigating the urban night had become a test, then art, literature, and journalism soon provided crib sheets. For in contrast to daytime description, which people enjoyed as a complement to their own experience, people consumed images of the night as a substitute for their own adventures. Reading the night narrative, deciphering the night scene, provided vicarious thrills and “truths” about the city without the attendant risks. In a book one could safely visit murderous opium dens, with trapdoors to the river, as in Foster’s New York by Gas-Light, or fish up the resultant corpses, as the night prowler of London does in Dickens’s Sketches by Boz. Unlike the daytime sketch, meant to amuse and invite participation, the night scene generally served as a warning: it sought to shock before it explained. Proposing to initiate his audience gently into the city’s depredations, Foster strolls down “fashionable, aristocratic Broadway” all alight “with its gay throng and flashing lights beaming from a thousand palace-like shop-fronts.” “Certainly,” he mocks, “we shall find nothing here to shock our senses and make our very nerves thrill with horror” (70). Foster finds his pleasure not so much in the spectacle of lights as in cataloging infamy and recounting tales

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of painful deception. He takes a proprietary delight—of the sort New Yorkers indulge in to this day—in recounting the skill with which Manhattan con artists leave their bumpkins bilked and penniless: “the pigeon is pretty sure of being plucked to the last feather, and most likely left bleeding and senseless in the street” (124). Although journalistic flâneurs like Foster joined fiction writers of the “Mystery and Misery” school in sensationalizing nightlife with liberal doses of prostitution, robbery, and murder, they often waxed eloquent over the joys of strolling boulevards “more brightly lit than day,” as the cliché ran. For almost paradoxically, scaremongering reporters were also rendering the night more attractive to readers who worried that being abroad after dark might be dangerous to their pocketbooks, persons, or reputations. By aiming to make economic, social, and common sense of what seemed intimidating and chaotic, these informal gaslight Baedekers increased middle-class appreciation and consumption of what urban nights had to offer. Foster, for example, takes care to praise the hardworking, “aristocratic” denizens of the night: newsboys, policemen, firemen, and . . . journalists. Along with instruction in nocturnal way finding came an aesthetic education that gradually taught readers and viewers to discover beauty in the urban night, in the way wet pavement glistened under gaslight and rows of streetlamps shimmered off into the distance. “The wet sidewalks gleam with a broad sheet of red light,” wrote Hawthorne in “Night Sketches.” “The rain drops glitter, as if the sky were pouring down rubies. The spouts gush with fire.”29 Within a short time, the brightness of shops, displays, signs, and cafés made simply strolling the gaslit streets an attraction in its own right, and the “tourism” of night’s formerly inaccessible wilderness could begin in earnest. But it is important to recognize how much of the night’s sparkle was private or commercial. After the shops and places of entertainment close about midnight, Foster remarks, “the street is now dark” except for “the dim and distant public lamps” (75). Aesthetics were not the whole of it. Foster, Hawthorne, and their peers saw that depictions of the night had a special, even primal allure. Like the night itself, the nocturnal chronicle could become a libidinal space, a dreamwork that suggested or even spelled out the sins and temptations daytime flesh and fancy might be heir to, but would rarely acknowledge. The possibility of limning for the public its darkest impulses and fears, its fantasy city, however acute or vague the longing might be, gave the imager of the night a special responsibility and yet also an unusual freedom. The writer or artist of the night became a sort of modern-day Virgil guiding bourgeois Dantes through the urban inferno. The guides might present themselves as virtuous or complicitous, as they pleased. The English essayist Joseph Addison once wrote that when the soul dreams, it is theater, actors, and audience.30 The same could be said of the gaslit city; it offered a ready-made

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theatrical spectacle for the flâneur to observe—or create, depending on his whim. The round-the-clock chronicle had begun, and men-in-the-know began to tell “the under-ground story” of the dark city that caroused and bled while the city of light peacefully slumbered.

Terror and Taming We modern Babylonians. —Herman Melville, Pierre

For the fact was, the after-hours city was still dark and dangerous. Despite the lights, nocturnal disturbances sporadically turned the city into a nightmare of blasphemy, hooliganism, mob violence, and even civic rebellion. On New Year’s Eve in 1828, working-class members of the “Callithumpian Band”—some four thousand strong, equipped with whistles, rattles, horns, and drums—rioted in the commercial district, breaking windows, overturning carts, and harassing pedestrians. During the Great Fire of April 4, 1836, city politics caused some firemen to refuse to fight the blaze. A newspaper cartoon depicted a child crying, “O mother mother we shall all burn”—while the firemen stood idly by. New York merchant Philip Hone complained to his diary: “Riot, disorder, and violence increase in our city. Every night is marked by some outrage committed by gangs of young ruffians who prowl the streets insulting females, breaking into the houses of unoffending publicans, making night hideous by yells of disgusting inebriety, and—unchecked by the city authorities—committing every sort of enormity with apparent impunity.”31 The creation of a city police force in 1845 did little to stop nocturnal uproar, and night watches were often helpless not only against the rioting but even against the semiorganized criminals who brazenly took control of the streets. In July 1857, the Dead Rabbits and other gangs fought the police to a standstill over a period of several nights, until the National Guard halted the battle. The New York Times lamented that “the streets at night are infested with ruffians of all descriptions. They hang around corners. . . . They move about in gangs, men and boys together, abusing and sometimes hitting the quiet passerby. . . . There is no security for life or limb in the present disorderly state of things.”32 Even Whitman advised, “Don’t go wandering about the streets or parks unnecessarily in the evening. The degrading confession and warning is necessary, that New York is one of the most crime-haunted and dangerous cities in Christendom.”33 Class and racial violence brought the nocturnal city to the verge of chaos. For if night and riot seem well acquainted, so do riot and Otherness. Not

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only do rioters attack those unlike themselves, they very often adopt another self, putting on costumes and painting their faces. Since the Boston Tea Party of 1773, where patriots dressed as Indians to board British ships and scuttle their cargo, the disguise of the Other has provided Americans with a coverup and an alibi: it was the Devil, the Indian, or the African who rioted, not a white person. Hawthorne’s story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1831)—in which war-painted colonists depose a colonial governor—is the classic statement of this phenomenon. Yet while these commotions had elements of the carnivalesque—the temporary, ritual unsettling of the social order—the disturbances in New York also had roots in the economic and social contradictions of American democracy, wherein the have-nots felt more than justified in confronting wealth, privilege, and power. Pretexts varied, but the rampages expressed intense class and racial animosity.34 Class antagonism came to a head during the Astor Place riots of May 7 and 10, 1849.35 On May 7, supporters of the American actor Edwin Forrest, who was playing the role of Shakespeare’s Macbeth on Broadway, packed the elegant Astor Place Opera House in order to shout down the English actor William Macready, who was playing the same role. At issue were conflicting rights: the right of the refined, “aristocratic” Macready to perform at an exclusive, kid-glove-only theater, supported by the city’s Anglophile elite, and the right of the poor majority, resenting all forms of privilege and smoldering at Britain’s handling of the Irish potato famine, to protest his presence. As an incendiary handbill put it, “shall americans or english rule in this city?” Macready was driven off the stage, but persuaded by a petition from leading citizens (including Herman Melville), who organized police and militia to back them, he returned on the night of May 10. While the police dealt with the protesters inside, several thousand gathered outside, claiming class discrimination when their entry was barred. What ensued was dramatic in its own right. The working-class crowd attacked the theater, ostensibly fighting to see a Shakespeare play, and Buntline, urging them on, was heard to say, “I luxuriate in the scene.”36 But Astor Place was soon a theater of war: as Macbeth and Macduff were dueling inside, the militia came up the Bowery and fired on the crowd. This climactic moment became perhaps the most famous night scene of nineteenthcentury New York. The many contemporary renderings all focus on the same elements: a cloud of smoke rising from the line of soldiers as they fire; bodies falling; utter confusion reigning in the crowd; and the Opera House towering over the scene, its neoclassic solemnity unperturbed by flying bricks and broken windows. By the time the confrontation ended, 22 were dead, most of them bystanders, and over 150 injured. Bloody as they were, the riots at “dis-Astor Place,” as it soon came to be called, were only a rehearsal for the Draft Riots of July 1863, New York’s own civil war.37 Passed by a Republican Congress in the wake of several

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Figure 1.3. C. M. Jenkes, Astor Place Riots, 1849. Watercolor over pencil, 4 7/8
7 in. (12.3
17.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures. Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954 [54.90.222]. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Union defeats, the draft law set up a system of compulsory conscription. It enraged poor New Yorkers, fanning the flames of class antagonism and racial mistrust. Looting as they went, rioters attacked policemen, the houses of the rich, and anyone who looked like a well-to-do Republican. They burned buildings and homes associated with abolitionists or blacks, including an orphanage for black children, and savagely murdered blacks on the streets. The racial violence was particularly grisly, with black men tortured and mutilated before being hung from lampposts. During the French Revolution, the mob hung aristocrats from lampposts; but in New York that fury turned on the least privileged, in a racist connection of darkness with a variety of social and economic fears. Young immigrant workers—often too young to be drafted—led the way in these attacks, which also targeted white women who had married or slept with black men. The Draft Riots remain the bloodiest civil disturbance in U.S. history: during the five days of chaos, at least 105 people died and probably hundreds more were injured. Melville responded to the riots with a grim nocturnal poem called “The House-top: A Night Piece (July 1863).” Lit by arsonists’ flames, New York becomes a hellish battlefield in the poem, whose subtitle—“a night

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piece”—suggests the field pieces of artillery used by the army to put down the insurrection.38 Images of the riots in the popular press indicate that the street-level view was more chaotic and horrific than anything Melville could see from his rooftop. Brutal Murder of a Negro Boy in Eighth Avenue shows the young black victim hanging from a gas lamppost, while a crowd of simian-featured Irish jeer with evident satisfaction. In Destruction of the Colored Orphan Asylum, nighttime rioters (who prevented firemen from stopping the blaze) make off with furniture and bedding while others cheer at the burning buildings. A few scattered gaslights, feeble representatives of civic order, light the scene of a pitched battle later that evening: “The Riots in New York: Attack of the Mob on the Tribune Newspaper Office” ran the caption to the frontpage woodcut in the Illustrated London News for August 8, 1863. There are no flâneurs or housetop sitters in these illustrations; everyone takes a side, either joining the riot or else desperately fighting against it. The illustrations reveal a nightmare world where the most primitive fears of the dark—its danger, savagery, and bestiality—were confirmed, beneath the familiar windows and facades of New York. Given such perils, it is little wonder that many preferred to master the night from an armchair, in the company of a literary guide. One of the earliest extant nocturnal scenes of New York was simply meant to reassure, offering a peaceful view of the night watchman making his rounds.39 The flâneur is in effect the watchman’s accomplice—a watching man who protects the reader. He takes the reader along, promising wonders and inside knowledge. It is in flâneur mode that Whitman insinuates himself with the reader, declaring in “Song of Myself” (1855), “This hour I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.” He then invites the reader to accompany him: “let us hasten forth, / Wonderful cities . . . we shall fetch as we go” (87–88, 1215–16). And it is very much as a descendant of the nocturnal flâneur, writing in the Whitman tradition, that Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock opens his urban love song, “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky.” But when the nocturnal guide escorts us, it is usually to no ordinary place. The thrill of risk, the promise of the risqué, spice up the familiar recipe. Foster likens a journalist to a nocturnal hunter: “Yonder, prowling about like a cat at midnight, among the tiles and chimneys, is a commercial reporter” (223). As a specialist in the newly accessible nighttime, the flâneur offered a fresh, if precarious, viewpoint. Citizens who dared not venture beyond the brightest streets and most fastidious entertainments were alternately enthralled and appalled by the dispatches of courageous men who prowled the city armed only with pen or brush. Starting in the 1830s, the penny press and the illustrated Police Gazette (based on its British cousin) specialized in keeping sensational crimes in the public eye.40

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Figure 1.4. Anonymous, Brutal Murder of a Negro Boy in Eighth Avenue, 1863. Museum of the City of New York Print Archive

Figure 1.5. Anonymous, The Riots in New York: Destruction of the Colored Orphan Asylum, 1863. Booth’s History of New York, vol. 7. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division, The New York Public Library. Photo: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, New York

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Figure 1.6. New York by Gas-Light—“Hooking a Victim,” c. 1850. Serrell and Perkins lithograph. Museum of the City of New York Print Archive. Gift of Karl Schmidt [37/361.423]

The illustrators and journalists who mapped the night city used many strategies to keep it under control. Depending on the amount of light or dark, tony or risqué detail they provided, commentators could convey to their predominantly middle-class audiences which streets, shops, balls, and bars were “respectable,”—a quality that varied considerably for men and women—and which were not. Sketching the brilliant entertainments of the rich and pronouncing darkly on the bacchanals of the poor, journalists and illustrators offered ingenious taxonomies of nighthawks and their haunts, confidently categorizing them by dress, behavior, type of amusement, and hour of the night. Images of “normal” urban nightlife generally attempt to ease tensions by rendering each class in its assigned place, both social and geographic. The rich have Fifth Avenue balls; the poor have the rowdy markets and dives of the Bowery. What causes popular images of nocturnal cataclysms to stand out is the artist’s juxtaposition of the stereotypes of rich and poor in unlikely places: Irish thugs brawl with top-hatted gents in front of the Astor Place Opera House; barefooted draft rioters don fine apparel as they loot Brooks Brothers’ clothing store; two top-hatted capitalists turn conspicuously away from the huddled masses at a labor rally in Tompkins Square; three prostitutes dally with three top hats under a gas lamp on Broadway.41 Another strategy was to offer elaborate cautionary dramas, from which readers could assume a superior detachment, even as they learned about snares to avoid. Such is Foster’s tale of an innocent visitor from upstate New York, Zerubbabel Green, whose biblical-sounding name combines rustic innocence (“rube,” “green”) with urban chaos (“babel”). A man purporting to be the chief of police and a finely dressed lady introduced as “the Countess of

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Astoria” lure Zerubbabel into a drunken tour of bars, gambling houses, and brothels. Foster’s addresses are vague, but the enormity of the behavior explicit. In one bar, “the ladies are not dressed in the strictest ball-room costume, one of the negresses being merely in her chemise, and one of the white women absolutely stark naked. There are several bunks round the sides of the room, from which the occupants have been aroused in a drunken hurry, to partake of this midnight orgy, and have evidently found the process of dressing too slow for the occasion” (183). Arrested after being dumped unconscious in the gutter, Green is thrown into the overnight holding pen, where he joins fifty other wretches who have been “shoved in to this general receptacle, like dead bodies into a Potter’s Field in time of pestilence.” Worse still, Foster adds, “Perhaps half the inmates in Loafer’s Hall are women—yes, reader, women. If you are incredulous call at the Tombs any night” (186–87). While Foster seems to revel in his worldly detachment, Dickens cannot keep his flâneur’s cool. Demanding, “Are people really left all night, untried, in those black sties?” he blanches at the sight of a prostitute’s cell: “In God’s name! Shut the door upon the wretched creature who is in it now, and put its screen before a place quite unsurpassed in all the vice, neglect, and devilry of the worst old town in Europe” (91).42 Yet Foster, like Dickens before him, eventually restores sobriety and order to the narrative: “At length came daylight, dreary, drizzling and dismal. Zerubbabel was . . . carried before the magistrate” (187). By the palliatory conventions of his genre, the flâneur had to tame what novelists could imagine and reality dish out, in a city apparently teetering on the verge of lawlessness and moral collapse. He dared not relinquish control of the sketch in order to probe deeper psychological imperatives or tragic plotlines. The peril that awaited any too-earnest grappling with urban obscurity became only too evident in Melville’s Pierre (1852), whose view of New York melds the sensationalist terrors of the mysteries genre with Melville’s own dark brand of human analysis.43 The novel received perhaps the worst reviews in American literary history, culminating in the headline “herman melville crazy.”44 More than a century of scholarship has yet to recuperate it, but Pierre depicts the city’s despair-inducing topography and depravity in a way no casual spectator could match. The protagonist and his pretended bride, Isabel, come to New York from pastoral upstate, arriving on a night of “no moon and few stars,” just as shops are closing and everyone seems to be hurrying homeward. Instead of greeting his characters with blazing gaslight, Melville sends them into “the obscure heart of the town,” and down a “twinkling perspective of two long and parallel rows of lamps . . . lamps which seemed not so much intended to dispel the general gloom as to show some dim path leading through it, into some gloom still deeper beyond.”45 Melville’s Manhattan avenues form a pre-Conradian heart of darkness, a metaphor for evil and suffering.

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Unlike the glittering Manhattan of twentieth-century views, Melville’s wretched metropolis offers no redeeming excitement, exerts no magnetic attraction. A recurrent moment of wonder in English literature, celebrated by Henry Fielding, James Boswell, William Wordsworth, Dickens, and so many others, comes when the hero first catches sight of London from afar. “Never shall I forget the hour,” writes Wordsworth in The Prelude: “Great God! That aught external to the living mind / Should have such mighty sway! . . . I only now / Remember that it was a thing divine.”46 Melville defuses all that imaginative power: when Pierre’s coach reaches the top of a hill, “the whole vast triangular town, for a moment, seemed dimly and despondently to capitulate to the eye.” Pierre remarks, “Never yet have I entered the city by night, but, somehow, it made me feel both bitter and sad” (265). So much for Broadway and urban divinity. Then Pierre makes the mistake of leaving Isabel and her maid at a police station—then called a ward “watch-house”—while he looks for lodging. When he returns, Melville sends him into a scene that shocks the author and characters out of their worldly sang-froid. The police have raided a brothel and brought the contents back to the station: The sights and sounds which met the eye of Pierre on reentering the watch-house, filled him with inexpressible horror and fury. . . . In indescribable disorder, frantic, diseased-looking men and women of all colors, and in all imaginable flaunting, immodest, grotesque, and shattered dresses, were leaping, yelling, and cursing round him.

The sight of all races and nationalities thrown together appalls him: The torn Madras handkerchiefs of negresses, and the red gowns of yellow girls, hanging in tatters from their naked bosoms, mixed with the rent dresses of deep-rouged white women, and the split coats, checkered vests, and protruding shirts of pale, or whiskered, or haggard, or mustached fellows of all nations, some of whom seemed scared from their beds, and others seemingly arrested in the midst of some crazy and wanton dance.

But the cacophonous language is even more terrible: On all sides, were heard drunken male and female voices, in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, interlarded now and then, with the foulest of all human lingoes, that dialect of sin and death, known as the Cant language, or the Flash. (275–76)

The passage moves in its revulsion from sex to sight to sound. The true horror is not so much the indecency as the cultural miscegenation of the city,

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the raw human stew and its polyglot babel. A mixing and melting pot from its earliest years, New York is said to have had eighteen languages spoken on its streets by 1654.47 For a character like Pierre, obsessed with his own genealogy and worried about the purity of his bloodline—to the point of incest, since Isabel is his half sister—no population could be more frightening than “this combined babel of persons and voices” (276). The incoming waves of immigrants were so immense that by the year Pierre was published, more than half of New York’s voters were foreign born. Melville’s text plays on fears, later so explicit in Henry James and Edith Wharton, of the white Anglophone city being engulfed in tide of Others, especially after dark. In this scene, Melville follows Foster and Dickens in highlighting the crushing irony that the worst of the city’s sins raged nightly, apparently unchecked, at the supposed heart of civic order, the police station. Stressing the infernal aspect of the nocturnal scene and its sounds, Melville strains the vocabulary of polite language to link Babel, blasphemy, and Babylonian harlotry in an uncontrollable jailhouse pandemonium: “The thieves’-quarters, and all the brothels, Lock-and-Sin hospitals for incurables, and infirmaries and infernoes of hell seemed to have made one combined sortie, and poured out upon earth through the vile vomitory of some unmentionable cellar” (276). But if the flâneur could return to middle-class security after a night on the prowl, Melville’s New Yorkers have no way out of the prison of the city. Like his author, Melville’s Pierre is a struggling writer propelled from country to city out of professional necessity, and at one point in the novel Melville describes what must have been his own view: “He is gazing out from the window now. . . . [T]here is nothing to see but a wilderness of tiles, slate, shingles, and tin; wherewith we modern Babylonians replace the fair hanging gardens of the fine old Asiatic times when the excellent Nebuchadnezzar was king” (307). Pierre sits with Isabel as dusk deepens into night and abandons all his literary work. The novel, Melville’s darkest, proposes that we are “modern Babylonians” all—author, character, and readers—with little to save us, except death. Pierre eventually kills himself in prison, with Isabel following suit in a grim scene that harks back to the double suicide of Romeo and Juliet in her tomb, and looks forward to the slow expiration of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” who succumbs in “the Tombs.” Avoiding Melville’s tortured tales, Foster and other boosterish flâneurs set themselves the task of spicing up the narrative of urban life while toning down the fear of its potentially contagious effects. A classic way to insulate oneself from the shock and guilt of urban association was to treat the city as a book and its more colorful citizens as transparent texts. Like most flâneurs, Foster claims to be able to read the crowd: “As a general rule,” he writes, “form and feature correspond pretty closely to the station, occupation,

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mental development and mode of life of their possessor. . . . [T]he snob, the vulgarian, the ignoramus and the outlaw, each carries his name written not only in his face but in every limb and gesture, every movement of his body” (137). Dickens too reassures readers: as he heads into the notorious Five Points neighborhood, he comments, “It is needful, first, that we take as our escort these two head of the police, whom you would know for sharp and well-trained officers if you met them in the Great Desert” (87). Even as he asserts the legibility of urban types, Dickens follows another convention—the need for the reader’s guide to be guided himself. This addition of potential danger to the flâneur’s customary job of taming the city, of inserting physical and moral threat into the tour, marks the night narrative as a special form of urban image-making. Protected by his own bravery or creativity (and often a police escort), fortified by literary conventions, the night writer or artist could script his own version of the night, and announce that he was performing a valuable service. Thus Foster, slumming with reformist zeal, could claim to “discover the real facts of the actual condition of the wicked and wretched classes—so that Philanthropy and Justice may plant their blows aright” (69). Investigation and retaliation go hand in hand. As violent in word as he is lofty in mission, Foster uses his conviction of moral superiority as a big stick. For Foster, the “mysteries of darkness” are “fearful” night-dwellers dangerous, and he arms himself accordingly. He identifies himself with the gaslight—where it is, he goes, shedding righteous light and ink to “lay bare” the night in its nakedness, to show it both terrible and tamed.

Morality and Light The flâneur is a sort of light in himself. As he passes, the dark world brightens for a moment, enough for the illumination of a scene, the enlightenment of his audience. Occasionally, he contemplates his own image and effect in the form of a streetlight. In the darkest, most dangerous part of the city, Foster pauses to reflect on his goal: to turn the facts of “licentiousness and prostitution,” he says, “into a series of pen and ink pictures, which will interest while they instruct” (121). Immediately, he presents one such picture: So, then, we are standing at midnight in the center of the Five Points. Over our heads is a large gas-lamp, which throws a strong light for some distance around, over the scene where once complete darkness furnished almost absolute security and escape to the pursued thief and felon. . . . Now, however, the large lamp is kept constantly lighted, and a policeman stands ever sentinel to see that it is not extinguished. The existence of this single lamp has greatly improved the character of the whole location and increased the safety of going through the Points at night. (121)

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Figure 1.7. Anonymous, Five Points—Worth Street Looking East, c. 1870. Stereoscopic slide. Museum of the City of New York Print Archive

The connection is hard to miss: the symbolic light of authorial intent (“over our heads”) leads directly to an actual lamppost (“is a large gas-lamp, which throws a strong light for some distance around”). For the nineteenth-century writer, light and shadow inevitably point moral lessons, and an exposé of iniquity sends a searchlight into the darkness. When Foster praises the safety-enhancing, morally rehabilitating force of the Five Points gas lamp that “has greatly improved the character of the whole location,” he is speaking for his own project as well as for culture at large. In an 1885 print, The Powers of Evil Are Fleeing Before the Light of Civilization, armed thugs steal away from streetlights, whose every globe projects a ghostly policeman. Foster’s chapter subtitle, “The Core of Civilization,” alludes not only ironically to the disgraceful slum but earnestly to the light that is the author’s means of understanding it. In his fictionalized exploration of this unregenerate population, Mysteries and Miseries of New York, Buntline had claimed to throw a “Drummond light on their dark deeds.”48 Lighting signifies the conquest of night in all its actual and allegorical shortcomings. For progressives it spells trade, social control, and modernity, while for moralists it permits good works and discourages bad. For both groups it is an expression of day’s advance, the onward march of Christian civilization. Maria Cummins’s sentimental best seller The Lamplighter (1854)

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Figure 1.8. Anonymous, The Powers of Evil Are Fleeing Before the Light of Civilization, 1885. In Electrical Review

conveys the popular conception of urban light and its positive symbolic resonance. The grandfatherly title character devoutly raises an orphaned girl whose goodness eventually leads her to a husband, a home, and worldly comfort. A visual equivalent may be found in one of the earliest paintings of gaslit New York: Night-Fall: St. Thomas’s Church, Broadway, New York (c. 1837) by George Harvey (color plate 6). The picture shows a happy bustle of families, friends, and tradespeople around the church, which is benevolently lit by three gaslights. A fourth light set in the left foreground nearer to the viewer is just being ignited by a lamplighter, who is prominently profiled against the night sky. Foster tries to capture some of this uplifting and friendly glow in the final chapter of New York by Gas-Light. “Our task is ended,” he says. “The thousands of twinkling gas-lights which have thus far dimly lighted our steps, have one by one expired” (194). Gaslight works

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from a centralized source and has to be extinguished, but Foster goes so far as to turn the network into a succession of individual dying candles, personal companions linked to human life by their own mortality. True to his subtitle, “With Here and There a Streak of Sunshine,” Foster deliberately gives his reader breathing room by breaking his nocturnal journey at midpoint to report on a daytime visit to various ice cream parlors. The format was so successful that he has come to be seen as a creator of the “Sunshine and Shadow” school of urban travelogue, a succession of moralizing yet titillating guidebooks built around contrasts of extreme wealth and poverty, virtue and depravity, integrity and greed. “Whoever writes of New York truly, will do so in lines of light and gloom,” observed Foster’s successor, the Reverend Matthew Hale Smith, whose 1868 Sunshine and Shadow in New York sold an astonishing three hundred thousand copies. “Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and worst of our race; holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.”49 Yet the simple equation of night with evil and daylight with goodness is too easy for Foster. While nighttime indiscretions predictably expose “many a man whose daily walk and conversation is held up to the admiration of the community as a ‘model’ of virtue and propriety” (82), daytime behavior itself needs scrutiny. In an ice cream parlor, Foster spies a well-dressed couple: “Yonder are a middle-aged man and woman in deep and earnest conversation. They are evidently man and wife—though not each other’s!” (134). True light, in its moral or intellectual sense, must stem from virtuous action, or failing that, from a virtuously intentioned observer. For in the apparently polarized world of the nocturnal moralist, darkness too may be a means of generating light. Foster dwells on deeds of darkness for brighter ends: “these inky pictures, if but truly drawn, go to many a heart untouched by picture, music-burst, or dramatic heart-history enacted before the eyes” (132–33). Claiming supremacy over the uplifting effects of art, music, and drama, Foster justifies his risqué documentary enterprise by the good intentions behind it: he describes depravity in order to prevent it. Foster’s approach raises the thorny question of how much one needs to know about the “inky” world to clean it up, without becoming stained in the process. “Let no prudish moralist condemn us because we go boldly and thoroughly through the haunts of vice and dissipation in our overgrown metropolis,” declares Foster, “and describe things exactly as we find them. . . . It is such facts as society most needs.” His motivation, Foster claims, is “a faithful desire to do good” (92). Later in the century, celebrated ministers took night tours like Foster’s so that they too could denounce darkness on the basis of their own experience. The Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage, author of The Night Sides of City Life (1878), said that as a minister he had “a divine commission to explore the iniquities of our cities.” The moral

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riskiness of that vocation can be seen in a Police Gazette illustration titled Talmage’s Visit to the Dance Houses. The minister recoils from the bare bosom and groping hand of the young woman who advances to welcome him.50 If darkness scrutinized could bring moral light, light commercialized could be a source of darkness. Moses led his followers to the promised land with the aid of a pillar of fire that guided him by night. But in an ironic parallel, Foster is “beaconed by yonder tongue of flame” from a phallic foundry chimney, “forever leaping up and sinking back again,” that invites him to take his readers to see a nude performance of “Susannah in the Bath” (77–78). Worldly light is evidently not the same as the biblical “Light of the World.” Hawthorne’s “Night Sketches” brings out these paradoxes explicitly. His essay ignores actual sites to explore the human condition—for which he makes the night walk an allegory. Led by the lamps to the center of town, Hawthorne finds “almost as brilliant an illumination as when some great victory has been won. . . . Two rows of shops, with windows down nearly to the ground, cast a glow from side to side, while the black night hangs overhead like a canopy, and thus keeps the splendor from diffusing itself away.”51 But the lights are illusory: “Methinks the scene is an emblem,” Hawthorne writes, “of the deceptive glare, which mortals throw around their footsteps in the moral world, thus bedazzling themselves, till they forget the impenetrable obscurity that hems them in, and that can be dispelled only by radiance from above.”52 And because it’s raining, deceptive worldly lights get no divine assistance from the stars. The umbrella that the flâneur carries represents the obscurity hanging over us all. Early in the career of gaslight, in 1819, a German newspaper anticipated Hawthorne’s doubts about the spiritual value of public illumination, as well as Foster’s warnings about blazing oyster cellars: “For philosophical and moral reasons, morality is worsened by street lighting. The artificial brightness chases from the mind the horror of darkness that keeps the weak from many a sin.”53 But the flâneur is a creature of artificial light, so Hawthorne’s persona cannot help but push on to the end of his appointed round: “Onward, still onward, I plunge into the night. Now I have reached the utmost limits of the town, where the last lamp struggles feebly with the darkness, like the furthest star that stands sentinel on the borders of uncreated space.” The edge of night is a frontier of knowledge and a visible barrier that the flâneur cannot cross. When a man approaches with a lantern, the flâneur steps aside to let him pass “fearlessly into the unknown gloom, whither I will not follow him.” But confronting the gloom, the narrator seizes a concluding moral in the stranger’s lantern, which he imagines “kindled at the fireside of his home” and able to light him back there again. While the brilliant gaslights of town only distract people from the darkness that “hems them in,” the homey lantern will see certain individuals through a life of night to the

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final light: “thus we, night wanderers through a stormy and dismal world, if we bear the lamp of Faith, enkindled at a celestial fire, it will surely lead us home to that Heaven whence its radiance was borrowed.”54 While Hawthorne implies a difference between the darkness of worldly glitter and the dim or invisible “radiance” of personal faith, he leaves the flâneur—who points out this moral—in an ambiguous position. He stands alone in the rainy night, without a lamp of his own, at the end of the streetlights’ “deceptive glare,” unable or unwilling to follow the man with the lantern. Where does the light lead? The worldly light we can see obscures the moral dark we can’t see; the worldly dark we can see hides the moral light we can’t see. The flâneur’s own capacity as a guiding light becomes suspect. His perception of the duplicity of light leads to paralysis.

The Country and the City Cities are, to dwellers in the country, very like what lights at night are to flies—brilliant and attractive, but certain ruin. —Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, 184755

As the night came into sharper focus near the middle of the nineteenth century, so did the age-old distinction between the country and the city. But with an interesting twist. The actual intensity of the new city gaslights had reached an unprecedented degree of brightness, especially when viewed against the backdrop of a benighted rural landscape, unchanged for millennia. The slowness of rural electrification (rural gas lighting was rarely attempted) kept the American countryside, for example, in the dark for another century, until the 1930s. But metaphorically, the brighter the lights, the darker the sins of the shimmering city. In a complicated moral chiaroscuro, the Babylonian darkness deepened when set off against the unstained innocence attributed to the natural world, even while the attraction of the artificially lit city was expressed in an image drawn from nature, the mothsto-flame analogy. A city like New York was already, in 1847, defined by its nocturnal aspect: “brilliant and attractive” light. And the more light, the darker the consequences for “natural” things from the healthy side of night, whether imagined as humans, moths, or flies. Thus, romantic and religiously invested concepts of the countryside helped shape nineteenth-century views of the night in two key ways. First, the alluring city singed the moral wings of country-bred people and things; it seemed to single them out for destruction.56 And second, the rural darkness, though a potential antidote to urban moral fatigue, was as often regarded as an imperiled resource, something intangible that might be more readily encountered in a poem or painting than in person. Henry Wadsworth

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Longfellow’s “Hymn to the Night” (1839) imagines the restorative powers of night as an unseen mother figure watching over the poet: “I felt her presence, by its spell of might / Stoop o’er me from above; / The calm, majestic presence of the Night / As of the one I love.”57 The assumption that the moonlit rural night held splendors unavailable or cheapened in the gaslit city underlies almost everything cosmopolites said about the nocturnal realm. Foster remarks that near the big gas lamp in the Five Points area lies a small park beneath whose stunted trees couples stroll and strike their sexual bargains—“reminding one of the reverse of rural life with all its innocent blandishments and moonlight love-walks beneath the whispering trees.” “Indeed,” Foster continues, “throughout the entire realm of metropolitan degradation, one is incessantly struck with the ghastly resemblances to the forms of virtue and purity, everywhere starting out before him. There is no virtue or innocence of a beauteous life which is not reflected in the dark sea of licentiousness and dissipation” (124). The worldly man about town is ever conscious of his purer country background. The gaslit city of experience darkly mirrors the moonlit country of innocence. If nineteenth-century urban explorers claimed to shed light on nocturnal “mysteries” later revealed to be ritualistic floutings of daytime taboos, those who still dwelled amid the pastoral landscape were more likely to attune their senses to the effects of darkness itself. They approached the night with awe and admiration. Traditionally, in poems ranging from John Milton’s “Il Penseroso” (c. 1631) and Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts” (1742–1745) to Whitman’s “On the Beach at Night Alone” (1856, 1871), night’s “mystery” meant contemplation, spiritual insight, and philosophical food in abundance. If city dwellers thought their moral reflections could bring some country freshness into their tarnished world, country dwellers might imagine themselves as flâneurs of the forest, capturing some of its elusive charm for urban consumption. About the same time that Foster was stalking New York’s streets, Thoreau was pursuing the literary conquest of the night discussed in my introduction. Like Foster, he gives his perambulations a moral tone; he feels that he can do his audience a good turn, “be a benefactor,” by discovering something hidden in the night. Thoreau’s ambition shows how broad was the range of nocturnal inquiry. Though he had little to say directly about night in cities, it is worth considering Thoreau for a moment because he raises aesthetic and philosophical issues—muted in Foster and his fellow flâneurs—that shaped nineteenth-century views. He spells out better than anyone else the sense of something enormous yet fragile at stake in this exploration. How important the night side of things was to Thoreau becomes clear in a sentence near the end of his most famous book. He likens his entire sojourn at Walden to a nocturnal voyage of discovery: “I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of

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the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.”58 Thoreau sought to push his explorations even further in the months after Walden was published, when he began working up the moonlight notes from his journal. Although he produced no final text on the subject, and gave only one lecture, his general theme is clear: he wants to show his audience the overlooked value of night as both a reality and a subject for contemplation.59 Not only is night the vital complement to day, for Thoreau, both experientially and philosophically; it is also a language, a neglected form of living poetry that deserves translation and explication. “Why not study this Sanskrit?” he asks. “What if one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions,—so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used her? One moon gone by unnoticed?”60 Despite the language of sexual exploitation, Thoreau’s interests in “so divine a creature” are verydifferent from his urban counterparts. Complaining that “men talk glibly enough about moonshine” without knowing its true qualities, Thoreau asserts that “the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, but also by her influence on the earth and its inhabitants.”61 He goes on to describe such positive lunar side effects as heightened perception, the restorative dews and darkness that make the day’s brightness tolerable, the casting of thoughts and emotions in dramatic relief, and night’s ability to bring us closer to worlds of enchantment and the past. Finally, moonlight is an invaluable guide to both travelers and thinkers; it emerges as an emblem of thought itself. “The light is more proportionate to our knowledge than that of day,” he writes; “the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated moments are.”62 In effect, Thoreau presents himself as an erstwhile journalist-flâneur of the rural night, a kind of aestheticized Foster leading an instructive tour. But how different is his intended “report to the gazettes” from that of the professional journalist, preoccupied with dance halls and dives! When he suggests that he might show his readers that “there is some beauty awake while they are asleep,” Thoreau uses the strategy of the urban sketch to make a point that was only slowly being grasped in the sensation-oriented city: the nightwalker could “add to the domains of poetry.”63 The prying loose of poetic beauty from its accustomed rural habitat was one of the biggest projects of urban art in the nineteenth century. Confirmed countryman though he was, Thoreau prepared “poetry” for export by linking the beauties of the night to the discourses of the explorer and the flâneur. Still, to capture something so evanescent for the delectation of the masses is to risk diminishing it, as Thoreau realized when he observed that most of the ice cut at Walden Pond melted before it could be delivered. In his reverence for the world of darkness and his somewhat contradictory eagerness to “use her” for his own ends, Thoreau represents the tendency of his

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age. In both art and literature, city and country, those who prize “the veil of night” simultaneously endeavor to peek behind it and hold it in place. The common image of night as a veil points toward the equally common image of night as a woman, just encountered in both Thoreau and Longfellow. Both images suggest something secretive, mysterious, and attractive to men, something they can’t bear not knowing or not having. Though a little more subtle, Thoreau reveals his kinship to Foster, who aims to “penetrate beneath the thick veil of night,” and to George Ellington, author of The Women of New York (1870), who claimed that in his book “the women of the Metropolis are boldly and truthfully unveiled.”64 A fragile, undervalued, apparently endangered female, the night attracts increasing attention as the century progresses and artificial light intensifies. The more elusive “she” becomes, the more essential she seems to the quest for self-enlightenment, or even the illumination of an entire civilization. “I turn and see the silent, contemplative, spiritual moon shedding the softest imaginable light on the western slopes,” Thoreau writes in his notebook, “as if, after a thousand years of polishing, their surfaces were just beginning to be bright.”65 Equating the glow of moonlit landscapes with the longterm projects of Western culture, Thoreau speaks for his century in viewing the night as the medium or metaphor for human endeavor. Glimpsed as part of human history instead of a threatening void around it, night becomes friendlier, less alien, more malleable, nurturing, and available. Between Foster’s sensationalist desire to expose “the underground story,” the “sad realities” of city nightlife, and Thoreau’s altruistic quest to reveal night’s hidden beauty, lies a vast landscape of nocturnal visions, attitudes, and images that, collectively, tell the story of how we have come to name the night.

Night People, Night Prowling One translation of flâneur is “prowler.” Thoreau’s rural rambler stalks the night like a carnivore tracking meaty ideas: “As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect.”66 If night near Walden Pond is a philosophical hunting ground, in the human jungle of Manhattan it is people who are the prey, in part because they have turned themselves into beasts. Foster writes that the “oyster saloons” stay open all night because “their customers [‘thieves, burglars, low gamblers, and vagabonds in general’] burrow in their secret holes and dens all day, and only venture out at night.” The gaslit wilderness has spawned new species to haunt it. Indeed, Foster continues, shifting his imagery from mammals to airborne raptors, “this is mostly true of all the inhabitants in this region [the Five Points]. There are the obscene night-birds who flit and howl and hoot

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by night, and whose crimes and abominations make them shun the light of day—not merely because they fear detection, but because day is hateful to them”(123). “Tender is the night,” wrote Keats, and in Foster’s Manhattan the nocturnal predators can’t wait to sink their teeth into it. But the flâneur feeds on them, for his material and royalties. The desire to discover the starkest and strangest sights of the night drives him forward, like his readers, looking for visual nourishment. It is the writer’s aim to show how night people are tantalizingly different from day people, and in this project well-known facts about Broadway help him out. In the 1850s, the “ladies mile” of fine stores between Fourteenth and Twenty-third streets was thronged by day with well-dressed women window-shopping, while at night well-dressed men shopped beneath the gaslights for even showier women. The very first sights on Foster’s tour are two harlots of modern Babylon, whose elaborate dress and coy tactics he describes according to convention, from their scarlet shawls and jewels to the “foaming goblet” that “delivers the victim helpless into the hands of the despoiler.” Moral struggle is his central theme, and men—always “the victim”—fall repeatedly as “prostitution performs her horrid rites” (71). From the nighttime tour guide’s point of view, what is especially attractive in the prostitute as a literary subject is that she is already and deliberately on display; the flâneur does not have much descriptive work to do. Her availability gives license to the imagination: just as in real life she urges the observer to get involved, so in the text her mere presence invites the reader to muse on her charms. It is often remarked that the man who strolls the dark streets is dignified with the name of flâneur, while the woman who does so is called a streetwalker.67 In Foster’s city, there are no “nice” women abroad in the night, and so no possibility of confusion, since the harlot will always reveal her inner coarseness: “But for their large feet and vulgar hands, they would be taken for queens and princesses, if such things were ever seen among us. They walk with a free and sweeping gait, and shuffle their feet upon the flag-stones with a noise that sets your teeth sharply on edge” (70). The illustrator of the original paper cover for New York by Gas-Light understood that Foster’s night world turned the city’s racial and social structure topsy-turvy. A gothic-arched gaslight, perhaps representing Foster himself, dominates the top of the design. But the key figures are an elegantly attired couple of mixed skin tone, the dark-skinned man sporting a top hat and cane, and the lighter-skinned woman an elaborate bonnet. Strolling past two white prostitutes tucked beneath the gas lamp, the couple is counterbalanced diagonally across the cover by a little white girl offering a coin to a dancing monkey (see figure 1.1). African Americans intrigued the white artists and authors of the nocturnal sketch, perhaps because blacks seemed to represent or belong to the night

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itself. Stereotypes of black sexuality, musical ability, and love of a good time fed this fantasy. For white bourgeois adventurers to find themselves seeking African American company for social purposes—whether in person or on the page—meant that morals and class boundaries had been relaxed, the social order inverted, and in the wild dancing, carnivalesque energies released. In New York, the focus of mixed-race festivity was Pete Williams’s dance hall in the Five Points, where white gentlemen could watch black dancing, and where poorer whites of both sexes joined in. Dickens visited there in 1842, jokingly calling it Almack’s, “the assembly room of the Five-Point fashionables” (89–90), after the exclusive nightclub in London’s West End. He noted the finery of the proprietor—“attired in a smart blue jacket . . . with a thick gold ring upon his little finger, and round his neck a gleaming golden watch-guard”—and produced a much-quoted passage on the liveliness of the dancing, especially that of the leader: “Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut: snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs . . .” (90).68 In the wake of Dickens’s visit, a generation of New Yorkers saw their own landmarks through English eyes. In Foster’s day the dance hall was called “Dickens’s Place,” forcing the local writer to differentiate his urban sketch from that of the foreigner who has been there before him. Foster compares his “humble and unpretending statement of facts” with Dickens’s “elaborate and artistic picture”: “We have both written to the same end—to interest the reader: but while the great artist has summoned the aid of all his well-prepared colors to fascinate the imagination with harmonious hues, graceful proportions and startling contrasts, the unambitious reporter contents himself with sketching human nature as it is” (146). Claiming to be truer to life, Foster stresses a rougher reality than Dickens, one that includes the illegitimate children of the proprietor—“there are something under a dozen ‘yellow-boys’ in the neighborhood who have a very strong resemblance to Pete”—as well as nearby back rooms where lechery, robbery, and violence are common (145–49). But out front, there is uncommon entertainment, leading Foster to produce what must be one of the earliest descriptions of jazz: “The music at Dickens’s Place is of no ordinary kind. You cannot, however, begin to imagine what it is. You cannot see the red-hot knitting needles spirted out by the red-faced trumpeter, who looks precisely as if he were blowing glass, which . . . penetrating the tympanum, pierce through and through your brain without remorse” (142). Then there are the dancers: “The truth compels us to say” that the “negresses, of various shades and colors . . . are more tidy and presentable . . . than their white companions. Such bleared-eyed,

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idiotic, beastly wretches as these latter it is difficult to imagine and impossible to describe” (142). And finally there is the dancing itself: Suddenly, “all observance of the figure is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams, and hurras on his or her own hook. . . . [T]he dancers, now wild with excitement like Ned Buntline at Astor Place, leap frantically about like howling dervishes, clasp their partners in their arms, and at length conclude the dance in hot confusion and disorder” (142–43). Amid the usual hellish allusions, the best description of black abandon that Foster can muster is white abandon. In addition to being the rival gaslight journalist who wrote Mysteries and Miseries of New York, Buntline had urged the crowd to riot in front of the Astor Place Opera House in 1849. But the comparison is highly charged. As a result of Buntline’s “dance,” twenty-two people were killed. Foster likens white racial violence (it was the English and Irish “races” who squared off at Astor Place) to peaceful black amusement. Well before Cole Porter, Foster sees that part of night’s thrill is the reversal of apparently polar opposites: “black is white today and day is night today . . . anything goes.”

The Devil, the Moralist, and the Voyeur To know the light and yet to walk the night is to be at once both white and black. The flâneur’s audience, consciously or not, enjoyed participating in this duality. The flâneur speaks out of this socially compromised but artistically fertile position. Occasionally he even hints at his own fascination with darkness, his own chameleon quality. “Onward I go,” writes Hawthorne, “deriving a sympathetic joy or sorrow from the varied aspect of mortal affairs, even as my figure catches a gleam from the lighted windows, or is blackened by an interval of darkness.”69 Hawthorne presents the flâneur as an equivocal moral figure of complex intentions, a tarnished angel taking joy and sorrow over the behavior of people—but nonetheless “blackened” by association with patches of darkness. But then, the original flâneur was perhaps the Black Man, Satan himself, “wandering to and fro in the earth, and up and down in it” (Job 1:7). And in fact, the flâneur was in league with the devil. The Halting Devil, that is. Also called the limping devil, or Asmodeus, this mischievous tour guide first made his appearance in Le Diable Boiteux by Alain René Le Sage in 1707.70 Set in Madrid, the story links the infirmity of the Devil to his jaundiced view of humanity. Asmodeus is a demon who publicizes hidden vice by taking off the tops of apparently respectable houses to reveal to the flâneur and his audience what scandalous behavior goes on inside. Asmodeus limps because he is an emotionally crippled flâneur, but his merciless misanthropy makes for lively reading. He quickly became a stock character, a device for exposing the sordid secrets of urban society.

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It was in the guise of protecting public morality that the American press made frequent allusion to Asmodeus in the 1840s. Novels such as George Thompson’s New York Life (1849), featuring “every type of illicit sex,” as well as Harrison G. Buchanan’s Asmodeus; or, the Legends of New York (1848) and Charles Frederick Briggs’s Asmodeus, or The Iniquities of New York: A Complete Exposé (1849) contributed to the popularity of Asmodeus characters. They reveled in bringing to light the purported corruption, hypocrisy, and debauchery of the upper-class leaders of the city.71 When Dickens visited New York in 1842, he complained that the alliance between the strolling spectator and the Devil was debasing both the press and its readership. The newspapers he saw during his visit provided “not vapid, waterish amusements, but good strong stuff; dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste” (87).72 The presence of Asmodeus moves the urban sketch into a moral, religious, and even supernatural dimension that ordinary sightseeing lacks. Asmodeus grants the flâneur the almost divine power to see everything. But as Dickens’s lament suggests, it seems to be a corrupting power, used more often to titillate than to edify. A Cassandra for modern times, a sort of patron saint of the penny press, Asmodeus sees nothing but scandal, and gleefully can do nothing about it. Foster has not gone far in his first chapter when he invites his readers to take a break from the public display of vice in order to spy on some private intrigue: “Let us make use of our Asmodean privilege and listen to this beautiful creature, closely veiled, and her gallant companion, who seem to be admiring the mysterious beauties of ‘Naples by Moonlight,’ as seen through a round piece of glass with a penny engraving and a lamp behind it” (72). A night scene, seen by night with the aid of a homemade magic lantern, precipitates the fall. A few smooth lines and the seducer whirls his willing lover “through the throng, to a fashionable assignation-house, to accomplish a husband’s dishonor and a wife’s infamy” (72). The overlapping interests of writer and Devil imply a close affinity that was captured in symbolic fashion by Alfred R. Waud in an illustration for The Physiology of New York Boarding Houses (1857). The text, written by Thomas Butler Gunn, aimed at “unroofing houses, and unveiling to our readers” the truth about city life.73 Waud depicts an Asmodean hand with a pen in it opening the roof of an apartment building. Exposed to view beneath the crescent moon are a couple embracing, wine bottle on the table, and bed in the background. Having yielded to the temptations of Asmodeus, the fallen flâneur makes voyeurism his new religion; the private lives of others become a source of his nocturnal imagery. Author, artist, and audience—and often the night people depicted—form a complicitious company, eager to see something or someone hidden. If as a journalist Foster is adept in steering his voyeuristic audience through dance halls that they could—for a price—enter

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Figure 1.9. Alfred R. Waud, Writer’s Hand Lifting Roof, 1857. In Thomas Butler Gunn, The Physiology of New York Boarding Houses (New York: Mason Brothers)

just as freely as he has, the Asmodean Foster offers a further thrill of reporting what could not be seen, something never intended to be put on show. But in a genre dedicated to literal looking, the “Asmodean privilege” could be invoked only rarely. Without Asmodeus to lift the roof, the flâneur was reduced to peeking in lower-story windows. His activity was made easier by interior gaslight and later electricity. Lighted interiors beckoned like stage sets: “Through yonder casement I discern a family circle,” Hawthorne writes, and “here is still a brighter scene. A stately mansion, illuminated for a ball. . . .”74 The practice of directly spying on others no doubt had its adherents in midcentury New York, but as an artistic method it would come to fruition only later, in the electric era. Besides, in the worst neighborhoods of New York, Dickens noted, neither light nor the Asmodean device is really necessary. Here, “debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old” and one can contemplate the final end of ruinous behavior—“ruined houses, open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show” (88–89). The most dramatic form of peeping is the police-accompanied “inspection,” a down-to-earth, rough-and-tumble version of the authorial hand lifting housetops. Here, the readers spy not on the middle or upper classes but the poor. Speculation about private behavior gives way to actual intrusion. In American Notes, Dickens describes entering a “wolfish den” with a police escort, and thence into “cramped hutches full of sleeping Negroes. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some

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Figure 1.10. Matt Morgan, A Midnight Visit to One of the Cheap Lodging Houses in Water Street. In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 9, 1872

figure crawls half awakened, as if the judgment hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead” (89). In this Last Judgment scene, the verdict—that these are human animals—is handed down not by God Almighty but by middle-class spectators: the author, his guides, and his readers. God’s presence—or at least His omniscience and penetrating gaze—is represented by the literal and metaphoric light that lanterns and the authorial consciousness cast on the dark interior. A newspaper artist rendered a similar moment of “judgment” in an engraving called A Midnight Visit to One of the Cheap Lodging Houses in Water Street. Part of a series on “Our Homeless Poor: How the Other Half Lives” that ran in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1872, the “visit” (“drawn from life”) anticipates Riis’s photographic raids by fifteen years. A candleholding guide leads a reporter and police officer upstairs into a barely furnished room with cracked walls and sagging ceiling, packed with recumbent lodgers, children among them. Such benevolently framed voyeurism offered readers lurid views of poverty’s haphazard sleeping arrangements—perhaps the “orgies of pauperism” that Foster alludes to at the start of New York by Gas-Light. Beyond a fleeting glimpse of naked limbs, spectators could feel the horrifying frisson afforded by what Alfred Tennyson sonorously denounced in London as “the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor.”75 For the poor themselves, the experience must have given ironic weight to the biblical warning about the imminence of Judgment: “ye

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know not the day nor the hour” when the Apocalypse might come—and gaslit Babylon be exposed to merciless light.

Police Take Note: The Flâneur Flummoxed But there were limits to what a flâneur or even a devil could learn. Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) is a story of frustrated detection, told by a still-feverish convalescent who at nightfall studies the passing parade from the window of a London coffeehouse. Poe had not been to London since childhood; he plays on the literary device of London’s immensity for what is obviously a New York audience who will read their city’s future into London’s fictive present. At one point, for example, the evening pedestrians “had gradually diminished to about that number which is ordinarily seen at noon in Broadway near the Park—so vast a difference is there between a London populace and that of the most frequented American city.”76 What draws Poe’s narrator to the crowd is its unfamiliar nocturnal character, the way it swells in volume and strangeness as darkness falls: “By the time the lamps were well litten two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door. . . . [T]he tumultuous sea of human heads filled me . . . with a delicious novelty of emotion” (233). Buoyed by the tides of humanity, thrilled by the historically new phenomenon of teeming, illuminated nocturnal streets, the narrator gives himself up to the pleasure of urban taxonomy. Like a flâneur, he categorizes the passersby into groups ranging from “noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stockjobbers” to clerks, gamblers, pickpockets, beggars, and “women of the town of all kinds and of all ages.” The night not only turns the city into a sort of museum of social types, it makes it into a theater, a freak show, a gaslit reading room for the study of human nature “as the late hour brought forth every species of infamy from its den.” Finding that “the rays of the gaslamps . . . threw over every thing a fitful and garish lustre,” the narrator cannot turn away: “The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces.” Despite the rapidity with which people passed, the narrator claims, “it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (233–35). Suddenly the narrator spots “a decrepid old man” whose striking face rivets his attention with its suggestion “of vast mental power, of caution . . . of coolness, of malice . . . of excessive terror, of intense, of supreme despair.” Fascinated, the narrator jumps up and follows him, determined to discover his history. Aided by the sneakerlike shoes that he happens to be wearing, the narrator walks closely behind his quarry, further intrigued by his ragged clothes but fine linen, and “a glimpse either of a diamond, or of a dagger” beneath his cloak (235–36).

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But the old man never leaves the avenue, walking to and fro in the crowd until the traffic thins. Then he quickly passes into a less-deserted street, where he pushes back and forth through the multitude until the crowd thins again, when he rushes with extraordinary energy to another neighborhood where nightlife is in full sway. Pursued by but never noticing the narrator, he works his way successively through the human waves of activity that wash over the nocturnal city, district by district, hour by hour, from theater closings and late-night bazaars to gin palaces and finally back to the main thoroughfare, now in its morning bustle, where first the narrator saw him. There he walks up and down in its “turmoil” all day until, “as the shades of the second evening came on,” the exhausted narrator abandons his quest. The man of the crowd has led him on a tour of the new twenty-four-hour urban life cycle—a bizarrely guided visit to the densest points on the city’s surface. But the narrator thinks only of the man, not of where they both have been: “ ‘This old man,’ I said at length, ‘is the type and genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds’ ” (238–39).77 “The Man of the Crowd” can be read as a parable about the limits of urban knowledge. There are some people, some ways of life in the vast metropolis, Poe seems to say, that can’t be fathomed, however perspicacious one might be—although one can still assign them the role of criminal. Night is a traditional location of privacy: even Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1856), a man who lives at his office, is seen only in the day. Bartleby is a descendant of the Man of the Crowd, a man who can’t be known because he has no trace of a private life. But here Poe apparently wants to question the value of the flâneur—his assumptions, practices, and hunger for knowledge— altogether. “The heart of the mighty London” where the stranger bathes in the crowd may well be just as illegible on the grand scale as is the stranger’s hidden heart. “It,” the narrator concludes, “does not permit itself to be read” (232). Given that Poe has pronounced the old man a textual being, a “type,” his illegibility is a serious matter; it casts doubt on all the other “readings” of the narrator. The ingenious urban taxonomies in the early part of the story, with their amazing details noted by a fevered brain amid “the wild effects of the light,” can be viewed as dubious knowledge in themselves, a parodic reductio ad absurdum of the flâneur’s method. Gamblers, for example, are “easily recognizable” to the narrator because of “a more than ordinary extension of the thumb in a direction at right angles with the fingers” (234). Furthermore, the old man behaves like a deliberate inversion of the flâneur; he is tattered and haggard instead of stylish and young. Apart from his desire for crowds, he does everything wrong: when he finds himself in a packed, brightly lit square, “his chin fell upon his breast, while his eyes

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rolled wildly from under his knit brows in every direction . . . he urged his way steadily and perseveringly.” In short, he doesn’t stroll, observe, give himself up to random whims, or let himself be borne along by the crowd. He doesn’t even window-shop. When he arrives at the bazaar, “he entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and looked at all objects with a wild and vacant stare” (237). When the streets empty, he becomes visibly distraught and dashes with extraordinary speed through deserted areas, finding apparent relief only when he regains the crowd.78 The genuine flâneur is an empty vessel, lazing along to allow himself to be filled by the city’s abundance; the Man of the Crowd is a closed book whose stride is like a protective shield. Milan Kundera writes in Slowness that the stroller who suddenly increases his pace is walking fast to forget an unpleasant thought that has crossed his mind, as if it were possible to fly from the past, whereas those who slow down during a walk are trying to recall something or savor a happy memory.79 On these terms, the Man of the Crowd is literally running away from himself. He seems to be a human shark in an urban ocean: if he stops swimming, he will die. Detachment, reflection, and idleness are impossible for him. And in pursuing his erratic, athletic course he makes the narrator behave just as oddly. There is one explanation for the old man’s behavior, obvious to anyone who lived in London or New York at the time, that the narrator fails to entertain: the Man of the Crowd is homeless, or as the Victorians called it, “houseless.” In Sketches by Boz, Dickens recognized that one of the most common reasons propelling people through the streets was the lack of any place else to go. London police were under orders to keep vagrants moving, even at night. Dickens later wrote in “Night Walks” that in the course of fighting insomnia, “I finished my education in a fair amateur experience of houselessness. My principal object being to get through the night, the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object every night in the year.” Dickens goes out into the streets and keeps moving until even the drunkards had disappeared: “And then the yearning of the houseless mind,” like that of the Man of the Crowd, “would be for any sign of company, any lighted place, any movement, anything suggestive of any one being up—nay, even so much as awake, for the houseless eye looked out for lights in windows.”80 If the police had begun to criminalize loitering and resting in public, Poe’s narrator seems to criminalize mobility itself. Rather than pursue a sociological angle, Poe’s story hints that the stranger is the Devil, not only because his diabolic features surpass any “pictural incarnations of the fiend,” but also because his way of striding “to and fro” in the city echoes Satan’s motion in the book of Job. More likely, he is a counter-Asmodeus, sent to plague the narrator. If the flâneur invented Asmodeus to help gratify his desire to spy on other people, this demon drives

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the narrator through the streets by dangling before him the idea that he will discover something startling to write about. The old man pulls him out of his coffeehouse and plunges him into the fray, surrendering nothing, producing impressions that weigh “confusedly and paradoxically” on the narrator’s formerly acute mind, running him ragged all around London until he grows “wearied unto death.” One runs toward and the other away from a nameless something: the story of the night. They make a pair; they need each other as alter egos. The only detail the narrator furnishes about his own circumstances is that he sets out from the “D———Hotel,” where the stranger eventually leads him the next day. In eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury English literature, “d———” usually stands for “damned.” The two men of the crowd are fellow fiends, incarnations of the modern night, unable to exist apart from the throng. What Poe’s story does illustrate clearly is the advent of a new urban nocturnal environment and a new way of behaving in it, a new way of writing about it. The promeneur who lives only amid the crowds and lights represents a search for sensation, a restless fear of solitude that the earlier, darker city had supplied. The narrator assumes his subject is a criminal, but anyone following the narrator himself would be wondering where his own home and motives lay. With the breakdown of the flâneur’s methods, “The Man of the Crowd” marks the impending demise of the urban sketch. And with its introduction of the motif of pursuit, it marks the arrival of the detective story. Poe makes an important point about modernity and control of the night: now that the nocturnal streets are full rather than empty, and the night watchman outmoded, other forms of surveillance are needed. Those who act strangely or do not have a plausible story to tell are suspect; they must be tracked down. The flâneur’s need for information and his incriminatory assumptions herald the policing of the streets by more organized forces. Poe shows where this policing leads: to the criminalization of private identity. Under the growing cultural pressure to read the night, illegibility shades into illegality. The night had been the preserve of the Devil for millennia. It was only logical to expect that as pursuer and pursued, he would change form to suit the glare of the gaslight, the birth of the nocturnal crowd.

Gaslit Barbary For Poe the United States were . . . nought but a great, gaslit Barbary. —Charles Baudelaire, “Préface des Histoires extraordinaires”81

For Baudelaire, who lived there, Paris was an intoxicating mystery. But for Poe, Baudelaire’s idol, Paris was a fictive setting where mysteries were solved; it was New York decoded, rationalized. Willis had predicted the

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“Parisification of New York,” but Poe went a step further by Manhattanizing Paris. He superimposed the two, setting the notorious New York murder mystery of Mary Rogers in Paris, so that literal and literary distance could furnish a new hero—the detective—and a new method of solving crime—armchair deduction. The unsolved mystery of Rogers’s death became “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842) and a baffling crime became a transparent lesson in how to read the city. In the process, Poe added a surprisingly novel element to the multifarious urban night: the possibility of knowing it after all. In the story of Marie Rogêt, the murder is committed Sunday afternoon in the country and solved in the city after dark. For Poe nothing is more foolish than the statement, “Those who are guilty of such horrid crimes choose darkness rather than light.”82 If the Mysteries genre of sensational novel terrified urbanites with the lurid secrets of the metropolis, and the flâneur genre attempted to convince readers that the complexities of the city could be dissected and enjoyed, Poe came up with a brilliant way to meld the two approaches. Creating “mystery” in the modern sense of a criminal puzzle to be worked out (rather than a dark rite to be shunned), Poe brought the flâneur face-to-face with urban crime. While allowing him his ironic detachment, Poe put the flâneur in the position of being able to do something about the evils he saw. For the first time the flâneur could intervene—if not on the side of justice exactly, then on the side of intellect and reason. The private detective, with his own motives for solving crimes, was born. The classic traits of the literary sleuth from Sherlock Holmes onward emerge full-blown in Poe’s Parisian tales: the bohemian-aristocratic detective, his dazzling deductions and eccentric habits, his admiring sidekick who records the tale. But Poe transcends his new genre even as he invents it: his detective does not scrounge for minute clues at the crime scene but does his most important work at home. The flâneur stops strolling and becomes a superreader; the detective shows his audience how to tame the city by teaching it how to navigate the city’s most characteristic product: the apparently plotless jumble of life, art, and business that is the daily newspaper. Poe’s urban locations were fluid composites: “Marie Rogêt” is typical in being written in Philadelphia about New York but set in Paris, where Poe had never been. Paris’ reputation for eroticism and violence made it the natural location for his three mysteries (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” being the other two). All three tales deal with attacks on women, two literal and one metaphoric: Marie Rogêt is sexually assaulted before or during her murder; in the Rue Morgue two women are brutally mutilated; and the owner of the purloined letter is in danger of being blackmailed because of her illicit affair. Poe projected the fears and desires of his American readers on to Paris not only as a means of “legitimizing” the prurient interest of the stories but also because the aristocratic

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pose of his detective (a word that did not yet exist) demanded a European context. And in the Paris of “Rue Morgue,” Poe could address the babel of the city’s tongues and the simian (read Irish) bestiality of his murderer without offending Democratic readers. Thus, Poe used the European night to further his own ideas about the heroic qualities of the man of in-action and his superiority to the common crowd of police, reporters, and readers. Poe also decided to resurrect the eighteenth-century idea of the night as the preserve of the social and cultural elite. The hours between dusk and dawn belong less to the criminal than to the well-read detective. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), the first of the Parisian mysteries, Poe’s detective Dupin finds that creativity and rationality alike are animated when the sun goes down. Dupin’s narrator-roommate comments: It was a freak of fancy in my friend . . . to be enamored of the Night for her own sake. . . . The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighting a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams—reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.83

Even in the daytime, Dupin finds a way to “counterfeit” night, a feminine and hence flighty presence, until he can sally forth on the nocturnal city streets. In calling “her” the “sable divinity,” Poe alludes to Young’s Night Thoughts (1742): “Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne, / In rayless majesty, now stretches forth / Her leaden scepter o’er a slumbring world” (“Night I,” lines 18–20). Dupin moves from a world of artificial night at home to one of artificial light on the streets. Proof of Dupin’s startling abilities comes in the course of a stroll “one night down a long dirty street in the vicinity of the Palais Royal.” After a silence of some fifteen minutes, Dupin suddenly breaks in on his friend’s thoughts with a comment on his latest idea. As Dupin explains his method, it becomes clear that the key elements in both men’s chain of thoughts are nocturnal too—the theater, the stars, and Latin poetry about the constellation Orion (244–46). Poe’s narrator suspects that Dupin’s nocturnal predilections and unusual analytic capacities are “the result of an excited, or perhaps of a diseased, intelligence” (244). It is as if Poe wanted to show how the city night, with its perversities and hypersensitivity, could

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nonetheless join forces with the intellect and lead to enlightenment. The light of detection needs urban darkness to do its work.

Lullaby for Babylon “I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway,” wrote Melville in 1849.84 If he had, the Gothamized bard might have looked and written a lot like Walt Whitman. Nobody else has come close for amplitude of vision as well as the sheer variety of people, activities, and things portrayed. From the early 1840s, when he made the transition from printer to journalist, until the 1855 appearance of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman made it his business to wander the city and record its sights, particularly in the sketches he did for two newspapers he edited, the New York Aurora and the Brooklyn Eagle. Gradually Whitman made himself over, from bemused cane-bearing dandy to workingman’s confidant. He pursued the flâneur’s calling with so much relish that he eventually became a sight himself, recognized by working people up and down Broadway and the Bowery. But while Poe’s detective-flâneur sought to dissect the night and the motives of its denizens, Whitman’s roving private “I” abandoned social taxonomies and collapsed moral distinctions, embracing the common bond created by bodies held close in darkness. Whitman took an unprecedented leap from the prose of the detached sophisticate to a new poetry of inclusiveness, where his rangy lines of free verse held ample room for all classes and races, all sexes, nationalities, occupations, and states of grace. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman surrendered emotional distance to wrestle pantingly with the naked darkness: Press close barebosomed night! Press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds! Night of the large few stars! Still nodding night! Mad naked summer night! (433–36)

For the rational knowledge of Poe, Whitman substituted an intuitive understanding of how a flâneur might fit into the city night, becoming its bosom companion: “I am he that walks with the tender and growing night” (437). Suggestive as these lines are, it is in “The Sleepers” (1855) that Whitman utterly transformed conventional renderings of both the night city and the flâneur’s investigatory hike through it. The first poem to revel in the boundless dreamscape of the New York night, “The Sleepers” presents the darkened city as a voyeuristic drama, a self-reflexive psychological space, a

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sexualized topography of dread and desire. From the start, Whitman casts himself in a new role, as a receptive and uncritical flâneur of the urban unconscious: I wander all night in my vision, Stepping with light feet . . . .swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers; Wandering and confused . . . . lost to myself . . . . ill-assorted . . . . contradictory, Pausing and gazing and bending and stopping.85

Unlike the conventional stroller, he admits to a lack of inner direction; “confused” and uncertain, he cannot play the confident cartographer of the night world’s terrain. Whitman delights in personal difference—a difference that is ultimately not exposed as the source of crime and mystery but preserved as a valuable human mystery in itself. “The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and unite,” he says (178). His quest is to explore, not to castigate, to participate in the sleepers’ sins or solace, not to stand aloof and judge. There is no need for detection; everything is revealed, even the author’s nightmares: “O hotcheeked and blushing! O foolish hectic! / O for pity’s sake no one must see me now! . . . . my clothes were stolen while I was abed, / Now I am thrust forth, where shall I run?” (60–62). Cataloging what he sees, he juxtaposes “the little children in their cradles” with “the wretched features of ennuyees, the white features of corpses, the livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists” (7–8). As the poem unfolds, the poet reports how lovers and parents, prisoners and murderers sleep, how ghosts and lovers call him, how it looks in the grave, how it feels to be a slave or a whale. Whitman offers no sensationalism, none of Foster’s “festivities” or “orgies,” no Asmodean claims about the scandal of the bodies coupled in the dark. Before Whitman, sleepers were most often seen in art as awakening and rising at the Hour of Judgment, grave clothes and bedclothes trailing as they head for heaven or hell. But Whitman opens up the dreamscape as a sufficient world in itself; he refuses to judge and send his sleepers elsewhere. The detached God-like light of the flâneur’s lantern does not shine here. Instead the poet mingles with his subjects: I go from bedside to bedside . . . . I sleep close with the other sleepers, each in turn; I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, And I become the other dreamers. (29–31)

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Fluidity of personality becomes the poet’s aim: “I am the actor and the actress,” he says, taking on all the roles on the night stage. Anticipating James Joyce’s “Nighttown” episode in Ulysses, he finds himself surrounded by “journeymen divine” (34), “nimble ghosts whichever way I look” (36), who lead him onward, “a gay gang of blackguards with mirthshouting music and wildflapping pennants of joy” (41). Yet even then, Whitman recognizes that some areas of the unexplored night must remain unknowable. Becoming a shroud wrapping a body in a coffin, he comments: “It is dark here underground. . . . It is not evil or pain here . . . . it is blank here, for reasons” (78). What makes the vision so attractive is its healing quality. All rifts are repaired. “Elements merge in the night” so that “the exile returns home, / The fugitive returns unharmed . . . the immigrant is back beyond months and years” (142–43). On the one hand this is an aesthetic vision, driven by the sheer loveliness of the sight, which will be taken up in the nocturnal art of Whistler and his followers: I swear they are all beautiful, Every one that sleeps is beautiful . . . . every thing in the dim night is beautiful, The wildest and bloodiest is over and all is peace. (162–64)

But it is also a vision of universal human harmony: The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed, They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed; The Asiatic and African are hand in hand . . . . the European and American are hand in hand. (179–81)

Whitman’s sleep restores life and health: “The swelled and convulsed and congested awake to themselves in condition, / They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night and awake” (193–94). Whitman draws readers a new picture of urban existence, daring to explore not nightlife but night lifelessness. He makes the ordinary sublime through the intensity and sweep of his vision, the scope of his inclusiveness. In the midst of this collective embrace, there is room for passion, as the night not only brings lovers together but also becomes a lover itself: I too pass from the night; I stay awhile away, O night, but I return to you again and love you; Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you? (195–97)

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Loneliness, carnality, and even confrontation and copulation surge between poet and reader, night and lover: “Double yourself and receive me darkness, / Receive me and my lover too . . . . he will not let me go without him. // I roll myself upon you as upon a bed . . . . I resign myself to the dusk” (48–50). Are we readers “the dusk” to which the poet yields himself? The “bed” he rolls himself upon? At the end of the poem, the doubled darkness becomes not only mate but also mother, home, and destination. The copulation earlier in the poem leads to birth at the end, as night’s womb bears poet and poem into the light of day: I will duly pass the day O my mother and duly return to you; Not you will yield forth the dawn again more surely than you will yield forth me again, Not the womb yields the babe in its time more surely than I shall be yielded from you in my time. (202–4)

Most of all, Whitman emphasizes the transforming power of darkness. His cataloging of different sleepers leads to a final assimilation: I swear they are averaged now . . . . no one is better than the other, The night and sleep have likened them and restored them. (160–61)

Rejecting the “sunshine and shadow” approach to New York, when all at night is dark and depraved, Whitman asserts that “every thing in the dim night is beautiful.” From Whitman’s perspective, the fallen woman drowned and floating in the river attracts no less than the pure moonlight shining on her.86 Whitman was hardly the self-effacing poet that Emily Dickinson celebrated in her poem beginning “The Poets light but Lamps— / Themselves—go out—.”87 And yet by stepping aside from the moral evaluation of gaslit Babylon, he found a way to snuff out its condemnatory glare. He created a new night city, alluring and mysterious, resistant to the flâneur’s excitement over misery and immorality, his intrusions, judgments, and sentencing. Domination and detection give way to a democratic dream wherein the nightwalker still confronts death and violence, but also bypasses the exclamation points prompted by “drunkenness and beastly debauch.” Unlike those of Foster or Dickens, Melville or Poe, Whitman’s night wanderings shared the direction of Thoreau’s woodland walks: each author hoped to become “a benefactor” if he could “show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep.” Turning from Babylon’s sins to its slumbers, Whitman fulfilled the goal of Thoreau’s mission: to “add to the domains of poetry.”

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chapter

TWO

The moon, like a flower, In heaven’s high bower, With silent delight, Sits and smiles on the night. —William Blake, Songs of Innocence Let’s murder the moonshine! —Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, title of Futurist polemic

The Nocturne: Moonlight, Metamorphosis, and Modernism Within a decade after Whitman’s “The Sleepers” first appeared, artists and writers began to question both the moral condemnation of gaslight and the ancient pastoral connotation of moonlight, discovering an unexpected beauty as night fell in the city. Gradually they came to regard the metamorphosis of sunlit turbulence into lamplit chiaroscuro as an aesthetic event rather than a moral danger. They evaluated the flicker of gaslight or the glow of moonlight in terms of formal possibilities. The mood that the night evoked counted more for them than the literal accuracy of their renderings. Not so much walking through the city as standing stock-still to let nocturnal reveries wash over them, they began to insist on the value of darkness for its own sake. They taught themselves and their public to imagine more because they could see less. By 1900, urban nightfall was widely regarded as an artwork in itself. Out of this exploration of night’s possibilities, a new artistic and literary form emerged, one that would link London, Paris, and New York in a shared vision of poetic harmony—not apart from, but in the urban world. The form was the nocturne, and while its practitioners delighted in the transformative qualities of moonlight, they mostly kept the moon itself offstage. They preferred a blurry atmosphere of nuanced emotion to detailed or anecdotal scenes of city life. It was through the rise of the nocturne that modernity embarked on a less-guilty love affair with the darkened city and redefined the romance of the night. The title “nocturne” had originally been given by the composers Edward Field and Frédéric Chopin to a dreamy musical composition. But though

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they bespeak rural moonlight on gently rippling water, nocturnes were an urban phenomenon. Field wrote the first nocturne in Moscow in 1812.1 The great popularity of the music of Paris-based Chopin, who between 1827 and 1846 composed twenty-one nocturnes for the piano, underscores the attraction of imaginary moonlit mediations in an industrializing world.2 As gaslight took hold, painters, poets, and eventually photographers began to apply the title to atmospheric night scenes, often of rivers flowing through the midst of darkened cities. English poets turned the London nocturne into a characteristic expression of aestheticism and decadence in the 1880s and 1890s; for Parisians it was linked with synesthesia and symbolism. Subsequently, photographic pioneers produced contemplative views of rainy New York streets and looming skyscrapers. Although it may now appear to be an inoffensive mood piece, the nocturne in fact represents an aggressive reevaluation of the conventions of postromantic poetry and painting. Privileging the formal over the anecdotal, the urban world over the natural one, musical analogies over literary references, abstraction over detail, and Japanese compositional devices over Western mimesis and perspective, nocturnes dramatically anticipated the aesthetic values of modernism. As night transforms the city, so in the later nineteenth century the nocturne altered expectations about the sorts of truths art should reveal, subversively posing its delicate balance of romantic mystery and abstract form against the mainstream preoccupation with narrative and hard-edged mimeticism. It opened a way toward expressionism and abstraction in art, and symbolism and imagism in poetry. The nocturne proved to be an exemplary transitional form precisely because of its own emphasis on the metamorphosis of the modern urban landscape. The catalyst was the American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler. More than anyone else, he made the nocturne an expression of—and a weapon against—modern urban life. His spirited defense of his foggy Thames scenes against John Ruskin’s libelous attack in 1877 marked a turning point in Anglo-American art and taste. Never once depicting the moon, Whistler brought nocturnal imagery to the center of the debate about modernity in art. Whistler’s nocturnes were both radical and influential in ways that painters, poets, and photographers could not escape—and were eager to understand. The full innovative value of Whistler’s nocturnes and their subsequent impact on New Yorkers can only be seen in relation to the extraordinary fascination with night during the nineteenth century. Emerging from a clair de lune tradition that dated back to the seventeenth century, the nocturne evolved rapidly from the 1860s until about 1910 as a malleable form through which painters and poets pushed back the boundaries of their art. A look at the nocturnal context reveals the degree to which Whistler staked out his own territory and boldly shaped the image of the skyscraper city that

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Figure 2.1. Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), Night: A Port in Moonlight, 1772. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux /Art Resource, New York

he never saw. In New York, under the nocturne’s spell, more and more people would come to understand the transforming power of darkness that Whitman had spoken of, and they would be able to apply it not just to individual sleepers but to the sleeping body of the city as well: “I swear they are all beautiful . . . every thing in the dim night is beautiful.”

Contemplating the Moon Before streetlights, the moon reigned supreme in country and city. While medieval and Renaissance painters broached night subjects almost exclusively in the context of biblical events, by the eighteenth century most night scenes portrayed moonlit landscapes where a restorative calm enfolds the world. A classic example is Night: A Port in Moonlight (1772) by the French artist Vernet. Encircled by clouds, Vernet’s full moon sends shimmers of silvery blue light over the water of a quiet harbor. The artist balances the cool moonlight and fishing activities on the left of the canvas against the warm red tones of a blazing fire on the lower right, around which men and women gather to tend a cooking pot. For many artists, moonlight was as much the subject of the picture as the source of its illumination. Since “moonlights” are by convention dedicated to a reflective mood—literalized in the reflecting water almost universally present—they avoid strident action, while their blanketing of details with darkness helps reduce narrative content. Because they represent

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Figure 2.2. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Two Men Observing the Moon, 1819–1820. 14
17 ½ in. (35
44.5 cm). Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

scenes conducive to thought, dream, and artistic self-questioning, moonlit images are among the most central expressions of the Romantic fascination with imagination and creativity. William Blake’s friend Samuel Palmer, for instance, painted glowing, thickly textured pastoral scenes such as Coming from Evening Church (1830) and The Harvest Moon (c. 1831–1832). The association of moonlight with the romantic sensibility was also emphasized by William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley, who both wrote poems called “To the Moon,” and by German poet Ludwig Rellstab, who in 1832 gave Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no.1 (1801) its lasting nickname, the “Moonlight Sonata.” No one was more drawn to the moon than Caspar David Friedrich, the most devoted night stalker of the Romantic era. In such works as Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1824), Moonrise over the Sea (1822), and Moonlit Landscape (c. 1830–1835), he establishes an eerie rapport between his cloaked spectators, their backs turned to the viewer, and the moonlit landscape before them. In the earliest of this series, Two Men Observing the Moon (1819–1820), Friedrich’s spectators not only stand in for the audience outside the canvas but also show us how to behave in the presence of moonlight—with awe and reverence.3 The spellbinding emotion that captivated Friedrich found its way into the American artistic community at about the same time.4 The idea that the natural landscape serves as a vehicle for inner exploration and spiritual enlightenment was shared by Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Heade, Ralph Blakelock, and Alfred Pinkham Ryder, among others. Unlike most daytime scenes where the source of illumination is invisible,

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since the sun is too bright to paint directly, moonlights usually place viewers directly before the full moon, permitting them to look head-on into the source of the light, physical or spiritual.5 And yet, because moonlight is light already reflected, by the moon from the sun, a “moonlight” is a metaphor for painting itself. Like the moon, the painting is reflection and reflector too, a mirror held up to nature reflecting the scene to the viewer, a reflection of what the artist saw as well as a mirror inviting spectators to discover their own thoughts within the scene. The impulses of romanticism were tied to the advent of the industrial era. As the reality of an urbanizing United States overtook the agricultural Jeffersonian ideal, images of the unspoiled countryside and wilderness became icons of the spiritual and sacred, the restorative and enlightening. The night provided a special access to nature and made the blessings of the country available even in city streets. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s first popular volume of poetry, Voices of the Night (1839), the poet asserts that after dark, “even in the city’s throng / I feel the freshness of the streams.” Soon nature instructs him that if he looks within, he will find that the secrets of night and the human heart are interchangeable: “All forms of sorrow and delight / All solemn Voices of the Night / That can soothe thee, or affright.”6 For the American city dweller, as for countrybased philosophers and poets like Thoreau and Emerson, Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant, the nocturnal landscape provided a passport into nature and the self, a way to reach the divine essence of moonlight that the advancing city lights were making it harder and harder to see.7 In Europe, sensing what was coming, the Romantic German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) sorrowed that “gaslight’s stench destroys the fragrant moon light.”8 In the mid-nineteenth century, the pull of the pastoral moonlit world was strong enough to cause photographers to get in on the act. Well before technology permitted real night shots (in the later 1890s), Seneca Ray Stodard published pretended stereopticon views of Moonlight on Lake George (c. 1875–1880). The earliest American photograph to focus primarily on light and atmosphere is John P. Soule’s Marine Study by Moonlight (1863); others include G. E. Curtis’s stereograph of Horse Shoe Fall, Moonlight (1870) and Henry Rand’s Moonlight on the Upper Saranac (c. 1897).9 Black-and-white photography was in one sense perfectly suited to capture moonlight effects, owning to the near absence of color at night. As Thoreau had noted, “By moonlight all is simple. Objects are for the most part robbed of their colors even, and tried by truer tests.”10 The problem was that to obtain the “truth” of moonlight, photographers had to fake their results. They soon found out what painters had known all along: that the amount of illumination actually shed by the full moon was insufficient to light a canvas or a photographic plate up to conventionally acceptable levels. So photographers resorted to

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Figure 2.3. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824), The Sleep of Endymion, 1791. Oil on canvas, 78
103 in. (198
261 cm). Photographer: R. G. Ojéda. Musée du Louvre, Paris [4935]. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux /Art Resource, New York

filters and the superimposition of several negatives in order to make their sunlight pictures look nocturnal. While the public was generally ignorant of these frauds, its eagerness for nocturnal refreshment created a market for manufactured moonshine.11 Pastoral night painting brought solace to nineteenth-century viewers looking for deeper or higher ideas than mundane reality was believed to generate. Moreover, moonlight lent itself to flights of fancy and fantasy, giving shape to the invisible world of dream and spirit. There were otherworldly and erotic evocations of nocturnal repose, such as Anne-Louis Girodet’s The Sleep of Endymion (1791), in which a naked youth is kissed by the moonlight, and Atkinson Grimshaw’s The Sprit of the Night (1879), which shows a diaphanously clad fairy hovering over the misty landscape, seeming to produce moonlight with her wand.12 Both pictures suggest that night’s emotive power is best conveyed by the body of a beautiful man or woman. Yet one could also figure the night in an uplifting way that returned to the religious origins of night painting. Placing great emphasis on minute detail, vibrant color, and careful drawing, William Holman Hunt produced the immensely popular The Light of the World (1851–1853). A wandering Christ comes out of the night to knock at the weed-covered door of humanity, experiencing the same lack of welcome his parents met

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Figure 2.4. William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), The Light of the World, 1851–1853. Oil on canvas over panel, 49 3/8
23 ½ in. (125.4
59.7 cm). Keble College, Oxford. Photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York

before the nativity. In true Pre-Raphaelite fashion, Hunt worked from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. during full moons in the English winter to capture the exact effect of moonlight and lantern light on ivy.13 If the moon’s gentle touch could refresh the countryside and revive the spirits of city dwellers, it might also help people see the light and bring salvation to the world.

The Softer Satellite in Eclipse As a source of inspiration to artists and writers, the moon must have seemed, around 1850, to be indispensable. Yet the close relationship between creativity and the rustic moonlight, so intense in the nineteenth century, had been stimulated by the proximity of growing cities and proliferating gaslights.

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Outmoded as a light source, the moon took on an oppositional role, speaking of ideas and places unaltered by modernity. If the moon had hitherto been essential to night scenes on a practical or symbolic level, now it was needed psychologically, as an unsullied reminder of an innocence that seemed to shrivel in the streetlights. In 1849, Matthew Arnold complained to his friend Arthur Clough about the lack of poetic material in the modern world: “Reflect too. . . . How deeply unpoetical the age and all one’s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving:—but unpoetical.”14 Feeling trapped in London, Arnold looked to the moon for consolation. His poem “Summer Night” (1851) starts with a problem of urban alienation that he hopes the unworldly moon can resolve: In the deserted moon-blanch’ed street, How lonely rings the echo of my feet! Those windows, which I gaze at, frown, Silent and white, unopening down, Repellent as the world;—but see, A break between the housetops shows The moon!15

The moonlit city repels him, but the moon itself comforts. Arnold praises the moon for avoiding all the earthly woes that trouble him; he hails it as “plainness and clearness without shadow of stain! / Clearness divine!” (76–77). Safely beyond the city, the “untroubled and unpassionate” moon shows us a better way to live: I will rather say that you remain A world above man’s head, to let him see How boundless might his soul’s horizons be, How vast, yet of what clear transparency! How good it were to abide there, and breathe free. (80, 86–90)

Antiurban and aloof, Arnold’s moon helps him get his bearings. He would have agreed with Thoreau that “as the twilight deepens and the moonlight is more and more bright, I begin to distinguish myself—who I am and where.”16 The gaslight era propelled people into a fuller awareness of the moon’s value. In danger of becoming merely ornamental, the moon was rediscovered as a way for people to locate themselves physically and spiritually in an impersonal universe. Art and literature treat the moon’s glow as by turns inspirational, magical, pastoral, pure, and nostalgic. In Moonrise over New York

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Harbor (1871), the American luminist painter Francis Silva took full advantage of the optical illusion that makes a rising moon loom disproportionately large as it clears the horizon. Silva’s centrally placed moon dominates the canvas, casting a peaceful glow that outshines yet harmonizes the lesser lights of ferries and shoreside buildings. Nathaniel Hawthorne mused extensively on moonlight in “The Custom-House” (1850), writing that familiar objects, even his children’s toys, “are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change.” In moonlight, says Hawthorne, we find ourselves “somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” Even the dead may be brought back to life; it would be no surprise, Hawthorne remarks, to see “a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine.”17 The magic works when traveling, too. For Mark Twain, the Venetian moonlight reanimated the past, factual or fictive: In the glare of day there is little poetry about Venice, but under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again . . . and the old city seems crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago. It is easy then in fancy to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies—with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals . . . with Othellos and Desdemonas.18

Moonlight can also take us into our past lives, remind us of home, lead us toward heaven, show us purity in a fallen world. In his travel book American Notes (1842), Charles Dickens mentions no moons on his late-night tours of New York and other American cities, but as his ship nears the British Isles on the return journey, he suddenly has a lunar vision that links home with heaven: “The rising of the moon . . . has an air of melancholy grandeur, which, in it soft and gentle influence, seems to comfort while it saddens. I recollect when I was a very young child, having a fancy that the reflection of the moon in water was a path to heaven, trodden by the spirits of good people on their way to God.”19 This connection of moonlight with childhood and religion broadens out into a general nostalgia for the preindustrial past, as in Carl Spitzweg’s moonlit nocturnal reminiscences, painted after the arrival of gas. The Sleeping Nightwatchman (c. 1860) and Walking Home by Night (c. 1855–1860) depict a vanished world of men in cocked hats and knee breeches who doze in or wander through silent streets where the shadows are cast by moonlight, and gas lamps have never been dreamed of. Linking the moon to the presumed freshness and innocence of the countryside,

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Blake writes in Songs of Innocence that “the moon like a flower. . . . Sits and smiles on the night,” but in his Songs of Experience, the “midnight streets” of London resonate with “the youthful Harlot’s curse.” As in George Foster’s New York, moonlight is the symbol of a sexual innocence soon lost in the city. In short, moonlight showed city dwellers a better world. Its appeal increased in proportion to its viewers’ dissatisfaction with their surroundings. In the late eighteenth century, William Cowper summed up in a striking fashion the perceived antagonism between the moon and the modern city. For probably the first time in nocturnal poetry, the now-ubiquitous conjunction of moonlight and streetlight makes its entrance. Dismissing London’s nascent lighting system, the poet sniffs: “We can spare / The splendor of your lamps; they but eclipse / Our softer satellite.” Cowper, who is best known for his line “God made the country, and man made the town,” here reiterates his priorities.20 The visual threat that artificial lighting poses to “our softer satellite” announces a fundamental aesthetic problem of urban art—how to discover anything “poetic” in the city at night. Cowper realized that the moon was under siege and no longer fully at home in the city. At first, people saw the situation as Cowper did; the city lights were misplaced, not the moon. But as gaslight spread, moonless views of urban terrain increased in number. In Adolph Menzel’s Departure after the Party (1860) the artist’s dinner guests stretch in a casual frieze across the canvas in groups of light and dark, under the mellow glow of what must be the first streetlight—as opposed to moon—ever glimpsed through a tangle of branches and leaves. Could some of the moon’s poetry be transferred to lamplit streets? Or did the moon simply not matter any more, its partisans being hopeless reactionaries whose night was over? By the early twentieth century a decisive answer came from New York: night’s magic now depended on artificial light. As a source of inspiration, the moon itself was finished. In 1906, a few years before Marinetti’s Futurists imagined assassinating the moon with three hundred spotlights, one of O. Henry’s characters asserted that it was more artistically rewarding to gaze upward toward the elevated train: When ye came upon me I was in contemplation of the elevated road in conjunction with the chief luminary of night. The rapid transit is poetry and art: the moon but a tedious, dry body, moving by rote.

Technology had edged out nature. But old conventions die slowly, and O. Henry’s nocturnal afficionado, no doubt speaking for the author, acknowledges that “these are private opinions, for, in the business of literature, the conditions are reversed.”21

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The conventions were still strong enough in the 1920s for Harlem poet Claude McKay to try to finish Cowper’s implicit narrative and send the moon back to the country where it belonged. In “Moon Song” (1922), McKay argues that the moon is simply out of place in a city like New York: Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from thin lines, To lovely, living things indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

So it might as well take its antiquated light and clear out: There is no magic from your presence here, O moon, mad moon, tuck up your trailing robe, Its silver seems so ancient and severe Against the glow of one electric globe. Go spill your beauty on the laughing faces Of happy flowers. . . .22

By McKay’s time New York had become the capital of the night, and the moonlight was in full retreat, even from “the glow of one electric globe.” Unwanted and unexpected, the moon could be confused with its rivals, even by a poet. In the 1930s, Charles Reznikoff summed up the moon’s decline: “Coming up the subway stairs / I thought the moon / only another street-light / a little crooked.”23 Given how strongly Romantics and Victorians held their lunar allegiance in the face of gaslight, technological change alone does not explain how the moon lost artistic altitude and dropped to streetlight level. A crucial step along the way was the artist’s decision to leave the moon itself out of the picture, so as to focus on the effect of its still-magical light. If the resilience of the moon as a poetic symbol was due in part to the rise of the industrialized, urbanized world that outshone it, the same was true for dreamy night scenes. The nocturne transferred to fragments of urban darkness—now mostly shattered and reassembled by innumerable lights—many of the qualities associated with the moonlit landscape. If one knew where and how to look, one might find some of the reflective and inspiring effects of rural night relocated to the big city. Yet henceforth the shapes and colors of the sublunar world would be drawn with a difference. Whistler created in his nocturnes a challenging form of art whose deep obscurity and fiery sparks doctored the beleaguered moonlight with novel tints, textures, and emotions. Though he lifted the night to new levels of popularity, the moon would never rise so high again.

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No More Than I Wish Whistler originally called his night paintings “moonlights.” But one has only to compare them to the work of Vernet, Turner, and Hunt to appreciate the upsetting effect that Whistler had on his audience. Accustomed to hard edges, brilliant colors, and well-defined settings with obvious content, they were served a watery soup of sky and sea, with soggy bits of land floating in the middle. Like Longfellow’s forest primeval, Whistler’s paintings were “indistinct in the twilight,” their purpose hard to make out. His moonlight was muffled; it never gathered itself into a radiant reflection or a glittering trail on the water. It signaled its presence only through a diffused bluish or greenish haze that made objects visible merely in outline. Yet in rejecting the silvery illumination of his predecessors, Whistler found he could use obscurity itself to reveal unsuspected formal and psychological depths in the urban landscape. More than anything else, it was this receptive attitude toward darkness that distinguished a Whistler nocturne from an ordinary night scene or “moonlight.” When, around 1870, Edgar Degas noted to himself that “the smartest thing is not always to reveal the source of light, but the effect of light,” Whistler had already begun to apply this idea in a sustained way, outdoors rather than in. Whistler borrowed the moonlight but ignored the moon itself. When Degas commented, “This area of art can become very important today,” he was anticipating the immense furor over—and later artists’ embracing of—Whistler’s nocturnes.24 Because of his effort to record fleeting effects, Whistler was regarded at the time as an impressionist. It has even been suggested that Claude Monet’s famous Impression: Sunrise (1873), from which the movement takes its name, was inspired by Monet’s acquaintance with Whistler’s work.25 Situating the artificial light of fireworks and distant gaslights along the Thames within the context of his misty moon glow, Whistler balanced his representation between the pastoral and urban worlds. In the 1850s and 1860s, the dark Thames attracted the interest of several painters, including George Price Boyce, William Inchbold, and Hunt, and the simplified forms necessitated by the night view has given their work, retrospectively, a “Whistlerian” air that Whistler himself probably learned from.26 In particular, Boyce’s nocturnal watercolors, begun in 1863, may have given Whistler the idea of thinning his oil paint to a nearly watery consistency—what Whistler called “sauce”—to obtain a spontaneous, delicately nuanced atmospheric effect.27 In synthesizing these influences, Whistler also built on his familiarity with the moonlit views of the Seine by Johan Barthold Jongkind, and the stripped-down seascapes that he and Gustave Courbet had produced together in 1865. Usually regarded as Whistler’s first night piece, the Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso (c. 1866–1874), apparently depicts the artist’s impression of

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Figure 2.5. James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Nocturne: Grey and Silver—Chelsea Embankment, Winter, c. 1879. Oil on canvas, 24 5/8
18 5/8 in. (62.6
47.5 cm). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer [F1902.143]

Spanish ships shelling the Chilean city while he was there in 1866 (color plate 7).28 At this point Whistler had been studying Japanese art for several years, and had used Eastern costumes, pottery, and other trappings in his paintings in the early 1860s. But now Japanese formal qualities—a tilted and flattened picture plane, abrupt foreground shapes, asymmetrical composition, and an ornamental use of fireworks whose graceful curves echo those of human figures—found their way into his work.29 Whistler’s thin, watery paint, showing his sweeping brushstrokes as well as the weave of the canvas, allows the ships to dissolve into their delicate reflections and gives to the jutting pier, with its almost-indistinguishable figures, a melting, almost transparent quality. With its dim fluidity, its lack of moon, edge, and anecdote, its symbolic and maybe sexual suggestiveness, the painting recalls lines sixty-three to sixty-four of Whitman’s dream vision in “The Sleepers”: “Pier that I saw dimly last night . . . / Pier out from the main.”

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Figure 2.6. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Chelsea, 1871. Oil on wood, 19 ¾
24 in. (50.2
60.8 cm), support 502
608 mm. The Tate Gallery, London. Photo: The Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York

By renouncing the quest for nocturnal clarity, Whistler had found a way to make his images illusionistic mirrors to nature, capturing the atmospheric effect realistically, while at the same time treating them as nearly abstract arrangements of form and color.30 In Nocturne: Grey and Silver—Chelsea Embankment, Winter (c. 1879), for example, the dimness that obscures details coincides perfectly with Whistler’s unwillingness to convey any kind of subject or story. The boats make intriguing shapes in the thick atmosphere, and we can make of it what we will. His success in turning the Victorian rendering of night from a moral lesson into a tantalizing blur seems confirmed by a letter from Degas to their mutual friend James Tissot: “Remember me to . . . Whistler who has really found a personal note in that well-balanced expression, mysterious mingling of land and water.”31 Of the Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Chelsea (1871), one of the first nocturnes to be exhibited, the painter Edward Poynter said that it “renders the poetical side of the scene better than any moonlight picture I ever saw.”32 There

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is no moon or distinct shadow visible, simply transparent reflections and a lighter tone to the left center of the painting where the moonlight touches sky and water. Whistler draws out the “poetry” of the view through the careful design of his flat shapes, a human figure and a rectangular signature at the bottom balancing a tower and its reflection at the top; lights on the far shore are echoed by the lamp on the foreground barge and the gold of the butterfly signature. Here Whistler uses a Friedrich-style device he would later discontinue: representing artist and viewer, the man on the shore stares at the scene in apparent admiration. He could well be the famously egotistical Whistler patting himself on the back. Critics eventually caught up with Whistler’s friends in their praise of his accuracy: a reviewer wrote in the Atheneum in 1882 that Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Silver: Cremorne Lights (1872) showed “with exquisite gradations and perfect truth one of those lovely effects of dimly illuminated morning mists on the Thames which nature evidently intended Mr. Whistler to paint.”33 Whistler’s taking of the title “Nocturne” was a calculated statement of his French-inflected avant-garde intentions.34 As he developed his musical titles (“Arrangements,” “Harmonies,” “Symphonies”), Whistler took advantage of the movement toward synesthesia in the arts. In 1873, about the time that Whistler started showing his nocturnes, Walter Pater announced that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”35 But well before that, artists, musicians, and writers were trying to mix their media. In 1852, Théophile Gautier published his poem “Symphonie en blanc majeur” (“Symphony in White Major”); in 1854, Franz Liszt coined the musical term “symphonic poem”; in 1867, Whistler first gave a musical title to one of his canvases, the Symphony in White, No. 3; and when Claude Debussy applied the title “Nocturnes” to one of his symphonic poems a few decades later, he confessed he was thinking neither of music nor literature, but of Whistler’s art. The emergence of the nocturne might be read as proof of Pater’s theory, proof of a revolt against literary or visual criteria valuing light and distinctness above darkness and nuance. Moody, evocative, aspiring to a musical freedom from denotation even as it claimed mimetic accuracy, the nocturne undermined the intense particularity and self-consciousness of high Victorian poetry and painting. The liminal quality of night held an attraction for the many poets and painters—Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Georges Seurat, Odilon Redon, George Inness, and Ryder among them—who like Whistler broached nocturnal themes around this time. Exploring the shadowy areas between the abstract, aural, temporal nature of music and the representational, visual, spatial nature of art, they discovered that they could readily enter this symbolrich aesthetic frontier by taking darkness itself as their subject. Those who called their works “nocturne” could regard themselves as participating in a literary, musical, or artistic tradition, and perhaps all three at once. The flexibility

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Figure 2.7. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1876. Oil on canvas, 18 ¼
24 ¾ in. (46.35
62.87 cm). Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop. Photo: Katya Kallsen. © President and Fellows of Harvard College

of the term suggests the fluidity of artistic boundaries between light and dark, urban and natural, visual, verbal, and musical expression.36 Having studied in Paris in the 1850s, Whistler imported to London Gautier’s idea of a boundarybreaking art for art’s sake when he moved there in 1859. In fact, Whistler himself did not begin calling his night pieces “nocturnes” until 1872, six years after the Valparaiso painting. In a letter to his patron Frederick Leyland, who suggested the term to him, Whistler said: “I can’t thank you enough for the name Nocturne as a title for my moonlights! You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me—besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish.”37 Whistler later declared that people supposed “I intended some way or other to show a connection between the two arts [of painting and music], whereas I had no such intention.”38 As the thank-you note indicates, causing “irritation” was a primary objective for Whistler. His musical terminology struck most contemporaries as highly arbitrary, and the titles were ridiculed as often as the paintings. The first instance that the Oxford English Dictionary cites of the term “nocturne” being applied to painting is an anti-Whistlerian warning to artists: “don’t be bothered with symphonies and nocturns.”39 The carefully calculated notoriety of the nocturnes would delight and bedevil Whistler for the rest of his life.

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But aside from Whistler’s desire to annoy his critics, the Leyland letter shows how in Whistler’s mind the ideas of poetry and expressiveness—“say all I want to say”—were linked to reticence—“no more than I wish.” Thus from the start, what the nocturne title did not reveal had a great attraction for Whistler. In the Nocturne in Blue and Silver—Bognor (1872–1876), for example, the wording of the title displaces content as the main concern, and stresses darkness, atmosphere, and color—the subject itself is only of secondary interest, a sort of footnote for the curious.40 Whistler later declared that the word nocturne “is meant to divest the picture from any outside anecdotal interest.”41 In this spirit, he remarked of his Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow (1876), which shows a small figure before a lighted tavern, “I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot.”42 All he would have to do to sell it for a large sum, he noted, would be to title it “Trotty Veck” after the pitiful character in Dickens’s “The Chimes” (1844). But contending that “art should be independent of all clap-trap,” Whistler refused anecdote as he refused detail, because “subject matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.”43 Instead of telling a story, the black figure works to decenter the composition. It pulls the eye away from the central, glowing window and large gas lamp outside it, and connects the foreground snow to the dark masses of buildings that dominate the upper half of the picture. The black figure also raises the question of the artistic meaning of another dark individual, the boatman in the famous Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–1975) (color late 8). Unlike the French Impressionists, who often went into sun-drenched fields with brush in hand, Whistler painted his nocturnes indoors, in the controlled twilight of a curtained studio. First, however, he gave lengthy study to the view, spending hours out on the river in a boat at night, or staring from the river or bank at the pattern of lights and dark outlines on the far shore.44 This memory method, learned from followers of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran in Whistler’s student days in Paris, helped the artist filter out extraneous detail, and shape the scene into a tonally harmonious and formally balanced whole. But even as it aided Whistler to capture the essence of a evanescent effect, the procedure would, like a long time exposure, have let moving river traffic “ghost” out of the composition, as do the disappearing pedestrians in the early photographs of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce or Louis Daguerre. Perhaps Whistler added the clearly outlined boatman, whose pose suggests a Venetian gondolier, because he and his boat were “wanted at that spot”—to create a strong, dark inverse curve that would balance the arc of the bridge above them. The curve of the boatman’s back also echoes the curve of the descending fireworks. If we step past the strict formalism that Whistler encouraged, we are likely to feel that the power of the picture depends on our inability to see

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the whole of the bridge, or just who steers the boat. Is he a London waterman heading home, or is he Charon crossing the River Styx? Ruskin’s lawyer thought the bridge looked like a telescope, and in a sense he was right: the painting is an instrument designed to show us something far away—eternity—and make it seem very near.46 The still scene holds its rising and falling rockets (shot off from the nearby Cremorne Gardens) forever in suspense like the lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn. It speaks of a timeless moment on the river of time, while the time-bound tower of Chelsea Church, visually balancing the passing boatman, juts from the dark at the left-hand side, its clock face all aglow. The vertical thrust of the picture, not fully contained by the span of the bridge, would soon assume a special resonance as New Yorkers tried to deal artistically with the increasing verticality of their actual landscape. Both Whistler and his American successors found that one way to move from the pastoral world of moonlight to the urban world of fireworks and artificial light was by favoring Japanese compositional devices over Western perspective. Whistler bought and poured over Japanese prints, especially those of Ando Hiroshige, such as his Fireworks, Riogoku (1858) or his view of Kyoto Bridge by Moonlight (c. 1855), which Whistler referred to when he painted a Japanese-style screen of the same view (1872); he then went on to incorporate the same structure in Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge. The ferryman gliding under the arch of the bridge, but away from the viewer, can be found in Hiroshige’s Kyobashi Bamboo Market (1858). The result of Whistler’s Japanese study is the dramatic flattening of the picture plane and the heightening—quite literally here, since the actual Battersea Bridge had very low arches—of structural elements. Works such as Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge would, just as Whistler hoped, teach his viewers to see the urban landscape in a new way. He bathed the bridge’s horizontal span with mist, darkness, and descending sparks to liberate its bold, distinctive, overarching architectural form. Like the dwarfed ferryman, viewers needed to reorient the axis of their vision. In the urban night, things were looking up.

As with a Veil Despite his desire to let darkness speak for itself, Whistler himself could not resist fabricating his own art-for-art’s-sake narrative of how the night serenades the superior artist. He used the nocturne to insist on one of the basic tenets of modernism: the autonomy of the work of art—a work that finds its raison d’être in the privileged vision of its maker. Whistler expressed his theory most fully in his controversial “Ten O’Clock” lecture of 1885, a statement about urban aesthetics important enough to rival Burke’s ideas of the sublime. Whereas Burke argued that “terror is in all cases

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whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime,” Whistler focused on the subduing of strong emotion.46 He shifted emphasis from the observer’s moral reaction to a nocturnal scene toward the sensitivity with which the artist had rendered it. Dressing workaday London in the deep shades of night, Whistler’s nocturnes create a dream city whose vague shapes and blurry atmosphere help the artist, self-consciously arranging colors on a flat surface, transform his base urban material into the gold of lasting art. In his lecture, Whistler makes clear how darkness paradoxically illuminates the allure of the dormant city’s body: When the evening mist clothes the riverside in poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone. . . .47

This much-quoted passage, likely based on Gautier’s account of a visit to London in 1842, moves in one grand sentence from the night’s arrival to clothe the city in “poetry,” to the magical, transformative effects of that veiling on ordinary buildings and chimneys, to the amatory uniqueness of the artist’s vision: he is the only one to listen when nature, “for once,” sings in tune.48 Whistler intriguingly uses darkness as a veil that reveals rather than covers—one that discloses to the artist’s eye the unheralded beauties of abstract form hidden by the garish light of common day.49 He presents the city as a seductive body whose magnetism increases beneath its poetic clothing. The passage about the poetry of evening follows an attack on repulsive daytime clarity, in which Whistler disdainfully remarks that “seldom does Nature succeed in producing a picture. . . . The holiday-maker rejoices in the glorious day, and the painter turns aside to shut his eyes” (143–44). Whistler’s adversaries sensed in this aversion to daylight an inability to measure up to its artistic demands. “When he comes out into the open,” wrote one critic, “and deals with daylight, we find these studies to be only the first washes of pictures. He leaves off where other artists begin. He shirks all the difficulties ahead, and asks the spectator to complete the picture himself.”50 Yet asking for the audience’s participation “to complete the picture” would be a hallmark of the modernist art to come; Robert Browning, whose elliptical dramatic monologues decisively influenced Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, was frequently reproved for doing just that. There are parallels also to the impressionists’ requiring the eye of the viewer to mix colors laid

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side by side on the canvas. As he drapes the city’s distressingly naked daytime in the veils of evening, Whistler engages his audience by disengaging beauty from what he knew most people saw as ugly; the impact comes from their discovering how wrong they were. His nocturnes deliberately reject the veiling metaphor as used in the popular press. Preferring sensationalism to mystery, reformers in the Babylonian city of New York would routinely claim to “tear away veils” or “lift up masks”; the title of Foster’s New York Naked says it all.51 But Whistler wished to render the veil itself. His thin layers of paint, allowing the weave of the canvas to loom through, act like literal veils, granting provocative glimpses of the mystery beneath their charm. The viewer completes the picture imaginatively, drawn by the veil but unable to draw it aside. Moreover, the fairyland that Whistler sees through the veil undergoes a transformation of its own. Throughout the nineteenth century, “fairy land” and innumerable lights go together: when the American visitor Benjamin Silliman said of Vauxhall in 1805 that it was “a scene . . . splendid beyond description, and almost beyond conception, exceeding all that poets have told of fairy lands and Elysian Fields,” he was like countless others awed by the sparkle of myriad candles and lamps.52 But Whistler’s fairyland is far more subtle, a few lights scattered like fireflies across vast expanses of dimly moonlit water. Whistler’s feminizing veils also lend the night power. They change it from something the artist is repelled by to something that enthralls him. For not only do Whistler’s nocturnes bridge the rural and the urban, they also inhabit the boundary between the sublime and the beautiful, between what Burke sees as dominantly masculine and pliantly feminine; “we submit to what we admire,” Burke says, “but we love what submits to us.”53 Whistler concludes his description of nightfall by having it both ways; he asserts that Nature sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her. To him her secrets are unfolded, to him her lessons have become gradually clear. (144–45)

Famous for turning his beloved mother into an Arrangement in Grey and Black, Whistler sought to control what he admired; he routinely referred to himself as “the Master.” In a nocturnal Oedipal scenario, motherly Nature receives filial respect but also yields up her secrets to the artist’s persistent gaze. Even as the darkness hides what he does not wish to see, Whistler “unfolds” an elusive beauty, an urban intimacy that only the artist can “know.” With their rivers and bridges, pleasure gardens and feux d’artifice, Whistler’s nocturnes occupy an eroticized border area between mastery and submission, such that the infernal chasms and cataclysms of the romantic sublime find their tamed

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yet tempting counterparts in enveloping mists and looming pylons. Night, as Whistler paints it, does not awe—it invites and embraces.54 In having Nature sing “to the artist alone” Whistler implies that the artist is an indispensable middleman, for his painting, not the city itself, is the source of the viewer’s experience. The artist awaits the “tune” that the common herd cannot hear. While the flâneur reports to his audience what others might find, if only they would bestir themselves, the artist plays a more significant role in unveiling the delights of his veiled subject. Before his viewers can see (or hear), the artist must first open the doors of perception. In 1879, the critic William Brownell commented that “but for the Nocturne in Blue and Silver, the thing of which it is in any strict sense a portrait would never have been visible.”55 Yet Whistler’s graceful cover-up of the city’s body could not fully hide the economic basis of his newfound artistic wealth. While the “poor buildings” conveniently “lose themselves in the dim sky,” and the tall chimneys of London factories become Venetian-style “campanili,” Whistler boldly turns riverside warehouses into palaces. But it was clear what they really were: Dickens had commented on this magic trick, with knowing irony, in Hard Times (1854): “The lights in the great factories . . . looked, when they were illuminated, like Fairy places—or the travellers by express-train said so.”56 Whistler opposes his veiled “poetry” to the implied “prose” of the real world, but “poetic” water and mist depend on a base, formal and economic, of the shore, shipping, factories, and “poor buildings”—workers’ housing. The poetic veil is a double cover-up, a formal strategy that also wants to forget the mercantile world it entices. Though commerce is decorously draped, warehouses produce the funds needed to buy and build palaces for the new plutocracy, like the patrons Leyland and Charles Lang Freer, who would hang Whistlers therein. While it is one of Whistler’s great contributions to the visual appreciation of the city, this metamorphosis of industry into art points to a further sleight of hand implicit in Whistler’s art of nocturnal disguise: the presentation of art and artist as autonomous, existing freely outside contemporary social and moral structures. “The master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs,” Whistler wrote in the “Ten O’Clock” lecture. He is “a monument of isolation—hinting at sadness—having no part in the progress of his fellow men” (154–55). Yet in his own life, Whistler found how much the moment wanted to confine the Master, and how little progress, aesthetically speaking, had been made by his contemporaries.

Fireworks in Court The “Ten O’Clock” lecture insists on the artist’s nocturnal control of the crude, commercial daytime city because Whistler had already been assaulted

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from that quarter. Affecting to disdain money, he painfully confronted the power of the “cash nexus,” a term invented by one of his sitters, Thomas Carlyle. It was a nocturnal view of fireworks at Cremorne Gardens that brought the issue into the open. In July 1877, after viewing Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875) at the Grosvenor Gallery, Ruskin wrote, “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” (color plate 9).57 Enraged by Ruskin’s attack and the subsequent publicity it received in the newspapers, Whistler sued Ruskin for libel. In the trial that ensued in November 1878, Whistler’s spirited defense of spontaneous composition, the privileged subjectivity of the artist’s vision, and art for art’s sake confronted the high Victorian values championed in Ruskin’s criticism: a belief in the moral value of detail and finish, the obligation of mimesis, and the sacred duty of art to uplift its audience.58 Ruskin’s hostility toward Whistler’s nocturnes was not in itself unusual or unexpected, since Whistler had rejoiced in the abrasive possibilities when he first adopted “nocturne” as a title. Yet even before the name was attached, the style of the nocturnes themselves seems to have been provocative. Poynter wrote to Whistler in 1871 on one of the first occasions that a nocturne was shown publicly, with other paintings at the Dudley Gallery: “One of yours is perfectly placed, but the other the moonlight seems to have riled the hangers for they have placed it badly.”59 At the Whistler-Ruskin trial the nocturnes called in as exhibits were repeatedly held upside down, but several months earlier, wags had already written in to newspapers pretending that they had bought a Whistler and were uncertain of which way to hang it on the wall.60 A newspaper image demonstrates just how embattled Whistler was. He occasionally grew frustrated at the necessity of having to defend himself against a hostile public with pen and brush alone. On one occasion he delivered a knockout punch to a member of his club, and another time he pushed his brother-in-law through a plate glass window. Shortly afterward, a cartoon of a black-eyed pugilist appeared in the June 25, 1878, issue of Mayfair magazine. Amid the Nocturne in Black and Gold controversy, the cartoon implied, Whistler had been trying to give the Victorian art world a Knockturn in Black and Blue. Black or otherwise, it is difficult for the eye to master the Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. The painting represents a fireworks display at Cremorne Gardens, not far from Whistler’s house in Chelsea. Whistler’s scene looks at first like sparks falling in an inkpot. There’s little to help viewers decipher the shapes or decide whether the fiery spectacle at the pleasure ground has something deliberately infernal about it. One way to make sense of the picture is to imagine the viewer’s eye following a path that mimics the trajectory of the fireworks: we move from the central

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Figure 2.8. Anonymous, A Knockturn in Black and Blue. In Mayfair magazine, June 25, 1878

explosion to the bright bursts at the top of the canvas, and then to the two strings of sparks that drift down the upper half of the picture.61 But that’s too programmatic for Whistler. He has the eye drawn first to a visual crossroads, the horizontal and vertical outline of the fireworks platform, at the point of greatest contrast between dark and light. Here, a lavalike river of light seeps out under the blackest shape in the painting—a tree that reaches to the top of the left-hand side. From the lava line, the eye can move up with the fireworks or diagonally down toward shadowy figures at the bottom of the canvas. Seen this way, the affinity of The Falling Rocket with Whistler’s other nocturnes becomes clear. The thin transparency of the paint augments the effect of the glaring reflections that Whistler carefully limns on the pavement by the platform edge, making this very much like a Thames scene, with the foreground figures, also transparent, watching on the greenish tan walkway, as if from a sandy shore. Working at the conjunction of realism and abstraction, Whistler conveys the experience of watching fireworks even as he carefully arranges and balances patterns of light and dark, horizontal and vertical planes. With its fiery sparks drifting down against a blue-black sky, The Falling Rocket abandons the soothing moonlit tints of the pastoral nocturnal tradition to revel in the sudden disorienting glare of artificial light.62 But the painting’s style was not the only stumbling block for viewers. The respectability of the location was as doubtful as the artistic approach. When the aristocratic Vauxhall and Ranelagh faded at midcentury, the decidedly downscale Cremorne Gardens had stepped in to commodify pleasure for a mass audience. Offering dancing, dining, music, and fireworks as

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well as balloon ascents and acrobatics, the semisuburban pleasure ground of Cremorne packaged the thrills of darkness for a profit. The entertainments invited members of the middle class to shed their inhibitions and cavort like—and even among—the profligate nobility or intemperate poor whose behavior they normally condemned.63 Allegations that the park admitted easy women and prostitutes were frequent, and Cremorne Gardens closed shortly after the Whistler-Ruskin affair. In 1878, Cremorne was almost as much on trial as was Whistler; in trying to judge how well the Nocturne in Black and Gold represented the park, Ruskin’s lawyer remarked, “I hope [the ladies] have never been to Cremorne—(Laughter)—but men will know far more about it.”64 Anticipating later views of Coney Island, Whistler skirted the social issue by rendering the sights at Cremorne almost abstractly, reducing rituals of recreation to planes of somber color down which fiery flecks of exploding rockets fell. Still, the Cremorne nocturnes exploited a moral uncertainty that paralleled the visual disorientation. Even as Whistler de-commercialized Cremorne, claiming that his was an “artistic arrangement” rather than a view of the place, the depth of his darkness encouraged people to find something illicit hidden in it. If the painting was an experience, not a depiction, it seemed to be seconding the dark, immoral associations that the public had with Cremorne. One of the series, Nocturne, Cremorne Gardens, No. 3 (1872–1877), showed a distant man and woman, formally dressed, heading off into the gloom to the side of the canvas. Tartarean or technical, Whistler’s treatment of the festivities hovered on the edge of the infernal sublime. If one could have figured out what he was painting, one might have said it looked like hell. Yet in his smoky, sparky turmoil, Whistler had little in common with earlier renditions of fireworks by Joseph Wright, Hiroshige, or anyone else. Not only did Whistler make no effort to strike awe with his scene, he did not even describe it fully enough to give viewers the sense of being in a specific locale, such as a town square or a palace garden. Though “accurate” to modern eyes as a rendering of what one might see, the painting allows the silent, private quality of the experience to dominate. With its possibly Pandemonian and Babylonian subtext, The Falling Rocket could be depicting the city of darkness overpowering the city of light—were it not that Whistler seems never to have thought along these lines, visually or literarily. Though quite different from Martin or Turner, Whistler would have agreed with Burke that “night [is] more sublime and solemn than day”—even as he would have added that night was more poetic and abstract, too.65– In his effort to shun moral impact and sentimental moonshine, he tries to make a natural, physical darkness prevail, even as the radical artificialness of his art, imaged by the feux d’artifice, bursts through the blackness. But at the trial the pressing moral issue was “finish,” not frolic. It was a question of value for money. Was Whistler’s work in a sufficiently finished

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state to justify the high price he asked? Or was it so sketchy as to justify Ruskin’s charge of impudence? The key moment came when it was established that Whistler had often completed a picture in just one or two days. When Ruskin’s attorney pounced—“The labor of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?”—Whistler answered triumphantly, “No;—I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”66 Besides insisting on the value of unique know-how rather than the number of hours worked, Whistler satirized those penny-pinchers who wanted a painting to contain more than could be seen, just to make sure they had not been cheated. “There is a cunning condition of mind that requires to know,” Whistler stated. “In the painting trade this would induce certain picture-makers to cross the river at noon, in a boat, before negotiating a Nocturne, in order to make sure of detail on the bank, that honestly the purchaser might exact, and out of which he might have been tricked by the Night!”67 It is ironic that Ruskin’s desire for a high degree of execution prevented his seeing in Whistler some of the very qualities of atmospheric realism that he had praised in Turner. But Ruskin also missed the content and “ideas” that Whistler declined to provide. Above all else, Ruskin expected morality and social commitment from the artist—qualities that a formalist painter like Whistler openly scorned.68 Ruskin spoke for his era when he declared in Modern Painters that the great artist was one whose art contained “the greatest number of the greatest ideas.” But Whistler looked forward to twentieth-century painting when he insisted that his works were simply technical challenges, resolutely devoid of deeper meanings: “The picture is throughout a problem that I attempt to solve.”69 The larger aim of the “Ten O’Clock” lecture, written partially in response to the events of the trial, is to proclaim the independence of art from nature, morality, and its historical moment, to assert that art does not instruct in any conventional sense; as Whistler put it, “Art is.”70 For Whistler, the genius of the artist lies in his ability to see exceptionally, to transform cacophony into harmony, to create from his vision a sacred icon—but that icon is still an object made for sale. The legal complaint Whistler made to initiate the proceedings was that Ruskin’s unwarranted criticism had diminished his, Whistler’s, ability to make a living by selling his works. He claimed one thousand pounds in damages. Thus while denying the social function of art, Whistler insisted in court on its exceptional worth, both aesthetic and financial, for an educated elite in a free market system. Whistler, like Oscar Wilde after him, had a curious faith in the public he reviled. But most people, then as now, would not rest content with Whistler’s minimal formulation. They wanted the rest of the equation: Art is . . . what? Whistler might have agreed with the twentieth-century sentiment that “art is what you can get away with,” but he also found out that

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what one can get away with is constrained by Andy Warhol’s more practical definition: “Good art is what sells.”71 Legally, Whistler won the verdict, but the one farthing in damages he received indicated how trivial the court found the whole issue. In a larger sense, both men lost: Ruskin’s already-fading influence declined further, and Whistler, as he had accurately predicted, found his livelihood evaporating. He was immediately bankrupted by the court costs, and his paintings, unlike his etchings, did not sell well for the next decade. Despite his best efforts, he failed to convince the public that the Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket was a commodity worth two hundred guineas. By an ironic twist of the marketplace, Whistler became, against his will, proof of his own assertion that “the master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs.” But Whistler’s presentation of his concepts, especially as retold in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, helped him win his suit with posterity, and the notorious Falling Rocket was eventually bought by aAmerican collector for eight hundred guineas, or “four pots of paint,” as Whistler gleefully put it. The painting toured six U.S. cities in 1883 and was frequently exhibited in New York, where many artists and photographers would have seen it between 1901 and 1904, along with other Whistlers such as Nocturne—Blue and Silver—Bognor.72 At the trial, Ruskin’s attorney looked at the Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge and wondered if that “structure in the middle” was a bridge, and if so, and those were people on it, then “how in the name of fortune were they to get off ?”73 What only a few could see at the time was that Whistler’s bridge connected a multitude of aesthetic elements and carried them right back on to the canvas. In Whistler’s view, the bridge takes us nowhere but here; as one of the foremost examples of Aestheticism, the painting is its own destination. Yet it and the other urban nocturnes soon became a destination that artists and writers were eager to visit: a bridge to modernism.

Everywhere I Looked I Saw Whistlers Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and give me the nocturne over again. —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray74

Suddenly, nocturnes were everywhere. Not only artists but also American and continental tourists came to London to see the fogs that Whistler had made visible and beautiful. In 1888, several newspapers recorded the incident in which an American woman raved to Whistler about the stunning

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effects of mist and fog on the Thames at night: “Everywhere I looked I saw Whistlers.” “I dare say, ma’am,” Whistler replied, “Nature is creeping up.”75 In “The Decay of Lying” (1889), Wilde was not far from the truth when he wrote, “To whom, if not to [the impressionists] and their master [Whistler], do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art.”76 Arthur Symons wrote in London: A Book of Aspects (1909) that “the English mist is always at work like a subtle painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for the mist to work on.” Later in the book Symons declared simply, “Whistler has created the Thames for most people.”77 Whistler had made the way in which night enfolded the city one of London’s chief attractions. Shifting the emphasis of urban art from topography to atmosphere, the nocturne attracted not only British and American artists but even Whistler’s friend Monet, who painted his Thames scenes from the same room at the Savoy Hotel that Whistler had used for a series of lithographs.78 An army of dedicated followers was soon painting the urban night in ways “the Master” would approve. Among them were Walter Greaves, George Henry, John Duncan Fergusson, James Lavery, William Stott of Oldham, Ambrose McEvoy, Wilfred Jenkins, Jerome Hamilton Hay, W. L. Wyllie, Théodore Roussel, Joseph Pennell, Paul Maitland, Mortimer Menpes, and Thomas R. Way. Even the decadent illustrator Aubrey Beardsley drew nocturnes and night pieces, including a cover for the infamous Yellow Book that shows a gaslit bookstall by night (1894). With the help of new halftone printing technologies, the Thames nocturne made its debut in magazines and books, as in William Hyde’s The Embankment at Night, published in a book called London Impressions of 1898 with a text by the poet Alice Meynell. And drawn by reflections on wet nights, it was on the Embankment that Paul Martin, a professional illustrator who chronicled London street life, took the first outdoor nocturnal urban photographs, in February 1896.79 Under the combined spell of the French symbolists and Whistler, poets made the London nocturne prominent in the Aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s, as poets scrambled to praise the beauties of dark masses and scattered lights, reflective water and silent streets.80 Wilde freely borrowed Whistler’s musical terminology in “Impression du Matin” (1881), depicting the coming dawn not as moving from dark to light but from one Whistler canvas to another: “The Thames nocturne of blue and gold / Changed to a Harmony in gray.” In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde used Whistler’s ideas liberally, as when the decadent Lord Henry turns unpleasant moral questions into appealing aesthetic mysteries: “It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”81 In the 1890s, in poems such as “April Midnight,” “Nocturne,” and others, Symons devoted more

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Figure 2.9. Aubrey Beardsley, cover design for The Yellow Book, 1894

Figure 2.10. William Hyde, The Embankment at Night. In London Impressions (1898)

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attention than anyone to nocturnal city scenes. In the risqué qualities of their writing, Wilde and Symons signaled the greater social freedom that the gaslit era brought, and they used the night to evoke the sense of escaping the high noon of Victorian inhibitions; as Symons wrote in “Nocturne” (1892), “We were free, / Free of the day and all its cares!” The poetry and illustrated books of the period reveal how many writers took up Whistler’s emphasis on the magical nocturnal transformation of the mundane metropolis. For them the city became a work of art, and they saw it through Whistler’s eyes. Among them were John A. Symonds (“In the Key of Blue” [1893]), Richard Le Gallienne (“A Ballad of London” [1892], and “Sunset in the City” [1892]), Theodore Wratislaw (“Nocturne” [1896], and “On the Embankment” [1893]), Alice Meynell (“November Blue” [1898]), and William Sharp (“A Paris Nocturne” [1893]). Via William Ernest Henley, who devoted much of his poetic energy to trying to capture the look of London, Whistler may even be said to have inspired some of the earliest free verse in England. Finding himself deeply impressed by Whistler’s vision, Henley published the free verse poem “To James McNeill Whistler” (1889) beside a reproduction of the Nocturne in Blue and Gold in A London Garland (1895).82 Henley is best known today for fighting off dark despair in his poem “Invictus”: “Out of the night that covers me / Black as the pit from pole to pole / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.” But when writing about Whistler, he gloried in the gloaming. Attempting to describe Whistler’s delicate tonal modulations, Henley begins, “Under a stagnant sky, / Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom. . . .” The cover of night helped put Victorian poetry on the road to Imagism and the more elliptical styles to follow. The poet Lionel Johnson sensed as much when he complained of Symons’s use of a simple three-stanza structure for his urban scenes: “a London fog, the blurred tawny lamplight, the red omnibus, the dreary rain, the depressing mud, the glaring ginshops, the slatternly shivering women: three dexterous stanzas, telling you that and nothing more.”83 This was precisely the point. Just as Whistler had done, Wilde, Symons, and Henley sought to eliminate superfluous narrative and commentary, presenting only the essence of the image. Pound, in fact, regarded Whistler as a proto-Imagist, and as he launched the Imagist movement in 1912, he wrote that it was “an endeavour to carry into our American poetry the same sort of life and intensity which he [Whistler] infused into modern painting.”84 After Whistler, the moon would never be the same. Though they did not dispense with it, Imagist poets did their best to bring it down to earth. They seem to have agreed with the Italian Futurists, who warned against “intellectual poisons” of the past, including “Romantic sentimentalism streaming with moonlight.”85 Released from convention, the Imagists reversed Arnold’s idealism and drew the moon into everyday life. In “Above the

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Dock” (1912), T. E. Hulme made the London moon a prisoner at the water’s edge: Above the quiet dock in mid night, Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height, Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.86

For Hawthorne, the moonlight had turned even toys into magical entities; Hulme turns the moon itself into a plaything. In Richard Aldington’s “Evening” (1915), the ill-at-ease moon shares the sky with chimneys: The chimneys, rank on rank, Cut the clear sky; The moon With a rag of gauze about her loins Poses among them, an awkward Venus— And here am I looking wantonly at her Over the kitchen sink.87

No longer a divine muse, the moon becomes a sex object for a prosaic poet who seems to be doing the dishes. Perhaps even less respectfully, in “Nocturne” (1916) Arthur Kreymborg imagined the moon shining on dancing breeches: “The pantaloons, / dancing through the night, / pure white pantaloons / underneath the moon.”88 And in “Nocturnes,” a poem published in the first American collection of Imagists, Des Imagistes, Skipworth Cannell abandoned wonder for weaponry, writing “upon my head has the moonlight / fallen / like a sword.”89 Imagists also dealt directly with Whistler’s legacy. John Gould Fletcher, author of delicate poems published in 1913 that he called “Color Symphonies,” claimed he wanted to do for poetry what Whistler had done for painting. Although the artistic desire for a liberating veil of darkness would eventually expire as the formal innovations of modernism took hold, the model continued to exert a powerful attraction well into the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Louis MacNiece, Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Cowley, and Dorothy Parker all wrote early works titled “Nocturne.” Paris, too, played an active role in the development of the nocturne. Around 1900, as symbolism and Whistlerian tonality came to the fore, it would have been possible to rearrange Pater’s theory to say that anything “poetic” constantly aspired toward the condition of Whistler’s art. By then Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1888 translation of the “Ten O’Clock” lecture had been widely read, and Debussy’s “Nocturnes,” first performed in Paris in

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Figure 2.11. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), The Starry Night, 1889. Oil on canvas, 29
36 ¼ in. (74
92 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest [472.1941]. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

1901, showed how musically styled art might make the transition back into artful music. Whistler’s atmospheric urban vision emerged in paintings such as Eugène Carrière’s Place Clichy at Night (1899–1900) and Henri Le Sidaner’s La Place de la Concorde au clair de lune (c. 1910). While many poets titled poems “Nocturne,” Gustave Kahn’s “Nocturne” (1886), clearly inspired by Whistler, went the furthest. As a Symbolist, Kahn abandoned any idea of exterior landscape in order to create synesthetic evocations of evanescent color, shadow, and sound: “A little blond, a little blue, a little white . . . a little sound, some sweet perfumes, and [play it] very slowly.”90 In 1905, the critic Camille Mauclair proclaimed that the inevitable fusion of the arts would prove that the aims of Debussy, Whistler, and Le Sidaner were all analogous; and that the nocturnes of Whistler and Le Sidaner were rising out of the ruins of tradition to furnish “the aesthetic of the future.”91 Yet despite Whistler’s immense influence, the future did not belong entirely to him. The painting destined to become the most famous product of

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this fascination with night was painted not in Paris but in Provence, and it seems to owe as much to Whitman’s New York as to Whistler’s London. Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) outshone all its contemporaries in finding a new way to paint the night. Van Gogh lived in the London area for several years in the mid-1870s; like Whistler, he was interested in the range of London life, and both artists were influenced by Japanese prints. In his letters of 1888 he often adopts Whistler’s vocabulary, speaking of color as music and envisioning a series of sunflower paintings that would be a “symphony in blue and yellow.”92 Aware of the nocturnal craze, he would have had Whistler’s work in mind and memory by the time he came to paint his own night scenes. In Starry Night, the prevailing blue-green tone and the pronounced golden light in the upper right corner parallel Whistler’s practice, even as van Gogh increases the emotional intensity with his swirling brushstrokes.93 But leading up to Starry Night, the artist’s close reading of Whitman was probably just as formative. He would have known such lines as these from section 21 of “Song of Myself ”: “Press close bare-bosom’d night—press close magnetic nourishing night! / Night of the south winds—night of the large few stars!” Apparently van Gogh was especially concerned with a poem in the “From Noon to Starry Night” section of Leaves of Grass, called “Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling.” There, Whitman salutes the radiant sun and orders it: “Prepare the later afternoon of me myself—prepare my lengthening shadows, / Prepare my starry nights.”94 Van Gogh’s whirling, whorling sky also seems to illustrate the last poem of “From Noon to Starry Night,” called “A Clear Midnight,” as well as the nearly final lines of Whitman’s “Passage to India: “O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter! Passage to you! . . . . Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?” The clearly fictive town in van Gogh’s painting, so angularly un-Provençal beneath the swirling stars and flamelike cypress, may derive from Whitman’s poem “The City Dead-House.” There, as in other passages in Leaves of Grass, Whitman contrasts stifling forms and conventions to the surging energy of his poetic vision.95 Van Gogh approached Whistler’s territory more directly in Starry Night over the Rhone River, Arles (1888). The blue-green and black tones, tempered with yellow gaslights, and the reflections on the water, though they shimmer with van Gogh’s characteristic vitality, are reminiscent of Thames nocturnes, as are the bare outlines of boats and the minimal outlines of buildings on the far shore. The foreground shore rises like the pier in Whistler’s view of Valparaiso or Nocturne: Grey and Silver—Chelsea Embankment, Winter (1879). The real difference lies in the intensity of van Gogh’s lights, and particularly his stars (including the constellation Ursus Major), which are radiant and numerous beyond any Whistler ever painted. They outshine the gaslights and fill the sky even more than do Whistler’s fireworks. As van Gogh wrote, “Often it seems to me that the night is much more alive and

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Figure 2.12. Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night over the Rhone River, Arles, 1888. Oil on canvas, 28 ½
36 in. (72.5
92 cm). Photographer: Hervé Lewandowski. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux /Art Resource, New York

richly colored than the daytime.”96 The glow of the stars in the clear air is the chief subject of the painting, whereas Whistler’s subject is the almostpalpable night atmosphere. Meanwhile the moon, as in Whistler’s scenes, does not show its face. Van Gogh seems at this time to have been more enthusiastic about gaslight, which he had just had installed in his studio in Arles, and under whose flames he painted this picture.97 Maybe that’s why the couple in the foreground of the painting turn away from the splendor over the Rhone. Unlike Friedrich’s moon watchers who gaze in wonder at the heavens, they seem to represent the coming reaction to night’s starry glory. Either it does not move them or they have already had their fill.

Unrecorded Miracles Whistler modernized the night without ever painting a modern object— unless you count the yellowish dabs of gaslight seen through a thick fog from

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across a river. Unlike the Impressionists or even van Gogh, Whistler steered clear of nightlife’s bustle and glow. Despite the fireworks, his was mostly an art of dimness and distance, and perhaps for that reason imitators in Paris and London, Venice or Glasgow, had little to add to his vision. They tinkered around the edges with cafés and carriages, columns and domes, but their misty silhouettes came back like pale reflections of the Master, nocturnes of nocturnes. In New York it was different. Even on the darkest night, there was no mistaking the startling bulk of the Brooklyn Bridge, the airborne diagonals of the elevated train, the looming peak of a skyscraper. A New York nocturne wrapped the vertical wonders of a steel-framed city in a tempting package of mysterious mist, revealing an unsuspected beauty. The city was growing in fits and starts toward cultural maturity, and Whistler’s approach gave New Yorkers the tools they needed to make graceful art out of an angular adolescent. As an American, however expatriated, he also gave them confidence in the value of their achievement. When Whistler left the United States for good in the 1850s, New York had already matched Paris in size, and by 1900 when Whistler’s art returned in triumph, the metropolitan area population had more than doubled to over three million. Electric lighting had arrived in 1882, and gas lamps and lightbulbs jockeyed for attention on the streets and in the stores. Yet until about 1890, little had changed in the way the night city was depicted in art or literature, or the way it was written about in the press, since the gaslit nights of Foster. In that year, however, the novelist William Dean Howells prepared to move to New York from Boston and published A Hazard of New Fortunes, based partially on his own adventures in apartment hunting. As a newcomer to the city, Howells saw things that others did not. When he wrote of a nocturnal ride on the El that “the architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers” were “rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble in them,” he brought a Whistlerian vocabulary to the Manhattan landscape and produced the first description of modern New York’s nocturnal wonderland. In the novel, Howells and his wife are the Marches, and they take the El together. Having already noted the picturesqueness of Little Italy, the Marches now yield themselves up to the “unrecorded miracles” of city lights: At Third Avenue they took the Elevated, for which [Mrs. March] confessed an infatuation. . . . She now said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day. . . . The track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable lights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble in them, and

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the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam—formed an incomparable perspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles . . . but for the present they were mostly inarticulate before it.98

If painters hadn’t yet awakened to the sight, and writers were “inarticulate” before it, the ripple effect of Whistler’s Thames vision had given Howells the concept of nocturnal urban metamorphosis. Anticipating the canvases of Ash Can painters by almost a decade, Howells perceived that the visual appeal of the city had expanded in surprising directions, due to the unusual vantage points from the Elevated. Here were unexpected sources of delight whose aesthetic properties would soon be realized: the strange “flare” and “blots” of light from gas, and the “moony sheen”—replacing the moon itself—of electric lights, coupled with the steaming clouds from the trains themselves. As one of the first to hail the “incomparable perspective” that the elevated train affords, Howells served as the city’s impresario, constructing an aesthetic framework to exhibit a picture that the city had already painted by itself.99 Howells anticipates O. Henry’s 1906 insight that “the rapid transit is poetry and art,” and as a literary man himself, he would also have foreseen that author’s concern about demoting the moon into “a tedious, dry body, moving by rote.”100 Yet in just a few years “the rapid transit” did eclipse the moon in the painting and photography of New York. Manhattanized, Whistler’s ideas opened the way for an enraptured appreciation of the city’s unique landscape.101 In October 1898, Scribner’s Magazine published a poem called “A New York Nocturne (On the Elevated at 110th Street)” by Charles G. D. Roberts. The text was set against an illustration of an elevated train roaring above the darkened city. The city’s “tall shadow-towers with glimmering lights” echo the starry night, and Roberts carefully balances the sparkles: “The dark above is sown with stars, / The humming dark below / With sparkle of ten thousand lamps / In endless row on row.” Through its Whistlerian title and concluding sentiments the poem asserts that the most important nocturnal landscape is now urban: “Our souls have known the midnight awe / Of mount, and plain, and sea; / But here the city’s night enfolds / A vaster mystery.”102 Whistlerian aesthetics percolated through the city. An article titled “Picturesque New York” declared that “the most picturesque of all the sights that New York offers is its general aspect when seen at night from a boat on the water,” and an article on Coney Island in Scribner’s Magazine at night, echoing Howells, claimed that as yet no painter or poet had “sought to immortalize its wonders.”103 In 1900, a lengthy article on the dimly glowing

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Figure 2.13. Charles Roberts and anonymous artist, A New York Nocturne, 1898. In Scribner’s Magazine 24, no. 4, 469

after-hours beauty of “New York at Night” appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, while in 1901 Harper’s Weekly published an illustrated feature on “The Streets of New York at Night.”104 As a consequence of all the nocturnal interest, the art magazine The Craftsman declared in 1908, “It can no longer be denied that New York streets have obtained a vogue for picturesqueness.” The essay described how Birge Harrison, a leading tonalist, had adapted his art to the new reality in such paintings as The FlatIron Building on a Rainy Night and Christmas Eve on Washington Square.105 Poets kept up; in “The Shadowy City Looms (New York from the North River),” Lloyd Mifflin

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pulled out the Whistlerian images: “The domes are veiled; the wondrous City dims— / Dims as a dream: // The night transforms it to a palace vast / Lit with a thousand lamps.” In “Fifth Avenue in Fog,” James Norman Hall noted with a Wildean twist that though there are “a thousand lights aflare,” “the sins of streets are hidden in a mist / Pale yellow, shot with topaz, amethyst.”106 Among artists, Whistler’s influence spread in several ways. First, his nocturnal prints and paintings were exhibited frequently in New York from 1895 on, including the now-celebrated Falling Rocket (in 1901, 1902, and 1904). That Whistler had gotten his message across the Atlantic became clear when a New York Sun reviewer described it as “a burst of yellow and rose fireworks against a deep blue sky . . . quick with the modernity of Whistler’s own original spirit; a vindication of the abstract appeal of painting, divorced as far as possible from any idea conveyable in words.”107 Second, his ideas were further diffused by the tonalists such as Ryder, Inness, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing, who emphasized mood, mystery, and reverie keyed around a prevailing emotional or color tone; and by “The Ten,” a younger group that included Childe Hassam and James Alden Weir, and who were open both to the influence of the French Impressionists as well as that of Whistler and the tonalists.108 As exhibition records show, there was an unprecedented amount of night painting going on in the United States at the time, with nocturnal works by Inness, Ryder, Winslow Homer, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Edward Steichen topping the list.109 Third, two of Whistler’s greatest devotees, the etcher Joseph Pennell and his wife, Elizabeth—who would publish their landmark biography of Whistler in 1908—relocated to New York and made it clear that the city needed artists who shared his vision: As the steamer moves up the bay on the left the Great Goddess greets you, a composition in color and form, with the city beyond, finer than any in any world that ever existed, finer than Claude ever imagined, or Turner ever dreamed. Why did not Whistler see it? . . . To the right, filmy and lace-like by day, are the great bridges; by night a pattern of stars that Hiroshige never knew.110

The frequent references to starlike lights in prose and poetry indicate that Whistlerized New York differed from London in crucial respects. In Manhattan, Whistler’s love of darkness was counterpointed by the firefly effect of multitudinous pinpoints of light, even as the emphasis on veiling and metamorphosis remained constant. While the rain, mist, or snow obscured distracting or ungainly details, the delicately posed lights, novel in their number, rarely disturbed what was also unique to this setting: the underlying structure provided by the dark masses of tall buildings and bridges, or

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the long diagonals of electrically lit avenues. Hence the carefully modulated, blue-green and blurry surface of the paintings remained recognizably “Whistler,” even as the compositional elements, and sometimes the balance of light to dark, boldly announced “New York.” Of the many American painters who produced pictures called “Nocturne,” two of the most original were Weir and Hassam. Weir diligently applied Whistler’s methods in Nocturne: Queensboro Bridge (1910) and The Plaza, Nocturne (1911), letting the city itself shape the intriguing result (color plate 10).111 A reviewer rhapsodized, “Weir has given us a supreme representation of the palpating mystery of night,” thanks to “a delicacy of tonal relations that is almost ethereal.”112 With their restrained lights and dark blue tones, his paintings at first glance represent a careful transfer of the Thames aesthetic to the East River and the East Side. But Nocturne: Queensboro Bridge in particular takes the form into new territory. The bridge itself is barely visible in the upper background; what catches the eye are the drifts of smoke that have replaced Whistler’s fireworks in the sky and a cross street that has been turned into a white river of light. It leads diagonally toward the horizon, punctuated by a multistory vertical sign that points like a flaming finger toward the bridge. Both the street and sign burn brighter than anything seen on the Thames. The dark roofs and lit facades of the buildings thrust angularly into the picture, while columns, lighted windows, and window recesses reinforce the verticals of the bridge and sign. The picture plane tips up, the smoke and lights draw the eye inward, and the whole is more complexly balanced and busy than anything Whistler attempted. Weir’s handling of the overall tone is so sure that only slowly do the streaks of light and passages of dark disengage to reveal an abstract intricacy that might have pleased Piet Mondrian—a nocturnal Broadway Boogie-Woogie avant la lettre. Best known today among makers of the New York nocturne is Hassam, who had already honed his skills by venturing east (A Paris Nocturne [1890]) and west (Nocturne—Railway Crossing, Chicago [1893]).113 In his Fifth Avenue Nocturne (c. 1895) he focused on a discrete treatment of a favorite topic: the sexually charged quality of an encounter in the misty street. He foregrounds the dark figure of a woman whom a distant man approaches, the space between them lit by glowing streetlamps reflected on the glistening pavement beneath a deep blue sky. This is the same implied tension between heavily clad male and female figures that Hassam uses in the wintry Cab Stand at Night, Madison Square (1891) and the rainy Early Evening, Union Square (1902). Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, Hassam shows how a Manhattan artist could borrow the Master’s magical vocabulary, especially the misty blue-green blurriness—and then do something almost heretical with it. Combining Whistler’s tonal approach to nocturnal humidity with the free brushwork of Monet, Hassam heads back toward narrative painting and the decorative specificity of the moonlight tradition. His titles zero in

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Figure 2.14. Childe Hassam (1859–1935), Fifth Avenue Nocturne, c. 1895. Oil on canvas, 24
20 in. (61.2
51 cm). © The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Anonymous gift [1952.538]

on an urban location, where he sets masculine and feminine elements on a collision course along a diagonal axis. The anecdotal quality, the one-point perspective, and the flurry of brushstrokes echoing falling snow or rain all distinguish these pictures as Hassam’s. He rolls back the emphasis on flat surfaces in order to advance the idea that the painting is a window opening on to a city full of precipitation—sexual or meteorological. Introducing new forms and content, Weir and Hassam pointed the nocturne toward a showdown with modernity, as its quiet mystery yielded to sensations that would become even more characteristic in the century ahead: the visual and visceral excitement of New York at night.

The Photo-Nocturne Though the painters were no slouches, it was in photography that the pervasive influence of Whistler’s nocturnes, combined with Manhattan’s unique sights, helped produce the most striking works of art. It could leven

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Figure 2.15. Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), An Icy Night, New York, 1898. In Camera Work, 1903. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © ARS, New York. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York

be said that the nocturne helped photography itself become an art. In 1896, after hearing about Paul Martin’s experiments in London, Stieglitz began taking his own night photographs of New York City. He was later joined in his enthusiasm by two admirers of Whistler, Steichen and Coburn, and together with many others they managed to translate Whistler’s vision into something subtly sublime, at once modern and mystic, on the rainy streets of Manhattan island. The narrow tonal range of the nocturne was perfectly suited to black-and-white photography, especially given the nuanced gradations that large-format cameras and high-quality gelatin prints could convey, and the fact that prints could be tinted to establish an emotional key. No photographer could have snapped a Monet or a van Gogh, but Whistler had so successfully captured a certain kind of natural effect, and so effectively taught his audience to see it, that people discovered “Whistlers” all around them.114 All one had to do, it seemed, was go out and shoot a nocturne, bringing it home as if the image were ready-made big-game art.115 It was hardly that simple, but the fact that the photo-nocturne looked much like a painting went a long way toward ensuring its acceptance as high art. There were two basic ways to track the prey. In so-called straight photography, photographers had to be hardy and dedicated enough to do their work on location when the Manhattan streetlights beckoned like gaslights on the far shore of the Thames, as in The Glow of Night (c. 1897) by Stieglitz. The frigid experience of shooting An Icy Night, New York (1898) nearly carried Stieglitz to an early grave. At first, even with the help of street lighting, slow films or plates could not capture human action. Human inaction,

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Figure 2.16. Alfred Stieglitz, Reflections—Night, New York, 1896. In Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies, 1897. Gravure print, sheet 14
17 in. (35.6
43.2 cm). Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1968. Philadelphia Museum of Art. © ARS, New York. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York

however, was possible. Stieglitz claimed that in Reflections—Night, New York (1896; printed in 1897) he had made “the First Night Photograph with animated life.”116 Deep in the background, across a sidewalk sea of shimmering reflections worthy of Turner or Vernet, one can just make out a few horse-drawn cabs and cabbies waiting for customers in front of the Savoy Hotel. One of the most striking things about early night photographs, apart from atmosphere, is the near absence of human figures—just what gives contemporaneous Ash Can paintings of New York much of their interest. Close on the heels of Stieglitz came William A. Fraser, whose serene A Wet Night, Columbus Circle (c. 1897) made a stir at the Philadelphia Photographic Salon of 1898.117 The pictorialist photographers, who favored a suggestive, symbolist vagueness as they created for themselves harmoniously tuned, mysteriously muted scenes, embraced a different tactic.118 They were not content to let nature—which Whistler had assured them “seldom succeeds in painting a picture”—call the shots. To deploy the revelatory veil of mist they needed, as photographers, to find new solutions to the old problem of extracting an artistic ensemble from the urban hodgepodge. And since they couldn’t paint their fog or drizzle, they would use specially manufactured soft-focus lenses, put gauze or petroleum jelly over the lens, or even kick the tripod during a time-exposure in order to produce a desired atmospheric effect. Both approaches paid off. In January 1908, about twelve years after the first outdoor night photographs, members of Stieglitz’s group, the photoSecession, exhibited at the National Arts Club in New York alongside works by the Ash Can School or “The Eight,” with Hassam and others. A

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Figure 2.17. William A. Fraser (ca. 1840–1925), A Wet Night, Columbus Circle, ca. 1897–1898. Gelatin silver print, 20
16 ½ in. (50.8
41.91 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc. [2005.27300]

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reporter for the New York Times noted how successfully this “expression of the spirit of modern times” set the photographs “on the same plane as paintings” for the first time ever in the United States.119 A few years later, a critic suggested that it was Stieglitz who had influenced the painters.120 While not all the credit for this recognition of photography goes to nocturnal subjects, the liminality of the nocturne form helped break down barriers, hovering as it did not only between nature and the city, romanticism and modernism, painting, music, and poetry, but also between art and photography. Trying to extricate their medium from its conceptual antecedents in painting as well as from the charges of merely mechanical reproduction, photographers emphasized the reality of their art and the artfulness of their reality. They sought more than silvery tones, pursuing the deep blues and greens of enveloping darkness. Certain photographic processes, such as gum bichromate, lent themselves to manipulation, including brushing color on the negative. Steichen, who as a painter produced tonalist scenes of rural moonlight closely related to his nocturnal photos such as Pastoral—Moonlight (1907) and The Pond: Moonrise (1903; toned with yellow and blue-green), created a photographic Self-Portrait with Brush and Palette (1901) that in its heavily worked surface paid tribute to his artistry as both a painter and photographer. Steichen’s masterpiece, The Flatiron, is best known in its colored 1909 state (blue-green pigment and gum bichromate over a platinum print), made from a 1904 black-and-white negative (color plate 11). It was published as a three-color halftone in the April 1906 issue of Camera Work. It was Steichen who became the photo-Secession’s foremost night photographer. Whistler was an early influence on Steichen, who later recalled that “the romantic and mysterious quality of moonlight, the lyric aspect of nature made the strongest appeal to me . . . all my efforts were directed toward finding a way of interpreting such moments.” Since he was a painter, Steichen was not afraid to use a brush directly on a gum-bichromate print or to manipulate the print in other ways. He was also helped by some creative accidents: when raindrops fell on the lens, “I saw that the whole scene had been transformed by general diffusion”; and when he accidentally kicked the tripod, making the camera vibrate, he found another means of atmospheric re-creation.121 In 1908, he took a celebrated series of moonlight photographs of Auguste Rodin’s statue of Balzac, working all night with exposures ranging from fifteen minutes to one hour. The Flatiron—Evening is Steichen’s most famous nocturnal scene. Although taken “from nature,” it is carefully composed. Set alongside Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, the resemblances are striking: the blue-green tones, the tall verticals of bridge piling and skyscraper, the horizontals of roadway and tree branch that cross them, the bargeman and cabdriver silhouetted beneath; the dim lights on the horizon. Steichen skillfully applied Whistler’s Japanese-inspired vertical structure and cropping. In both pictures

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the main elements go shooting out of the frame: Whistler, as contemporary photos have shown, exaggerated the height of his bridge to strengthen his design, while Steichen, unlike Stieglitz in his famous snowy daytime picture of the Flatiron (1903), cuts off the top of the building, suggesting even greater height. Whistler’s fireworks and Steichen’s twigs also share the same function, delicately counterpointing the strength of the main shapes. But Steichen was proclaiming the modernity of his subject as well as his medium, whereas despite Whistler’s radical style, even his Battersea Bridge was old. Conscious of the Flatiron’s aggressive thrust, Steichen gently ruralizes his image so that the skyscraper appears through a tracery of tree branches that domesticate the rude force of American capitalism. The dim outlines, misty atmosphere, and shimmering reflections suggest that the three waiting cabmen, like the photographer and viewer, are enraptured by the mystery of the slim and intricate structure before them. Though The Flatiron’s nuanced emotional effect allies it with art photography’s emphasis on personal expression, as a nocturne it self-consciously orders and tranquilizes the volatile urban environment, teaching the viewer to take pleasure in these astonishing surroundings. And yet there is a provocative, tonally and symbolically dark interaction between men, horses, and the city in The Flatiron. It is the disproportionate scale between human and animal, on the one hand, and a building, on the other, that makes the composition so powerful. The overshadowed cabbies, subservient to their lowly function, may wonder at the enormous prow of the Flatiron Building, at this brief moment the world’s tallest. They seem to function pictorially like Friedrich’s moon watchers, showing us how to react appropriately to the impressiveness of the man-made scene. But does the building offer anything in return for their admiration? Business carves the skyline in its own image; the sodden cabmen scrounge below for fares and tips.122 In the poet William Butler Yeats’s phrase, “A terrible beauty is born.” Steichen may also be mindful that dissatisfaction with cabdrivers forms a leitmotif in New York history. In Pierre (1852), Melville calls them “Charon ferry-men to corruption and death”; in Mysteries of New York (1882), cabbies rob their customers routinely; in O. Henry’s story “From the Cabby’s Seat” (1906), a cabby is so drunk he tries to arrest his wife for fare beating on their wedding night; and back in 1850, Foster was already calling cabdrivers predatory nighthawks.123 Are these cabbies representatives of crime and death? Do they and their dark vehicles recall Dickinson’s lines, “Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me”? O. Henry cynically remarks that to a cabby, the customer might as well be inanimate: “you are contents”; you are “cargo.”124 The Flatiron thus brilliantly evokes the deeper meanings of the nocturne form. Night frees repressed fears and libidinal energies, and photographs such as this subtly exploit the suggestive properties of the urban landscape,

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working in a symbolic language to uncover ideas and emotions hidden at midday. Yet the more haunting the dream, the more difficult is the interpretation. Does the building’s dark, towering shape reveal the phallic dominance of commercial interests—the city as it “really” is—or is this a landscape of desire, of masculine wish fulfillment, of the Charon cabmen offering to mingle the sex drive and the death drive—literally? The photograph evades answers to such questions. For even as the nocturne makes its potentially disturbing discoveries, it harmonizes the psychological landscape that it exposes, aestheticizing the often-brutal forces of the city. Like an artistic safety valve, the dreamy nocturne releases unconscious feelings and fears about the city, while at the same time presenting the urban scene so seductively that it can only be accepted as desirable. Although Steichen was aware that his views of New York depended in part on techniques learned from abroad, for him the very taking of such pictures, like the subject matter, was a sign of a technological preference and American artistic citizenship.125 For the expatriate Coburn, however, the tension between the Whistlerian nocturne and its New York adaptation led him eventually to follow Whistler’s path, and settle in London.126 In 1908, Coburn confessed that he saw Steichen and himself as “the Whistlers of photography”: What I try to do is see the little piece that matters in the midst of nature’s massiveness, and . . . concentrate the interest on that. That done, I use every inch of my knowledge to retain the purely photographic qualities. Of course, by “photographic qualities” I don’t mean hard pure lens work. I don’t mean the sharp shrewish acidity of your ordinary cabinet photograph. I mean photographic in the sense that Whistler was photographic.127

To Coburn, Whistler seemed “photographic” because he eschewed the “hard pure lens work” of Victorian realism in favor of atmosphere and nuance; he was extraordinarily sensitive to the emotional and abstract qualities of ordinary urban scenes.128 Coburn concluded by remarking, “It’s a pity . . . that he [Whistler] didn’t live long enough to use a camera, it would have saved him so much time.”129 Thirty years after being regarded by Ruskin and the British public as a careless painter, Whistler is seen as a photographic pioneer who had to do it the hard way because of primitive equipment. Coburn felt strongly about the unique power of his medium: “Just imagine any one trying to paint at the corner of Thirty-fourth street, where Broadway and Sixth Avenue cross! The camera has recorded an impression in the flashing fragment of a second.”130 Going on to say, like Whistler, that it takes years of practice to be ready for the moment, Coburn insists that his “unseemly hurry” with the camera is necessary to capture “these visions of mine before they fade.” For Coburn, as for Whistler, the night was a revelation.

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As Coburn wrote in 1911, “It is only at twilight that the city reveals itself to me in the fulness of its beauty, when the arc lights on the Avenue click into being.”131 Yet creatively speaking, it is the photographer who “clicks” the avenue “into being” with his shutter. Like Whistler, Coburn manufactures the experience he seems to be recording. Throughout the period of his best urban photography, from 1902 to 1912, Coburn was also studying Japanese design and composition with Dow, one of America’s leading art teachers. In an urban environment increasingly dominated by rectilinear construction, Japanese composition proved instrumental to artists, since it emphasized the arrangement of forms in a vertically oriented, two-dimensional space. In Japanese views of landscapes over distance, the effect was one of compressing the near and the far, not so much superimposing objects as stacking them up vertically, as if they were seen through a telephoto lens.132 This feeling for surface and pattern rather than volume and depth suited the visual propensities of photography, which tends to flatten the picture plane.133 Two photographs that appeared in Coburn’s collection New York (1910) demonstrate how he applied this aesthetic to the American city at night. If the graceful vertical composition, the patterns of light and dark, the echoing forms, and the soft focus that almost dissolves their substantiality recall Whistler’s London, the objects of Coburn’s camera are urban forms of American technology, tall buildings, and electric lights. Though tempered by reminders of nature in the form of tree branches or mist and rain, it is the modern city that compels attention—its powerful allure, its capacity for beauty. In The Singer Building, the varied, layered tones mount gradually from traffic-torn streaks of light at street level to the brooding dome and spire of what was then the tallest building in the world. But the verticality of New York proves congenial to the Japanese aesthetic even when the eye is kept at street level, as in Broadway at Night. Superimposed, the row of streetlamps, the signs, and the vertical reflections on the sidewalk all announce that while the everyday city may be transformed by night, its insistent upward thrust, forcefully stated by the truncated lamppost in the foreground, cannot be hidden. The Brooklyn Bridge had preceded the skyscraper as the mightiest symbol in New York of America’s technological prowess, and in 1910 Coburn connected the vision of the photographer with that of the bridge builder: The one uses his brain to fashion a thing of steel girders, a spider’s web of beauty to glisten in the sun, the other blends chemistry and optics with personality in such a way as to produce a lasting impression of a beautiful fragment of nature. The work of both, the bridge-builder and the photographer, owes its existence to man’s conquest over nature.134 Steichen’s Brooklyn Bridge shows just what Coburn meant. Lateral views of the entire

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Figure 2.19. Alvin Langdon Coburn, Broadway at Night, 1910. Photogravure print, 8
5 ¾ in. (20.1
14.7 cm). Credit: George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

bridge from a distance date back to its opening in 1883. But Steichen shot upward from beneath the bridge at an angle that elicited the immense, soaring strength of its abstract form; his artistry places him on the level of the master builder who created the span.

Using the nocturne itself as a bridge between mimetic and abstract form, Steichen’s photo strikingly prefigures Walker Evans’s pictures of the bridge, which Hart Crane included as an integral part of his poem The Bridge when

Facing Page Figure 2.18. Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Singer Building, New York, c. 1909. Gum platinum print, 16 ½
8 ¾ in. (41.8
22.2 cm). Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn. Credit: George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

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Figure 2.20. Edward Steichen, Brooklyn Bridge, 1903. Reprinted with permission of Joanna T. Steichen

it was first published in 1930. One of Joseph Stella’s modernist paintings had been Crane’s first choice for a frontispiece, but it is clear that Crane was at least as sensitive to Steichen’s Whistlerian vision: Everytime one looks at the harbor and the NY skyline across the river it is quite different, and the range of atmospheric effects is endless. But at twilight on a foggy evening . . . it is beyond description. Gradually the lights in the enormously tall buildings begin to flicker through the mist. . . . And up at the right Brooklyn Bridge, the most superb piece of construction in the modern world, I’m sure, with strings of light crossing it like glowing worms as Ls and surface cars pass each other going and coming.135

Although the visual imagination of Steichen and Coburn seemed as unlimited as the urban landscape that their photographs transformed, the heyday of soft-focus, pictorial photography was short. With the triumphant success of the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo in 1910, Stieglitz felt that the work of the photo-Secession had been accomplished, and the organization dissolved just as it finally achieved public recognition of

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Figure 2.21. Alfred Hewitt, In the Heart of Manhattan, 1907. In Harper’s Magazine, February 1907

photography as a fine art. Their battle had been won at a cost: in the effort to establish photography as an art independent from painting, pictorial photographers had imitated the very medium they sought freedom from. The seeds of the pictorial nocturne’s demise were already sown in the soil of its revolutionary love of darkness, and its vogue faded along with the soft-focus vision that both derived from and sustained it. Shaping American modernism, Coburn, Steichen, and others adopted the Whistlerian, Japanese aesthetic at a crucial moment, in a way that was suited both to the burgeoning city and the evolving art of photography. After 1910, Stieglitz and his vanguard increasingly regarded pictorial photography as a mannered style of the past. If the nocturne, with its musical, synesthetic elusiveness, almost managed to dissolve the city into a private darkness, it did so against the mainstream preoccupation with ever more light. The nocturne temporarily held out—and even triumphed—against the harder-edged, more harshly lit scenes that scrutinized the moral and social effects of gas and electricity. But the sharp focus on light, energy, and action, rather than moody reflection, was the way of the future.

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Of course, the hard edges had been there all along in commercial and journalistic photography—and this did not necessarily eliminate the romance, as Alfred Hewitt’s In the Heart of Manhattan (1907) shows. The relatively even illumination and crisply glowing signs of Hewitt’s picture suggest that the blazing city of night had its own special allure. The tension between the two visions of the city is apparent from the article on “Manhattan Lights” by Edward S. Martin that accompanied Hewitt’s photograph in Harper’s Magazine for February 1907. With his penchant for reflected lights and moods of mellow detachment, Martin indicates the degree to which the pictorial aesthetic had taken hold: “Broadway has been so bejeweled with all manner of electrical contrivance” that “the result is somewhat blinding, but . . . softened by due distance, it stirs the imagination and becomes even beautiful.”136 But resisting the writer’s preference for the “contemplative distance” of East River views, the photographer Hewitt is fascinated instead by electricity; his work looks ahead to the vibrant night images of the next two decades. As Coburn had already noted in 1911, the march of light seemed inevitable. Watching the illumination of the streetlamps progress up Fifth Avenue, he commented, “Probably there is a man at a switchboard somewhere, but the effect is like destiny, and regularly each night, like the stars, we have the lighting up of the Avenue.”137 Steichen had no trouble in adapting this new style to express his continuing love of the nighttime city. By 1925, when he took a series of photographs from the window of his midtown studio, he had left behind the intimate darkness of his earlier work. Sunday Night on 40th Street offers a lean, sharp-focused precisionist vision of the city, as cool and austere as the earlier pictorial views were warm and emotive. And as Stars on Sixth Avenue demonstrates, Steichen in fact helped complete the shift in the iconography of nighttime New York from the misty romance of the fin de siècle to the bright lights of the Roaring Twenties. In this photograph the lights themselves have become the subject, the stars of their own show. The urban environment originally lit up by these artificial stars has disappeared into their blinding glare, and henceforth the “natural” light by which New York nocturnes were taken would be that of electricity, not the heavens. In 1912, Ezra Pound wondered if New York after dark was “the most beautiful city in the world.” Answering his own question, he rhapsodized: No urban nights are like the nights there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers. They are immaterial; that is to say one sees but the lighted windows. Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.138

Using Whistler’s rhetoric—“the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers”—Pound announced a final metamorphosis in the

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Figure 2.22. Edward Steichen, Stars on Sixth Avenue, 1925. Reprinted with permission of Joanna T. Steichen

nocturne’s style. Drenched with light, the myriad urban windows that, “silent and white,” once convinced Matthew Arnold that the city had no magic to offer, have now become “poetry” themselves. Replacing moon and stars as inspiration, the lighted windows act as electric muses; poetry will henceforth spring from these artificial “squares of flame,” not from the dark mist that clothes the riverside. Pound was sensitive to Whistler’s vision, and saw in Whistler’s expatriate struggle a version of his own battle for modernism in the arts. “You were not always sure,” Pound wrote in the same year in his poem “To Whistler, American,” “not always set / To hiding night or tuning ‘symphonies’; / Had not one style from birth but tried and pried / And stretched and tampered with the media.” Despite the opposition, Pound concluded, Whistler had succeeded; “You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts / Show us there’s a chance at least of winning through.”139 In New York’s nocturnal transformation, Whistler had indeed won through; generations forever after would see the city on certain nights, by certain lights, his way. As a transitional form par excellence, the nocturne acted as a bridge that ensured its own passing. But by then it had played its part in changing the aesthetic perception of New York at night, transforming it into a place of romance and wonder whose spell, if often strained, has yet to be broken.

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chapter

THREE

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it,—to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found? —Henry David Thoreau, Night and Moonlight

Colonizing the Night In september 1899, George Dewey’s fleet made its triumphant arrival in New York. Having invaded the Philippines to give the United States victory in the Spanish-American War, the returning admiral and his sailors were greeted by a huge celebratory illumination. “Welcome Dewey” glowed the thirty-six-foot-high electric letters on the Brooklyn Bridge.1 Lower Manhattan was ablaze with electricity; fireworks and searchlights filled the sky. In the same year that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was being serialized in Britain, declaring that imperial London was “one of the dark places of the earth,” Americans were vaunting their technological and military might; their light-filled quest for global power was beginning to assume the status of a moral imperative.2 But there was some confusion at the heart of empire as to the message the light should carry. The majestic illumination of the Roman-style triumphal Dewey Arch—built specially for the occasion on Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street—was marred by the flashing of an immense Heinz pickle sign a few blocks away in Madison Square.3 With his fifty-seven varieties of tomatoes, beans, and pickles, Heinz had found a message and a medium more powerful than a neoclassical procession. Commercial as well as colonial, the empire of artificial light had arrived. Throughout the nineteenth century, new technologies and business interests were steadily encroaching on the realms of moonlight. The oncequiet hours surrounding midnight were progressively occupied with the same triumphal fanfare and commercial rapacity that Europeans applied to “enlightening” darkest Africa. In a culture that equated light, Christianity, civilization, and progress, pitting them against darkness, paganism, savagery,

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and regression, the American night seemed to have all the attributes of a frontier, to be mapped, settled, and made productive like the West. Viewing night as both colony and frontier, New Yorkers found innovative ways to grasp night’s changing uses and represent its role in relieving the pressures of urban life. Functioning simultaneously as a social safety valve and site of economic and artistic expansion, the nighttime bore a similar relation to the struggles of the urban day as the Western frontier bore to the social conflict of immigrant-swollen cities. It was George Washington who first suggested that New York could be considered the seat of an empire, and by the 1820s, with the opening of the Erie Canal, the terms “Empire City” and “Empire State” came into popular usage.4 A cluster of activities at the end of the century proclaimed that imperial glory. When the consolidation of Greater New York was declared at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1897, uniting Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, the mayor of San Francisco, three thousand miles away, pushed an electric button raising the new flag on top of New York’s City Hall. In the New York Journal the headline read: “this is the eventful night of nights that sees a city born.” The cover of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle depicted five airborne women with glowing diadems, representing the boroughs, who joined torches to create one shining light, as they floated above the twinkling lights of Brooklyn Bridge, which physically had made the consolidation possible.5 The night was conquered anew with the unprecedented Hudson-Fulton illuminations of October 1909, marking the three hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration in his ship the Half Moon, and the hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton’s pioneering steamboat Clermont. One of the largest public events the country had ever seen, Hudson-Fulton attracted a million visitors to New York, and lit up the city, the riverbanks, the bridges, and all the ships in the harbor; it featured 7,000 arc lights and 1.2 million incandescents.6 Celebrating the America’s discovery, spirit, and progress, the ceremonies culminated in a nine-mile-long procession of navy warships that ostentatiously dwarfed the replicas of the Half Moon and Clermont that they escorted. Having learned from the Dewey events, organizers of the land-based festivities used white light and focused on neoclassic buildings, avoiding Broadway and its commercial hoopla. The New York Times wrote: “The city was one long banner of light that sparkled and scintillated in the crisp night air, paling even to insignificance a moon of harvest splendor. There were electric wonders for all to gape at, tall buildings enough to send their shafts of molten splendor where all might see, and searchlights enough to streak the sky wherever crowds were gathered.”7 Electrified New York and the floodlit Hudson would seem to be a long way from the foggy Thames of Whistler’s nocturnes. But by this time, Whistler’s ideas had thoroughly infiltrated British and American thinking

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Figure 3.1. Butler, The Dewey Celebration Seen from Brooklyn Heights, 1899. Museum of the City of New York. Gift of George Cowles Lay

Figure 3.2. Anonymous, A Night Scene from Metropolitan Life Tower during the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, 1909. In Thirty Years of New York, 1882–1912: Being a History of Electrical Development in Manhattan and the Bronx (1913)

about nocturnal beauty. In Brooklyn Bridge Celebration (1883), Warren Sheppard depicted the culminating moment on the evening of May 24, 1883, when fourteen tons of fireworks, including light-trailing Japanese shells like those that Whistler painted, exploded over the bridge and harbor (color plate 12).8 Covering the Hudson-Fulton events, the London Times commented, with a sensibility clearly educated by the “Ten O’Clock” lecture, “Skyscrapers are not by day remarkable for grace or beauty of line, but by night under the electrician’s skill, they were shown to be capable of

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transformations which suggested rather palaces and dreams than the sober realities of the modern Land of the Dollar.”9 The electrician had replaced the artist, but the Whistlerian vision of mercantile warehouses becoming aesthetically pleasing “palaces in the night” survived intact. Amid all this self-congratulatory light, Whistler’s valuing of night remained relevant in many ways, as a new generation entered the protracted contest between the forces of darkness and light. Moreover, the origin of Whistler’s first nocturne was embedded as deeply in colonial politics as in aesthetics. It was begun in March 1866 during Whistler’s mysterious trip to Valparaiso, Chile. Although Whistler was in part seeking a new landscape in order to escape the influence of Courbet, he may also have been helping to smuggle arms. He later claimed that he had been asked as “a West Point man” to aid the Chileans in their quest to break the military power of Spain in South America.10 One could read Whistler’s original Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso (1866) (color plate 7) as an anti-imperial statement, depicting as it does the Chilean capital holding out against shelling by the blockading Spanish fleet. Whistler’s first painted fireworks came from actual exploding rockets. There was more than a hint of Valparaiso in Whistler’s most notorious nocturne. The nocturne’s radical, light-resisting form was liberating because light could mean subjugation as well as progress. At Cremorne Gardens, the fireworks display immortalized in Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket was shot off from a platform “descended from a Baroque stage set that had symbolized the capture of a city” (color plate 9).11 From shelling to fireworks, in the darkness of Cremorne Whistler was replaying the birth of his nocturnes, even as he testified to the shift in light’s role, from conquest to commodity. He was also capitalizing artistically on Cremorne’s selling

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of the night, repressing its lights and attractions to further his own art of darkness. As he partly resisted, partly embraced the exploitation of night, Whistler anticipated similar struggles in the work of New York artists, writers, and reformers—Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, Frederic Remington, Willa Cather, and Joseph Stella among them. From the 1890s to the 1920s, New Yorkers would witness not only the colonizing of the night but also the transformation of that enterprise from conflict to commodification. Night, electricity, flash photography, advertising, and imperial rhetoric would all converge as nocturnal art evolved in the “Land of the Dollar.”

Conquering Some Realms for the Night The perception of the night as an arena of both art and empire is encapsulated in a phrase from Thoreau’s essay “Night and Moonlight,” when the philosopher exclaims, “Consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage!”12 If the contemplative nocturnal scenes that had evolved into a near-abstract form in Whistler’s nocturnes could be considered “civil” or civilized, a certain amount of “savage” moonlight still remained to be explored. When Thoreau stalked the nocturnal countryside near Walden aiming to “conquer some realms from the night,” his forays led in directions both aesthetic and imperial, forming part of the larger nineteenth-century project of subduing unknown territory.13 As the epigraph to this chapter indicates, for Thoreau, the night is like “Central Africa” or (though he does not say it) the western United States. All are analogues to the uncharted continent of the human soul. “Are we not tempted to explore it,” he asks. “Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found?”14 Benevolently and altruistically framed, Thoreau’s concerns are nonetheless couched in the treasure-hunting rhetoric of the era. Imagining himself a David Livingston of the unmapped night world, he links nocturnal exploration to the perennial fantasy of virgin territory waiting to be claimed.15 The usually circumspect sojourner at Walden Pond plunges into a racy scenario produced by his association of Africa and darkness: “tempted . . . to penetrate” to a fabled interior, his boldness is rewarded by discovering a “fertility and beauty” both morally unimpeachable and naturally achieved. Unself-consciously employing the language of Western imperialism to legitimate his own enterprise, Thoreau the rustic democrat expresses his longing to participate in one of the great exploits of the industrializing world: the colonization of the night. The work of colonization proceeded similarly in both city streets and overseas outposts. Once the desire to discover new realms for monetary or moral reward proved strong enough to motivate questers, empire builders dedicated themselves to traversing exotic landscapes, appropriating natural and human resources, cataloging and pacifying strange peoples, and generally reshaping the contours of darkness to suit the ideology of the conquering culture. In the

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United States, the major waves of western settlement in the middle decades of the nineteenth century (1830–1880) coincided with the installation of gaslight in the major towns and cities of the East and Midwest. And just as the vanishing of the culturally formative land frontier declared by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 gave impetus to American imperial aspirations abroad, so the changeover to brighter electric lighting at about that time stimulated renewed efforts to subject the domain of darkness to human control. In his book Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark, the sociologist Murray Melbin makes an extended analysis of the comparison, concluding that “the night’s frontier is neither metaphor nor analogy.”16 As Melbin notes, “During the era that land settlements were being completed, there began—into the night—a large-scale migration of wakeful activity that continues to spread over the world.”17 This scenario of conquest and settlement has been reinforced by histories of technology: “None of the many histories of lighting, which in their different ways all describe the triumph of light, is able to dispense with a preliminary description of the impenetrable terrain of the nocturnal as an alien region of fear that is conquered and finally subjugated.”18 In the rapidly modernizing United States, night fared not so much as Thoreau had imagined as how political and commercial interests demanded. Even in the wilderness the advance rays of a light-hungry civilization were parting the sea of darkness. Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi (1883) that facing obstacles in the night was no longer a peril for the riverboat pilot, or even much fun: For now the national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of two-thousand-mile-torch-light procession. In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of every crossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp. You are never entirely in the dark. . . . But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent.

The Mississippi was now like Manhattan, he complained, for the “government has snatched out all the snags and lit up the shores like Broadway.”19 The blank areas on the map were undergoing the scrutiny of the searchlight, and as American nature was progressively tamed, artificial lighting—first at exhibitions, then in cities, and eventually throughout the country—was increasingly used to supplement natural illumination, deferring the sundown and regulating the hours of day and night to suit human convenience. It was a far more aggressive conquest, no doubt, than Thoreau envisioned, for it seemed likely to annihilate the poetic realms it gained. Once we are aware of it, the frontier function of night melds with imperialist discourse in Thoreau’s essay, displacing on to Africa the invasion of Native American “darkness” being undertaken by evangelists, homesteaders, and the army in the western territories of the United States. Thoreau probably

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wanted to distance his tentative forays into the moonlight from U.S. agitation for continental control. He sought to capture verbally the ephemeral wonder of the night. But his use of African metaphors could not prevent the spread of the night/West analogy, even in the context of the urban East. Seemingly worlds apart, Indian war and urban class conflict were conceptually intertwined by an ideology that regarded the Anglo-Saxon “race” as destined and indeed duty bound to rule, educate, and enlighten the “benighted” tribes, ethnicities, and classes inhabiting the murkier corners of the continent and the metropolis. Due to their imagined propensity to dwell in darkness, not only Indians, but also African Americans and “primitive” subgroups among whites that were resistant to Anglo-Saxon civilization all had the term “savages” applied to them. The New York World spun out this web of assumptions explicitly for its readers in 1874 in a series of articles arising from a riot in Tompkins Square, where mounted police officers brutally charged a peaceable demonstration of laborers. Praising the police action, the newspaper drew an analogy between the dispersal of “communist” urban hordes and George Armstrong Custer’s taming of the Sioux in the Black Hills.20 “Reds” and “redskins” alike warranted repression as common enemies of free trade and Christian civilization.21 Elsewhere, it was the same routing of the dark foe by forces of light as in Milton’s Paradise Lost—Satan’s fiendish archangels were being tamed by arc lamps, an idea that some thought might be useful in the American West. In the Sudan in 1884, British forces used electric lights mounted on towers to repel a night attack of the Mahdi’s soldiers: “The long beams of dazzling white light shot out suddenly upon the howling, rushing mass of Arabs, and in a few seconds the attack had by this means been turned into one of the strangest routs imaginable.”22 Applying a similar tactic, the African explorer Henry Stanley apparently used a concealed battery to give shocks to tribal leaders with whom he shook hands, with the idea of signaling the greater power of his civilization. An electrical engineer named C.J.H. Woodbury defended Stanley’s practice in an 1891 article called “The Savage and the Circuit.” Woodbury went on to speak of a Plains Indian who was electrocuted while chopping down a telegraph wire with his tomahawk at the exact moment that the wire was hit by lightning: “It is much better to use a savage to complete a circuit, than to make him serve as a target for projectiles, and the objection to this application of science for conquest is more nice than wise.”23 Thoreau’s moonlight looked more and more civil as the circuit revealed a savagery all its own.

A Mighty Woman with a Torch Meanwhile, light was being used to welcome the very people it would soon subject. Conceived in 1871, cast in 1873, erected and dedicated in 1886,

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Figure 3.3. Anonymous, Fireworks following the Inauguration of the Statue of Liberty, November 1, 1886, 1886. Negative no. 60750. Collection of The New-York Historical Society

Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty lifted its torch to arriving European immigrants. By 1920 it had hailed over five million prospective New Yorkers. At 305 feet tall, the statue surpassed Brooklyn Bridge to become the tallest thing on the continent. With the torch-bearing hand so powerfully lit that it soon had to be dimmed so as not to disorient mariners, and with the base illuminated by electric lamps of eight thousand candlepower, the statue’s nocturnal debut on November 1, 1886 was as impressive as its daytime aspect.24 In October 1892, four hundred years after Columbus had first visited the New World, the rest of the statue was illuminated with four million candlepower, so that “the whole outline of the figure was brought distinctly to view.”25 Two relics of Liberty’s multistage birth are particularly striking. In March 1883, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt appeared at her own ball dressed as “Electric Light,” with real diamonds sparkling on her white satin ball gown. She may have been thinking of Edison’s lighting of downtown Manhattan in November 1882; in a carefully posed photograph she holds aloft what seems to be a shining electric torch, as if she were an elaborate lamp stand. But she is also unmistakably personifying the Statue of Liberty—whose disembodied arm and torch had been jutting from the ground in Madison Square Park since 1876, awaiting installation.26 In the same year as the Vanderbilt ball, a Jewish poet named Emma Lazarus, who would die before the statue’s unveiling, wrote a poem to aid the

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Figure 3.4. Mora, Vanderbilt Ball, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt as Electric Light, March 26, 1883. Costume Ball Photograph Collection, PR-223, series V, box 3, folder 34, negative no. 39500. Collection of The New-York Historical Society

construction fund. Eventually affixed to the base of the statue on a bronze plaque in 1903, the poem, “The New Colossus,” became an inseparable part of the icon it helped construct. The writer created the more lasting tribute, but both Vanderbilt and Lazarus grasped the visual and symbolic importance of the woman’s arm brandishing an electric light.

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Lazarus’s poem begins by contrasting the male Colossus of Rhodes, between whose legs ships are said to have sailed into an ancient Greek harbor, to the “mighty woman with a torch” who welcomes outcasts to modern New York. Self-consciously shunning the “storied pomp” of antiquity, the “Mother of Exiles” offers refuge to the weary and unwanted masses of the Old World: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Lazarus uses an old-world poetic form, the Italian sonnet, to sing a new form of maternalistic love song to the downtrodden of the earth. With a Whitmanesque inclusiveness, Liberty offers “world-wide welcome” and a place to “breathe free.” But given the battered condition of her guests, we have to imagine Liberty as cast in the caring mold of Florence Nightingale, an earlier “Lady with the Lamp,” as she was reverentially called. Liberty presumably stands ready to nurse her huddled immigrant children into political health. Bartholdi had planned that “Liberty Enlightening the World”—his original title for the statue—would hoist a gilded torch in recognition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals that spurred the revolutions in both the United States and France. But Lazarus and her readers knew that the more “American” take on these historical principles would be to break with the past. They would signal the country’s ingenuity and technological superiority, not to mention its economic opportunities, via electric light. The natural forces of darkness and thunderbolts would be conquered by “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning.”27 When President Grover Cleveland spoke at the statue’s dedication, he kept Lazarus’s male/female, Old World/New World contrast in play, as he dwelled on the electric radiance that would eventually unite all nations: “Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and death [like Zeus], she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement.

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There it shall gleam upon the shore of our sister republic in the East. Reflected and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance . . . until liberty enlightens the world.”28 But the statue itself does not fully square with the democratic meanings draped on its classic form. With her Greco-Roman garb, regal crown, and stolid mien, New York’s Liberty bears little resemblance, for example, to Eugène Delacroix’s bare-breasted, barricade-hurdling revolutionary heroine, Liberty Leading the People. Rather, with her darkness-piercing lamp and record book (it says “July 4, 1776”), the New York statue might be taken for “Liberty Processing the People.” Under Liberty’s watchful eyes, the bureaucratic sifting of “wretched refuse” was carried on with American efficiency day and night, first at Castle Garden and then, beginning in 1892, on nearby Ellis Island, under electric lighting. It is not clear from the poem or the pose whether Liberty will treasure the varied ethnicity of her huddled masses, or simply toss them all into the melting pot for immediate purification. In the glare of Anglo-Saxon racial values, Lazarus’s vision of enlightened inclusivity was mostly turned into an assimilationist bleaching of cultural difference. President Cleveland spoke of Liberty illuminating “the way to man’s”— not woman’s—“enfranchisement,” but her female character is what makes her receptiveness so immensely audacious. In many ways, Liberty plays off William Holman Hunt’s famous painting The Light of the World (1851–1853) (see figure 2.4), where Christ beckoningly holds a lantern toward the viewer. To show how few heed the Gospel, Hunt positions Christ near a closed door covered by briars. But the motherly, Greco-Roman Liberty opens her arms to millions every decade. Democracy trumps religion; Liberty’s golden door (and her kingdom, if we would go by the crown) is definitely “of this world.” It was only a matter of time before someone saw the sexual side of the “Mother of Exiles” and imagined how she got to be a mother in the first place.29 Near the turn of the twentieth century, the Yiddish poet Melech Ravitch passed Liberty’s portals, and later he addressed her in a poem called “In the New York Statue of Liberty”: Woman, hollow, steel giant With the torch in your right hand high, You are a golem-woman, with a tinny skin Taut over a steel skeleton. Your tin lips have never kissed bread. Your iron ribs have never cradled a man in bed.

And yet the poet confesses that he loves her, even though “in your veins of wire and steel / Flow electric lights.” Her hollowness is both inhuman

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and inspiring, since she can take in so many children and lovers: “Oh, is it true, you woman, you freedom, you’re today a fallen woman,” Ravitch asks, realizing that her promiscuity is what makes her so attractive: “And perhaps—perhaps because of that is my love for you so tender and so deep.”30 Writers have never tired of telling New Yorkers that just as the burning candle draws moths to its flame, so the city draws men and women to their ruin. But the Statue of Liberty lifts her electric beacon to attract the tired, the poor, the huddled masses to their salvation. The Mighty Woman with a Torch may be a fallen woman, one more lady of the (street)lamp after all, but her free and easy ways have only improved her reputation.

Armies of the Night Night, in these modern times, is like the United States Constitution. It is an admirable institution, but it doesn’t know what is happening beneath it. . . . You . . . look upward, through the glare of the arc lamps, and you see old Mother Night still brooding about you, calmly, imperturbably, quite unconscious of the fact that her mischievous children have lined her feathers with electricity, kerosene, acetylene, coal gas, water gas, and every other species of unlawful, unnatural illuminating substance. —William Hard, De Kid Wot Works at Night 31

One autumn evening in 1884, more than a hundred Edison employees with Prussian-style lightbulb helmets marched through New York streets in an electric torchlight parade. Dressed uniformly, and marshaled by a leader on horseback, they gave a military impression. They strode in unison, since all their helmets were wired to a cable framework that they carried.32 A team of horses at the center of the formation pulled a steam engine dynamo that created the power supply. Here for the first time in history was a flameless and mobile light, invading the urban darkness in the name of progress and profit. The demonstration was part of Edison’s campaign to conquer the lighting market in New York. In December 1879 the inventor had thrilled a crowd of over three thousand, including the actress Sarah Bernhardt and many influential New Yorkers, by electrically illuminating the area around his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The display won him permission to set up a power plant and lay underground electric lines in the New York business district. On September 4, 1882, Edison put New York’s first central power station into service, illuminating a section of lower Manhattan near his Pearl Street generators. The next day, the New York Herald reported the “weird” and “beautiful” sight: “In the stores and business places throughout the lower quarter of the city there was a strange glow last night. The dim flicker of gas . . . was supplanted by a steady glare, bright and mellow, which

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Figure 3.5 Anonymous, Edison Employees Marching in Formation. In Scientific American, November 15, 1884. Courtesy of Schenectady Museum, New York

illuminated interiors and shone through windows, fixed and unwavering.”33 As the report makes clear, Edison’s first trial of his new system aimed not at street lighting but at effective indoor lighting that also reached out into the street. Edison’s incandescent electric bulb thus arrived as an indoor medium with outdoor effects and applications. This played a large part in its success, for people were tired of the heat, fumes, dirt, and danger that gas lighting brought into houses, theaters, and stores. Moreover, the “bright and mellow” quality of the electric bulb gave it a flexibility of use that made it clearly superior to its competitor, the electric arc light. For novel as his inventions were, Edison sought to rearrange a landscape of light that was already extensively electrified. What is often called the “gaslight era” was in reality a period of mixed technologies. In 1880, the Brush Electric Light Company lit up Broadway between Union Square and Madison Square with powerful arc lights, one per block, raised on twenty-foot poles.34 By 1886, there were over 1,500 arc lamps throughout the downtown area, and up along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. They covered about thirty miles of New York streets, with lamps about 250 feet apart.35 But arc lighting was far too strong for interior use, and rich New Yorkers such as J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts

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Figure 3.6. Charles Graham, Arc Lights in Madison Square, 1881. In Harper’s Weekly, January 14, 1882

(who were also Edison shareholders) led the way in adopting electricity in their homes and businesses, and pushing for electric street lighting as well. Until the eventual triumph of the electric bulb in the early years of the twentieth century, gas, arc, and electric lights shared the streets: in 1892 the city had 27,000 gaslights and several thousand arc lamps, but only 1,200 electric streetlights; in 1898 New York had 859 incandescent lights per thousand people, and over 5,000 arc lights illuminating public places.36 For the most part, New Yorkers were enamored of electric light and what it represented. While promoting order, civilization, profit, and fun for the better-off, electric light could also be used to police the poorer peoples of the night, and with luck turn them into consumers too. But

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elsewhere light’s symbolic message was wearing thin. London preceded New York in the dawning self-consciousness that light can bring with it its own darkness, as critics of imperialism realized.37 In the 1880s, the phrase “Darkest London” took hold as a way to describe the city’s similarity to the uncharted areas of the African continent—a similarity that included not only its population of strange peoples and customs but also a perception of their ignorance, brutality, and fiendish immorality. Conrad, who in Heart of Darkness represents the imperial impulse as a blindfolded woman carrying a lamp, speaks of London in that novel as a “mournful gloom.”38 The “darkest” part of London was the East End—industrialized, impoverished, and socially as well as geographically remote from the West London home of the upper classes, government, fashion, and the arts. In 1890, the year that Henry Stanley published In Darkest Africa, “General” William Booth of the Salvation Army titled his study of the unlit poor In Darkest England— and the Way Out. With his militaristic organization and with the light of Christianity for a weapon, Booth invaded his own country; “the campaigns he led into the night were planned and organized like campaigns of war.”39 Gustave Doré’s engraving The Bull’s-Eye (1872), named for the police lantern that could be aimed at a specific target, represents the investigative and moral war waged against the poor: light-wielding Virgilian policemen lead Dantesque journalists through the hell of poverty. The police function of lighting dominated in the poorer quarters, since the places where the middle and upper classes rarely went were always the last to be lit. A genre of “dark” urban exploration emerged, having little of the buoyancy and humor of earlier flâneur literature: James Greenwood’s The Wilds of London (1874) was followed by George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894), and Jack London’s People of the Abyss (1903). London wrote of the poor that “they are a new species, a breed of city savages. . . . The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the jungle.”40 With a surging population that reached nearly two million in Manhattan alone in 1900, New York was busy constructing its own heart of darkness. Manhattan’s wealth of dangers, slums, and exotic-seeming peoples would be illuminated by journalists, artists, photographers, and reformers who gave an American twist to British conventions. Crane, who later became friends with Conrad in England, wryly mixed the urban metaphors of Wild West and Africa to describe a harrowing trip on a Broadway cable car: “It is a great ride, full of exciting actions. Those inexperienced persons who have been merely chased by Indians know little of the dramatic quality which life may hold for them. These jungles of men and vehicles, these cañons of streets, these lofty mountains of irons and cut stone—a ride through them affords plenty of excitement.” After a particularly savage curve tosses the passengers to the floor, “everything is dead. The interior of the car resembles the scene of the battle of Wounded Knee.”41

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Figure 3.7. Gustav Doré, The Bull’s-Eye. In Blanchard Jerrold and Gustav Doré, London: A Pilgrimage (1872)

Crane wrote these words in the superior, morally disengaged tone of the flâneur, but by this time the ironic mode of urban exploration was fading, as realism took hold and the revelations of slum raiders satisfied the public demand for a new kind of factual information about the city’s nocturnal activities. The flâneur, like W. H. Auden’s famous definition of poetry, “makes nothing happen”—whereas it is the self-imposed task of the muckraker,

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the undercover investigator, and the photojournalist to take risks, assemble evidence, and shake up the status quo. The flâneur observes; the crusader strikes. In New York, the new urban explorer shunned the traditional reliance on guides. Crane himself went incognito to get the inside story on the life of a tramp; rather than relying like Dickens or Doré on a police escort, he challenged police control of the night on the street and in court. Similarly, the photographer Riis, who also fought police corruption, substituted a portable “detective” camera for the usual police lantern, and thereby was able to lead the public on his own tour of the night in the form of lanternslide lectures and illustrated publications. While pictorialist photographers such as Stieglitz, Steichen, and Coburn were seeking the atmospheric beauties of the city night, socially oriented realists were finding sharp-focus ways to create a harshly detailed art of urban darkness.

Lightning Powder I hate darkness and dirt anywhere, and naturally want to let in the light. I will have no dark corners in my own cellar; it must be whitewashed clean. —Jacob Riis, The Making of an American42

In 1870, a young Danish immigrant named Jacob Riis arrived in New York. He promptly bought a revolver, which he strapped to the outside of his coat, so that he would be prepared for life in the city. Riis believed, he later said, that he was “following the fashion of the country,” for he had formed his mental image of America by reading the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. He was sure he would see “buffaloes and red Indians charging up and down Broadway” (38). But once he had taken his bearings and shed a few illusions, he discovered instead a way of life equally strange and misunderstood. Jobless and penniless, Riis found himself among the nomadic tribes of the urban poor. Having failed to make a go at any of a dozen trades, he drifted into desperate poverty. “I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime . . . and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway,” until “I was finally and utterly alone in the city, with the winter approaching and every shivering night in the streets, reminding me that a time was rapidly coming when such a life as I led could no longer be endured” (66, 69). One dark night, Riis almost threw himself into the Hudson River. But somehow he found the strength to live and took shelter in a police station lodging house in the Five Points. The brutality of that environment appalled him, and when the next morning a policeman killed Riis’s dog, his only companion, the Dane’s resolve was set. He would live to expose the

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untold misery of the poor. He would have his revenge on poverty and the police; he would reform the tenements and close down the police station lodgings where the poor were so cruelly exploited. Eventually finding work as a journalist, he accepted the worst beat: the slums of the Lower East Side. When he went off duty after having filed his late-night report, he did not flee uptown, but continued his investigations in “the Bend,” at the heart of the Five Points. Even before he had a camera, he discovered that this was the best time to get a true picture of slum life. “I liked to walk, for so I saw the slum when off its guard. The instinct to pose is as strong there as it is on Fifth Avenue. . . . But at 3 a.m. the veneering is off and you see the true grain of a thing. I got a picture of the Bend on my mind which so soon as I should be able to transfer it to that of the community would help settle with that pigsty according to its desserts” (235). From the start Riis had faith in a simple idea: if he could “transfer” his own mental picture of the Bend to the mind of the larger community, it would provoke a public outrage strong enough to initiate reform. “It was not fit for Christian men and women let alone innocent children, to live in, and therefore it had to go,” he later wrote (235). But from the first, he felt that writing alone was insufficient to the task of conveying that shocking mental picture. “We used to go in the small hours of the morning into the worst tenements to count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated, and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something. . . . I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression.” He needed, he felt, a vivid visual image, but the conventions of art did not seem able to handle the impact of the raw truths he had witnessed. “A drawing might have done it, but I cannot draw, never could. . . . Anyway, a drawing would not have been evidence of the kind I wanted” (266–67). Photography, however, could supply the right kind of “evidence,” and fortuitously the “detective” or portable camera had just been introduced in the mid-1880s. But the films were slow, requiring long exposure times, and there was little light, actual as well as metaphoric, where Riis wanted to go. He was temporarily stymied. Then in 1887 he read of magnesium flash powder: “There it was, the thing I had been looking for all those years. . . . The darkest corner might be photographed that way.” Riis realized that like a missionary, the photographer could bring his own light with him. But this would now be a literal, if momentary, light. “Within a fortnight,” Riis recalled, “a raiding party composed of Dr. Henry G. Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence, two distinguished amateurs, Dr. Nagle [of the Health Department] and myself, and sometimes a policemen or two invaded the East Side by night, bent on letting in the light” (267–68). Riis’s metaphors are illuminating in themselves. He saw photography as a form of war. His “raiding party . . . invaded the East Side by night.”

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If Riis’s nocturnal interiors are brutally direct, this is a feature not only of the image but also of the process of making it. In order to take what were among the first successful flash pictures, Riis or an assistant fired an explosive round of magnesium-based “lightning powder” from a revolver, jolting the subjects, garishly illuminating every speck of dirt and every crack in the wall, and occasionally setting the room on fire. His assaults on poverty involved considerable risk for himself and others. Once he accidentally ignited the wallpaper in a room full of blind men, up several flights of stairs—and he was painfully burned in putting out the blaze with his hands. Using military metaphors and flash pistols, Riis perfected his own form of the new art: photography as blitzkrieg. “It was not too much to say,” recalled Riis, “that our party carried terror wherever it went” (268). Riis also carried with him two new ideas about what photography might do. First, though his motives may have been laudable, he stalked his subjects and scenes in a manner not so different from that of his big-game hunting ally in urban reform, Theodore Roosevelt. The poor became anthropological specimens, to be “shot” in their hovels by the crusading photojournalist. Then they could be mounted on glass slides, to be projected rather than hung on the walls of the well-to-do. Other photographers before Riis had depicted the poor, but none had so relentlessly sought to strip away the protective poses and picturesque conventions, to catch them “off guard” and literally “at home.”43 His flash functions like the police officer’s bull’s-eye lantern, but like the photographer, it remains concealed. We see only the target that the light hits. Second, Riis was not content to have the camera record just what he saw. His determination to photograph “the darkest corner” involved a fundamental shift in nocturnal art. That is, he did not seek either to capture the elusive aesthetic qualities of darkness, as did Whistler and his photographic followers, or register the new look of an artificially lit cityscape, as did Hassam or Steichen. Rather, he wanted to bring to light—or bring light to—what usually dwelled in darkness. He was on the side of Light with a capital L. His aim was not to record but to alter. His photographs were literally exposures—exposures of greasy wallpaper and grimy skin, filthy bedding and soot-caked stoves that never saw the light of day. It was a vision created only for an instant by the flash camera. Displaying what even the poor themselves were unable to see, the full degradation of their environment, Riis hoped to destroy the world his flash fell on. Photography is often thought of as a form of preservation; for Riis it was an agent of demolition. Riis used his photographic plates to make lantern slides so that he could give illustrated lectures, afterward passing the hat around his visibly shaken audience to collect money for the poor. But he wanted to reach a wider public, and got his chance on February 12, 1888, when his own newspaper,

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the aptly named New York Sun, published his article “Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process.” On the same day a related article, also by Riis, titled “Visible Darkness: New York’s Under Side Flashed on the Camera,” appeared in the New York Morning Journal. In the articles, Riis was able to recount his photographic and philanthropic aims as well as some of his adventures using volatile equipment in dangerous places. He wrote in the Sun, With their way illuminated by spasmodic flashes, as bright and sharp and brief as those of the lightning itself, a mysterious party has lately been startling the town o’ nights. Somnolent policemen on the street, denizens of the dives in their dens, tramps and bummers in the so-called lodgings, and all the people of the wild and wonderful variety of New York night life have . . . marveled at . . . the phenomenon. What they saw was a ghostly tripod, three or four figures in the gloom, some weird and uncanny movements, the blinding flash, and they heard the patter of retreating footsteps and the mysterious visitors were gone.44

Despite Riis’s best efforts, his photographs did not make it into the newspapers. Through the halftone photoengraving process, the first photograph had been published in a newspaper in 1880. But the technology to do this economically would not exist until the 1890s. Riis therefore had to accept line drawings made from his photos—“not . . . evidence of the kind I wanted.” The same compromise was necessary when Riis was finally able to publish his pioneering documentary, How the Other Half Lives (1890). Although Riis and his allies had made the photographs to show the world tenement life as it really was, the readers of his book and articles could not experience the immediacy, the visual assault of the slide lectures. Presenting the photographs in the form of a guided tour, Riis asked his spectators if they had the courage to follow him into the worst slums.45 When they assented, he conducted them into various tenements, his commentary accentuating the dirt, stench, and atmospheric poison through which the visitor had to move. Out of the darkness, in unprecedented detail, came a sooty man in a coal cellar, a gang of thugs in bowler hats lining an alley, a withered hag with clawlike hands in a decrepit room. Viewers seemed to be thrust up against these people; the encounter was brutal, repulsive, claustrophobic. Some of the audience wept, others fainted—such are contemporary accounts of Riis’s lectures.46 In presenting “the Other Half,” Riis minimized his role as photographer or artistic arranger of his subjects. He stressed the unmediated quality of his pictures, downplaying any posing or premeditated organizing of the scene. In a time when the word “snapshot” had just been invented and taking each picture still involved heavy, cumbersome equipment, catching unself-conscious

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Figure 3.8. Jacob Riis (1849–1914), 3 a.m. in the Sun Office, c. 1890. Museum of the City of New York. The Jacob A. Riis Collection [#128]

“real” life was not easy. Riis had twin allies in night and sleep. For night images were truer than daytime ones, Riis felt. He wrote in the New York Sun of his “picture-taking party” that “their night pictures were faithful and characteristic, being mostly snap shots and surprises. In the daytime they could not altogether avoid having their object known, and struggle as they might against it, they could not altogether prevent the natural instinct of fixing up for a picture from being followed.”47 Riis’s use of the passive voice leaves it unclear as to whether “the natural instinct of fixing up” applies to the subject, the photographer, or both. But in the darkness, the magnesium flash ensured a certain spontaneity, since the photographer could not see his subject until he took the picture, and human subjects were surely unprepared for the violence of the flash powder’s explosion. And then there was the element of surprise, as Riis and his assistants burst into the room with their “weird and uncanny movements,” and then fired off “the blinding flash” before beating a hasty retreat. Just as crucial to the disquieting immediacy of the photos is Riis’s focus on sleeping bodies. It is amazing just how many there are: the pig-piled newsboys in the Sun newsroom at 3:00 a.m.; the huddled Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters near warm-air gratings; a boy named Scotty reclining awkwardly “in his Lair” of timbers; the blanketed lumps in Police Station Lodgers, Madison Street; the mustached row of flophouse snoozers in Seven Cents a

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Figure 3.9. Jacob Riis, Midnight in Ludlow Street Tenement, c. 1888–1890. Museum of the City of New York. The Jacob A. Riis Collection [#158]

Spot; the hunched-over Police Station Lodgers—Women—Madison Street; the scattered, uncovered Police Station—Women Lodgers; the sleepers indistinguishable from the piles of bedding and washing piled around them in a ramshackle room in Midnight in Ludlow Street Tenement; the barefoot circle of bodies around a stove in Men’s Lodging Room, West 47th Street Station; the propped-up Lodgers in Bayard Street Tenement—“Five Cents a Spot”; and the slumped-over, bowler-hatted denizens of An All-Night Two-Cent Restaurant, in “The Bend.” Riis had a practical reason for taking these pictures, in wanting to document just how overcrowded and miserable the tenements and lodging houses were. As Peter Hales comments of “Five Cents a Spot,” Riis specializes in “visual overload,” to the point that as “a description of overcrowding in slum housing, it is itself so overcrowded as to require a great deal of time simply to catalogue everything included.”48 Yet a Riisian catalog is not exactly Whitmanesque in range or flavor, being mostly limited to cheap domestic objects such as socks, shoes, and chamber pots. Nor are his sleepers much in the way of transcendent dreamers. In strangely reciprocal relation to their environment, they lie shapeless and limp as their bedding, or propped against walls, tables, or elbows like brooms or washtubs, or carelessly stacked like kindling for the potbellied stove. As Riis no doubt appreciated, sleepers are by definition “acting

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Figure 3.10. Jacob Riis, Lodgers in Bayard Street Tenement—“Five Cents a Spot,” c. 1889. Museum of the City of New York. The Jacob A. Riis Collection [#155]

natural” and unwary, but here, lacking animation, they assume the status of inanimate things. The camera and flash trespass on their privacy and ingloriously turn them into lumps under blankets, legless bare feet (there are at least four pair in Men’s Lodging Room), and greasy heads with scarlike parts on the scalp. They are “real” life at its purest, but also at its closest to death. They are documented, along with their possessions, as if they were dead in the morgue. (The woman sleeping on the bare floor in Police Station—Women Lodgers, for example, lies in a posture close to that of the murder victim in Weegee’s famous Dead Gunman). Riis eventually shifted the ignition of his flash powder from a revolver to a frying pan because “it seemed more homelike.”49 But the domesticity he invokes—the blankets, the stoves, and the pots—is a funereal one, as if all this human and household mess were preparation for an iron-age burial rite. The propped-up figures wait, amid their belongings, for some distant resurrection. The whole scene is an archaeologist’s paradise. Riis’s invasive photographs fling back the cover of night, claiming intimacy without any kind of human engagement. By dispelling darkness, the flash deprives the sleepers not only of privacy but also of a reason for sleeping in the first place. The night has been dissolved, abolished. These are the

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Figure 3.11. Jacob Riis, Men’s Lodging Room, West 47th Street Station, c. 1890. Museum of the City of New York. The Jacob A. Riis Collection [#230]

first night pictures without any trace of night—a moon, stars, darkness, or any evidence of blazing lights. Nothing in the picture suggests the hour, a reason for revelry or repose. Time seems irrelevant. Thus in certain pictures, such as Police Station Lodgers—Madison Street and 3 a.m. in the Sun Office, some people stand and look at the camera while others snore on. The effect is more than a bit like war photos of soldiers standing over enemy bodies. Yet lurking within these apparent victims is a coy sort of life. We tend to think of pictures of people with closed eyes as failures, but many of Riis’s most famous images give us just that, and their uncomfortable, often-upright postures make one wonder if they are sleeping or have closed their eyes because of the flash. The second drawing in the Sun, showing women sitting up on a flophouse platform, is titled Waked Up by the Flash Light, while a drawing in the next column, of children lying on the porch of a house, is called Sleeping Street Arabs. Why do the boys (who seem to be outdoors, in the daylight) sleep while the grown-ups awake? Are the boys—or both groups—posing? These pictures disturb partly because of their voyeuristic quality—photographer and viewers glimpse something meant to be hidden—but partly because we can’t tell if those unseeing faces

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are pretending to act unseen. Through this uncertainty, the night’s mystery sneaks back into Riis’s photographs. Someone is being manipulated but we don’t know whom. Discussing how, during the nineteenth century, street lighting came to seem inseparable from modernity, Joachim Schlör quotes a Berliner who recalled, “A step into the side streets and you felt set back by centuries.”50 In a sense, it was the dark side street that made the city shine. A vital component of New York’s modernity, its heterogeneous, polyglot immigrant population, did not sparkle at night; for many, it furnished the darkness against which the lights were lit. As David Nye writes in Electrifying America, the very electric lights and signs that advertised the commerce of night, the restaurants, theaters, and stores, seemed to “cast everything unsightly into an impenetrable darkness. If by day poor or unsightly sections called out for social reform, by night the city was a purified world of light, simplified into a spectacular pattern, interspersed with now-unimportant blanks.”51 Yet the “blanks” were anything but unimportant—visually they lent the “purified” world of light both form and meaning, while socially they helped define elite culture’s sense of identity and progress. Riis’s downtown night world is all side streets, and for this reason he could not fail, as he shot his lightning powder toward those Conradian “blank spaces” on the map, to find an uneasy audience on the well-lit avenues further uptown. His point was that such poverty as he had uncovered, a medieval servitude, should have been a thing of the past. But it was terribly present, even omnipresent. It needed to be seen, addressed. This desperate, dedicated effort to make poverty visible coincided with the middle- and upper-class need for a lessfortunate “Other Half ” against which to measure its own modernity, its moral virtue and economic success. Seeming to combine the imagined benightedness of medieval Europe with the imagined barbarity of the Wild West, the foreign-born denizen of the Lower East Side was an object of sympathy and fear, innocent, devious, devilish, requiring help and vigilance at the same time. As David Leviatin comments, Riis “saw the slum environment as hellish and the unassimilated poor as potential agents of the devil. . . . By relocating the frontier line, refashioning the wild Indian as urban alien . . . Riis produced a catalog of images of the poor uncivilized.”52 Seen in this light, Riis’s work represents a crucial step in the colonizing of the night, the decisive moment when the enemies of progress seem most threatening and overwhelming in number, most demanding “pacification.” Yet it is also the moment in which they have been surrounded and have to be, by some deep cultural imperative, “cataloged” before they can be “helped”—or exterminated. What Riis managed to do—almost in spite of his belief in Light—was to capture the dignity and strangeness of the Others who dwelled in this dark corner of the nation.

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Figure 3.12. Anonymous, Turning Out the Night Lodgers from a Police Station. In Frank Lesley’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 10, 1877. Negative no. 63541. Collection of The New-York Historical Society

Living Like the Other Half Stephen Crane attended one of Riis’s lectures in 1892, reporting on it for the New York Tribune. He later got to know Riis socially, dining with him and Theodore Roosevelt.53 Like Riis, Crane brought his creativity to bear on the hard facts that his fieldwork in the slums had turned up. For Crane as for Riis, night told the truth about poverty; to explore the dark slums conferred a black-and-white badge of authenticity on the author. In the gritty sketches that he wrote for New York newspapers in the 1890s, and in his short novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Crane tried as did Riis to open poverty’s nocturnal lair to the light of the press. Fellow novelist Frank Norris used a Riisian analogy to praise Crane for producing “scores of tiny flashlight photographs, instantaneous, caught as it were, on the run.”54 But Crane’s pictures were made of words. He avoided the exhortative tone and ethnic stereotyping that made Riis’s prose so much less incisive than his intensely particular photographs. Crane discovered in the night’s denizens a laconic sort of vitality, which he reported with a tough-minded sympathy that was also beginning to emerge in popular illustration. Because the lack of a place to sleep made poverty visible, night, poverty, and homelessness were linked repeatedly in graphic work. A crowd of downcast men, women, and children emerge past an icicle-covered gaslight into the snowy darkness in Turning out the Night Lodgers from a Police Station (1877).55 In a summertime illustration called Among

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Figure 3.13. Sol Eytinge, Among the Tenement Houses During the Heated Term—Just Before Daybreak. In Harper’s Weekly, August 9, 1879. Negative no. 63540. Collection of The New-York Historical Society

the Tenement Houses During the Heated Term—Just Before Daybreak (1879), a solitary policeman stands to symbolic effect under a gas lamp while he surveys the homeless sprawling in Doré-esque profusion in the street, against lampposts, on steps, and in doorways.56 A multiscene depiction of the Work of the Children’s Aid Society (1873) shows children who have been sleeping on the streets being “Rescued” under foggy gaslight in the city and “Adopted” in sunshine in the rural West.57 Focusing like the illustrators on the exterior of his subjects, Crane avoided the sentimental and moralistic tone of most writing about the poor. His account of a night spent in a flophouse, “An Experiment in Misery” (1894), opens with two men studying a tramp. The younger, Crane himself, says, “I wonder how he feels,” and the elder, apparently his mentor William Dean Howells, remarks, “You can tell nothing of it unless you are in that condition yourself. It is idle to speculate about it from this distance.”58 Scrounging some tattered clothes, Crane heads downtown “to try to eat as

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the tramp may eat, and sleep as the wanderers sleep” (34). After some free soup at a bar, the author, who writes of his experiences in the third person, pays seven cents for a spot in a flophouse: “As the young man’s eyes became used to the darkness he could see upon the cots that thickly littered the floor the forms of men sprawled out, lying in death-like silence or heaving and snoring with tremendous effort, like stabbed fish.” A row of clothes lockers stands at the end of the beds like tombstones. A moaning sleeper expresses “the meaning of the room,” his cries “giving voice to the wail of a whole section, a class, a people” (38–39). Unable to sleep, “the young man . . . lay carving biographies for these men from his meager experience” (39). But Crane does not reveal what these biographies are; the flâneur’s fabled ability to read the crowd has either failed or become irrelevant. What Crane discovers during his experiment is “his infinite distance from all that he valued. Social position, comfort, the pleasures of living, were unconquerable kingdoms. He felt a sudden awe.” As he trudges forward in the morning to pass the day aimlessly, “the roar of the city in his ear was to him the confusion of strange tongues, babbling heedlessly; it was the clink of coin, the voice of the city’s hopes which were to him no hopes. He confessed himself an outcast, and his eyes from under the lowered rim of his hat began to glance guiltily, wearing the criminal expression that comes with certain convictions” (42–43). Like Poe’s man of the crowd, the penniless urban wanderer finds himself in the criminal camp, and though there may be many biographies concealed within him, he finally “cannot be read” by those above him on the social ladder. While poor men shuffle toward the flophouse to escape the night, poor women “of the painted cohorts” sally forth looking for hire. In October 1896, Crane challenged a policeman named Charles Becker for wrongfully arresting a woman whom the police believed to be a prostitute. Becker defended his action in court, insisting on the legibility of the woman’s actions: “Any woman who appears alone on the street late at night,” Becker said, “and talks to a man is a prostitute.”59 Curiously, Crane himself had depended on just this inference at the end of Maggie. There, Crane offers glimpses of the circumstances that lead his heroine to her fall, but the reader never sees Maggie working as a prostitute until her last night alive, when an unnamed girl slowly drifts from Broadway toward the East River, unsuccessfully accosting men, until “she went into the blackness of the final block” near the river’s “deathly black hue.” Maggie’s presumed suicide is revealed in the next chapter. As in “An Experiment in Misery,” Crane stresses the “unapproachableness” of the city’s pleasures for the outcast, as well as the cruel irony of “the varied sounds of life” that from a distance taunt the doomed heroine.60 This is the method of Crane’s investigation, to put himself and the reader as nearly as possible in the position he describes, while minimizing speculation

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Figure 3.14. Joseph Becker, Randall’s Island Poorhouse. In Frank Lesley’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1875.

about the inner hopes or failings of the poor, by sticking to what he can see for himself. In perhaps his most famous sketch, “The Men in the Storm” (1894), he uses physical details and telling similes to turn the familiar scene of people waiting for admission to a shelter into a subtle study of human nature in difficult circumstances. Outwardly, his scene is like one that appeared in Frank Lesley’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1875: in the night ragged men wait, huddled in a dark line against the raging snowstorm, to gain admission to Randall’s Island Poorhouse.61 But Crane animates both people and objects. In front of the shelter, as darkness falls on a winter night, “the buildings upreared gloomily save where various windows become brilliant figures of light that made shimmers and splashes of yellow on the snow. A street lamp on the curb struggled to illuminate, but it was reduced to impotent blindness by the swift gusts of sleet crusting its panes.”62 As in Turning Out the Night Lodgers, the cold comfort of the blindly struggling lamp suggests the limitations of both urban charity and authorial vision. The men in the crowd “were all mixed in one mass so thoroughly that one could not have discerned the different elements but for the fact that the laboring men, for the most part, remained silent and impassive in the blizzard” (317–18). Working men and tramps alike “pressed close to one another like sheep. . . . The snow came down upon this compressed group of men until, directly from above, it might have appeared like a heap of snow-covered merchandise” (318). Helpless lambs or capitalist commodities, the men fight to hold their places in the line until, as they “stood upon the threshold of their hopes, they looked suddenly content and complacent. The fire had passed from their eyes and the snarl had vanished from their lips. The very force of the crowd in the rear, which had previously vexed them, was regarded from

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another point of view, for it now made it inevitable that they should go through the little doors into the place that was cheery and warm with light” (321). While the men express desperation and relief, the snow continues to “beat with merciless persistence upon the bowed heads of those who waited. The wind drove it up from the pavements in frantic forms of winding white, and it seethed in circles about the huddled forms, passing in, one by one, three by three, out of the storm” (321–22). Like partnerless animals entering Noah’s ark, Crane’s poor tramp numbly and dumbly into the lighted shelter. Riis’s lightning flash suggests Judgment Day, but for Crane poverty is a dark storm to be weathered each night, with no promise of rainbows or landfall in the morning.

The Poor En Masse, the Rich One by One Beginning in the later 1890s, painters of what would be called the Ash Can School took up the subjects of Riis and Crane, though without the aggressive investigative methods. Focusing on the neighborhoods and activities of poorer New Yorkers with bold, energetic strokes of paint and pastel, they challenged the tasteful, color-coordinated city of tonalist painting, and avoided the fashionable people and locales of the American impressionists. With an empathy and anecdotalism more pronounced than that of Riis or Crane, John Sloan and Everett Shinn brought the vitality and desperation of the ragged city into the mainstream of American art. In The Coffee Line (1905), Sloan evoked the fatigue of the poor as they huddled waiting in the snowy night of Madison Square for a hot drink (color plate 13). One of Sloan’s earliest oil paintings of contemporary urban life, the painting has a simple yet powerful visual structure that recalls Crane’s “Men in the Storm,” to which an early viewer compared it.63 A dark mass dividing the snowy ground from the lights of Madison Square, the line of people pushes forward across the canvas—in this case not to a shelter but to the lighted square indicating the line’s goal, the spot where the free hot coffee is served. With its narrow tonal range and minimal detail, its semiabstract yet atmospherically convincing rendering of a winter night, The Coffee Line applies the techniques of the nocturne to the New York scene. It is a Whistler with a social conscience.64 The painting raises an aesthetic and sociopolitical issue that would confront artists from now on: what to do about lighted signs. As the illuminated sign became more and more a part of the urban landscape, painters had to decide how specifically to render its message. The “American” coffee wagons, as they were called, were sent out by William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York American and Journal, with the triple aim of publicizing the newspaper, serving the poor, and ostentatiously making a political point about the way that the city’s powers were failing the working classes

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that Hearst’s papers championed. While Sloan sided with “the masses” throughout his life, he was no fan of Hearst, who was notorious for his role in pushing the United States into the Spanish-American War as well as for his ceaseless self-promotion. In his painting, Sloan deliberately blanked out the “American” sign so as not to give Hearst free advertising.65 Widely exhibited and much discussed, praised by Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri, The Coffee Line marked a breakthrough for the Ash Can style of gritty urban realism. But it did so with a Whistlerian approach toward the nocturnal image. An eloquent suppression of detail enabled it to become a sign of the urban, without the urban sign. In jagged oils and pastels, Sloan’s colleague in newspaper illustration, Everett Shinn, also reported from the frontier of urban life. Though he covered the high as well as the low end of city life, Shinn’s work now stands out for the raw immediacy of his late-night scenes of the poor and working classes. In his Park Row, Morning Papers (n.d.), the dark street is filled to daytime capacity with the throng of newsboys stacking, dividing, and selling the papers in the lamplight before dawn. In Night Life—Accident (1908), a man lies bleeding on the pavement beneath a streetlight after apparently having been hit by a cab; a crowd stands over him, curious but disengaged. And in Shinn’s Fire on Twenty-Fourth Street (1907), a building gutted by fire seems ready to collapse under the weight of firemen and their hoses, while their comrades working the steam pump engines are covered in showers of coal sparks. It recalls Crane’s stirring but fictitious report of a tenement fire, with the firefighters up on ladders, “outlined like black beetles against the red and yellow expanses of flames.”66 These and other pictures may have been intended for a book Shinn apparently hoped to do called New York by Night, focusing on the unsleeping aspect of the nocturnal city.67 Yet one of Shinn’s most moving images, Tenements at Hester Street (1900), shows people sleeping on roofs and fire escapes in hot weather (color plate 14). Bodies are strewn everywhere after the day’s battle with urban poverty. The focal point is a half-naked sleeper who thrusts arm and leg through the railings of a fire escape, as if trying in sleep to escape the imprisoning bars of a jail cell. The Lower East Side had at this time the greatest population density the world had ever known, at more than one thousand people per acre. On hot nights they fled to the roofs. “What a mélange in the starlight,” wrote author Michael Gold, who grew up there. His memories closely coincide with Shinn’s image: “Mothers, graybeards, lively young girls, exhausted sweatshop fathers, young consumptive coughers and spitters, all of us snored and groaned there side by side, on newspapers or mattresses. We slept in pants and undershirt, heaped like corpses. The city reared about us.”68

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The rich were not immune to the probing light cast on the poor, for the presence of the immigrant multitudes also forced nocturnal scrutiny of the “native” consciousness. In the case of Henry James, his return to the United States in 1904 after an absence of twenty-one years prompted anxious reflections on his own identity as an American. He describes his sense of the new New York in The American Scene (1907). Anyone visiting Ellis Island will undergo a transformative fall into knowledge of the Other, he writes: “He has eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the taste will be for ever in his mouth. He had thought he knew before, thought he had the sense of the degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien; but the truth had never come home to him with any such force.” Forced to “share the sanctity” of his national identity, he is shaken “to the depths of his being” so that he must go about “ever afterwards with a new look . . . in his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his heart.” It is as if, James says, he “has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe old house.” The most frightening thing about the immigrant ghosts was, he concluded, that “we, not they, must make the surrender and accept the orientation. . . . This sense of dispossession . . . haunted me . . . in the New York streets.”69 In a sense, James himself had become a ghost, the ghost of old New York, haunting the city that once was “his.” In order to get a grip on self and other, James turned the image of a man seeing “a ghost in his supposedly safe old house” into a story of suspense and terror, “The Jolly Corner” (1909). The protagonist has returned, like James, from a long period abroad, and to communicate with his past he takes nightly walks through the empty rooms of his family’s old house. He will have no artificial light in the house; darkness or a candle suits his purpose. Gradually he becomes certain that a ghost accompanies him, and he decides to confront it, to demand its identity and intent. Despite all the modernity of New York and all the marvels of electric lighting, James shows, the culture only tenuously represses its dark past, as phantoms readily, credibly, swim up out of memory and legend whenever there is a house to haunt or a lost soul who needs to speak. While the story’s conclusion is fraught with characteristic Jamesian ambiguity, it seems that the ghost is a brutalized and mutilated version of the protagonist; the ghost is what the protagonist would have become had he remained a New Yorker. For James, the night shelters the horrors of the new American identity, and he uses the story to convince himself that his expatriate career and subsequent “sense of dispossession” was a necessary sacrifice, an act of self-preservation. A stranger in his own house, the Europeanized author portrays himself as a respectable Dr. Jekyll who must face up to his Hyde-like American half.

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James’s friend Edith Wharton saw no such way out for her vulnerable heroine in The House of Mirth (1905). As the exquisite Lily Bart’s fortunes fail, she will not compromise with the nouveau riche and the rising ethnic tide represented by the Jewish financier Simon Rosedale. Her troubles magnify when she is seen “in a haze of evening draperies” emerging after dark from a married man’s house on Fifth Avenue. Lily has been tricked into the rendezvous and is fleeing when her potential savior Lawrence Selden passes by. Deeply troubled by her apparent promiscuity, he is impervious to excuses made for her: “appearances are deceptive—and Fifth Avenue is so imperfectly lighted.”70 The glare of offended society is too penetrating for Lily to escape. She gradually sinks toward the shabbiness that revolts her. In her tortured consciousness, “it was as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on inside her head.” The crude harshness of the city’s light becomes remorselessly interiorized, relentlessly exposing all her mistakes and shortcomings: “her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it.” Desperate for refuge, Lily takes an overdose of chloral, seeking “darkness, darkness . . . at any cost.”71 Wharton shows that social domination and control can be figured electrically not only as “the savage and the circuit” but also as “the civilized and the circuit”—wherein, in a sort of electrical Darwinism, the weakest links in the social power chain are doomed to burn out through overload or else flicker out through insufficient power supply. In 1880, Dr. George Beard, a New York neurologist who had conducted electrical experiments with Edison, wrote that the nervous system was like a lightbulb: Edison’s electric light is now sufficiently advanced . . . to give us the best possible illustration of the effects of modern civilization on the nervous system. . . . The force in the nervous system . . . is limited; and when new functions are interposed in the circuit, as modern civilization is constantly requiring us to do, there comes a period, sooner or later . . . when the amount of force is insufficient to keep all the lamps actively burning, those that are weakest go out entirely, or, as more frequently happens, burn faint and feebly [giving] an insufficient and unstable light—this is the philosophy of modern nervousness.72

“Those that are weakest go out entirely”—only in death does Lily finally find the dark repose she seeks. Like the poor, the rich are subject to electrified scrutiny, and like them they feel overwhelmed in the flood of controlling light. Witnessing just this phenomenon, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in 1899: “People are fearfully disfigured by the light / that drips from their countenances.” The light, Rilke says, drains them of inner life and personality: “Upon their foreheads yellow shine / has driven away all thoughts” to the point that “they say: I and I / and mean: Anybody.”73

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Moonlight Reservation The conquest of darkness by increased illumination had eliminated the aura from the picture as thoroughly as the increasing alienation of the imperialist bourgeoisie had eliminated it from reality. —Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography”74

By 1900, night was an endangered species. For the great meditator on modernity, Walter Benjamin, there were twin casualties of light’s imperialism: darkness and the “aura,” the uniqueness of the work of art. The omnipresence of light, like mechanical reproduction, had killed the specialness of an image. Benjamin’s possible solution: picture the darkness. Writing in 1931, Benjamin praised the Parisian photographer Eugène Atget for city photos “beautifully dipped in blue night, with retouched moon.”75 Had Benjamin been working earlier, in an American frame of reference, he might have joined Frederic Remington in mourning the demise of another aura, that of the Wild West. With the inexorable spread of electric light, darkness seemed more than ever to belong to the past, its passing coinciding with the final settlement of the American frontier. If, like the West, night was now conquered and in danger of extinction, then perhaps the aura of night and the West—as well as the aura of the picture and the past—could be artistically preserved together. This was Remington’s project: to use night as a time machine, a passport to a dream of the past. During the 1890s, Remington’s illustrations in New York–based massmarket magazines made his name a household word; his masculine, heroic view of western conquest became the predominant one. But between 1900 and his sudden death in 1909, he produced a series of nocturnal views of the West that marked a turning point not only in his artistic career but also in how the night, the West, and the imperialist project would be viewed.76 Painting in the New York suburbs and exhibiting in the city, Remington created images of the West for an eastern, urban audience. He exploited his culture’s fascination with nighttime images in order to explore new territory—to spin for both himself and his audience a compelling narrative about the dark side of western expansion.77 Unlike Riis, he knew his subject matter was vanishing, not multiplying. He was afraid he was “doing an obituary,” but if he couldn’t save the reality he did his best to keep the multilayered western dream alive.78 He needed to nourish it with darkness, not fumigate it with light. Thus, as Remington matured he became less determined to reveal what the West was like in a literal sense. “These transcript from nature fellows who are so clever cannot compare with the imaginative men in [the] long run,” Remington predicted in his diary.79 Instead, he depicted ambiguous situations that required viewers to make up their own narrative. In Fired

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Figure 3.15. Frederic Remington (1861–1909), Moonlight, Wolf, c. 1909. Oil on canvas, 20 1/16 ⫻ 26 in. (50.96 ⫻ 66.04 cm) [1956.2]. Gift of the Members of the Phillips Academy Board of Trustees on the occasion of the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the Addison

On (1907), for example, the horses of army riders coming to a moonlit ford rear up, as bullets hit the dark water in front of them. The riders draw guns, staring frantically into the darkness. But Remington’s viewers stand at the source of the flying bullets; are we meant to be Indians—or civilization— trying to kill these intruders? Similarly, Remington’s powerful Moonlight, Wolf (1909) stares out at its audience with burning eyes—eyes that echo the stars blazing in the night sky above. Perhaps the viewer is menaced by the prowling wolf. But more urgently, as in Fired On, the viewer becomes the dark, unseen thing that is dangerous. In the quest to explore and exploit the West, settlers have hunted it down, cornered it. Yet in Remington’s enigmatic stopped narrative of the night, they dare not kill it, for they recognize in it something nocturnal that represents a vital part of themselves. Using Whistler’s colors, Remington creates a unified tonalist blue-green or blue-silver atmosphere that envelops his figures, rather like that of Steichen’s colored pigment on his Flatiron negative, harmonizing them with the background and projecting an initial mood of nocturnal beauty and calm. Against that he poses the drama of his figures. With their drawn guns and searching gazes, they uneasily inhabit the tonal reverie Remington has saddled them with like an unshakable dream. In their apparent calm, Remington’s night paintings pose deep questions about western expansion and its role in the American psyche. As Thoreau asked in Walden, linking colonialism and conquest to inner exploration, “What does Africa, what does the West, stand for?” Not pausing for the answer, Thoreau demands rhetorically, “Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it must prove, like the coast, when discovered.”80 Remington began painting night scenes of the West just at the time that Conrad and Sigmund Freud were

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making their own explorations of inner darkness. In Remington’s work, in obvious and subtle ways, it is the artist who has become “the West,” facing and creating figures, putting paint on and around them, standing in the place of the viewer, setting up the danger and embodying it. Conrad’s Marlowe remarks, “We live, as we dream—alone,” but as Freud spells out in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1908), writers, like painters, dream in public, to the fascination of others.81 What Remington adds to the history of night images is an implicit narrative, the element that Whistler had tried to suppress through his emphasis on the painting as an arrangement of colors on a flat surface. The stories that repelled Whistler come back with a vengeance and a loaded gun in Remington’s late work. Even in the deep blue-green Whistlerian atmosphere of Night Halt of Cavalry (1908), at first glance so still and calm, a crouched soldier with his left hand on his rifle suggests that something outside our ken has caught his attention. Remington builds his sense of night around the tension between the almost-palpable beauty of darkness and moonlight, on the one hand, and imminent danger, death, or psychological disturbance, on the other. With some exceptions, even preWhistler nocturnes convey emotional and lighting effects in a scenic way. The minimal narrative is “this is what one might see on a moonlit night.” Tonalist pictures, beautifully rendered though their effects may be, are deliberately nonevents. But Remington suggests a story, a specific situation, and distinctive characters whose underlying plot is to make art and audience interact. For Remington night was of a piece with the Indian—dangerous, seductive, and threatening, but on the verge of extinction. In painting it, he was dealing with artistic modernism and the disappearing primordial past at the same time. His works are thus only partly “nocturnes” in the conventional sense; the rest is fraught with psychological tension, a kind of brooding intensity. Remington adds a new layer to nocturnal painting: he allies himself and the viewer with and in the darkness. It is not the aestheticized urban darkness that Whistler embraced but an ideological frontier, a primal darkness, like that of Conrad, set in the eye-straining obscurity at the juncture of unstably defined civilization and savagery, between one race and another. For all their troubling ambiguities, Remington’s painted moonlights also acted as a sort of reservation, to which the terrors of night and its denizens could be consigned. Artistically avant-garde, the nocturne could be read as a politically marginalized and aestheticized “safe” outlet for the forces of darkness. A picture of the past, it serves as a conceptual corral, an unthreatening location in which romantics, Indian lovers, and Indians (now safely dead or dispersed) can roam. Yet if night and its once-timeless imagery now functioned

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Figure 3.16. Frederic Remington, Shotgun Hospitality, 1908. 27 ⫻ 40 in. (68.6 ⫻ 101.6 cm). Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Gift of Judge Horace Russell, class of 1865

as only a temporary, even fragile refuge from the ravages of day—the immigrant East, the settled West—it was still possible to wonder if, in the long term, the imperiled moonlight might eventually triumph. Night and moonlight are great levelers, as Thoreau saw, bringing past and present together, completing a circuit between antiquity and futurity, and evoking the ages of repose that both precede and succeed the moment of empire: “New and old things are confounded. I know not if I am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one.”82 In Remington’s nocturnal West, it is no longer a question of conquering some realms from the night, but of whether night will reconquer human realms for itself. Like the firelit figures in Remington’s Shotgun Hospitality (1908)— where a surrounded white man, shotgun on lap, ponders unexpected Indian visitors across his campfire—the empire of light and the empire of night hold each other uneasily at bay. Only Remington’s sudden death in December 1909 prevented his bringing a symbol of western darkness back to confront the torch of New York civilization. At a dinner for Buffalo Bill Cody held in the city on May 12, 1909, the artist joined in the enthusiastic talk about his creating “a colossal statue of the North American Indian at the mouth of the Hudson in New York Harbor.”83 Whether it commemorated the lost West or the Anglo-Saxon values that had killed the original inhabitants of the land, the statue would have confirmed for arriving immigrants and returning Americans their stereotypes of the West—stereotypes stamped with the name of Remington. It would likely have indicated that both groups of “native” Americans—Anglo-Saxons and Indians—were a proud breed on whose passing one could only look with regret. Remington’s friend Homer Davenport called it “the one necessary statue of the whole country.”84 In its own

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way, it would have been a work as allegorical as Bartholdi’s Liberty, and like her the giant Indian would have had to have been illuminated—a noble savage on a circuit—by something simulating moonshine, if only to prevent shipping accidents. What a sight that would have been, a giant nocturnal ur-American bestriding the waters, an indigenous partner for the foreignborn Lady Liberty. His meaning, like that of Remington’s night paintings, would be forever shaped by the electric urban night that he could not flee, glaring out into the western darkness stretching far behind him.

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chapter

FOUR

A lot of bad things are said about night life. It comes in for far too much criticism . . . night life and stupidity don’t get along. So the growth of night life also means increasing mental freshness . . . electric light . . . means night life, and night life means progress. —Thomas Edison, 1911 interview

The Empire of Light While Frederic Remington was corralling western moonlight in the New York suburbs, the city was carousing under the glare of gas and electric light. The mystery of the unseen that played so large a role in Remington’s night scenes was eroding in the flood of light. A headline read: “1,477 Big New Lights for Central Park: Lovers’ Lanes Will Be Illuminated and Also the Danger Spots.”1 Already by December 1878, elevated “owl trains” were running all night between South Ferry and 129th Street.2 In 1911, the first midnight theatrical performance in the United States took place in New York. Continually adding more and brighter lights to lure human moths, the city’s impresarios created a potent combination of eroticism and consumerism, decked out with imperial trappings, to delight the public and ensure that pleasure and profit went hand in hand. In 1888, the businessman Henry Clews wrote that “what London is to the Continent, what Rome was in its imperial day to the Empire. . . . New York is to the immense domain of the American Republic, a natural stage . . . for the great drama of civilization on this Continent.”3 New York nightlife got a new center stage when Madison Square Garden opened in 1891, and with it a new symbol of its racy but supposedly chaste pursuit of pleasure. Atop Madison Square Garden’s tower, Augustus Saint Gaudens’s statue of Diana the huntress, naked save for her quiver, scandalized and titillated the town.4 Gradually the center of nightlife was moving up Broadway. Heading north from Twenty-third Street toward Forty-second Street in the two decades before 1900, one would encounter theaters, restaurants, and roof gardens including the Lyceum (which in 1885 became the first theater lit by electricity), Daly’s, Wallack’s, the Bijou, the Abbey, the Casino (site of the city’s first roof garden, in 1882), the original Metropolitan Opera, and

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at the edge of what was soon to become Times Square, the Empire. Following the imperial theme, Murray’s Roman Gardens opened on Forty-second Street in 1906, setting a new standard for opulence of food and decor. Though moral perils still lurked, commercial nightlife had shed the tawdry image of Foster’s gaslit Babylon. Bright and brash, the empire of light now flaring in New York was compounded of imperialist rhetoric, selfindulgent prosperity, and Manhattan’s sense of itself as the inevitable cultural and economic capital of a nation and a world. Moreover, the world was coming to the city, as the immensity of foreign immigration proved: between 1880 and 1919, 5.5 million European immigrants settled in the city. Comparisons between New York and ancient Rome abounded, especially in terms of wealth, power, variety, architectural splendor, and engineering skill. Propelled by the desire to augment this splendor, agents of the light, in the form of advertisers, nightclub managers, and amusement park entrepreneurs, carried light’s conquests to Harlem, Coney Island, and above all Broadway. While poets and pundits wondered at this bulb-bedecked landscape, doubts began to glimmer about where all the illumination would lead. In downtown Manhattan, Willa Cather anatomized the brooding menace of the floodlit skyscraper in “Behind the Singer Tower,” and in midtown Joseph Stella cast a critical eye on the frantic, fractured landscape of flashing signs in his epic work New York Interpreted. The electric empire of skyscrapers and “sky-signs,” as the radiant billboards were called, seemed willfully unconscious, however, of the dire prophecies that empires provoke. If Gibbon’s Roman Empire could be summarized in the words “Decline and Fall,” Manhattan’s domain resolutely headed the other way: ever upward.

The Lesson of the Moth The crowds that first marveled at the illumination of Fifth Avenue and the theater district soon learned to participate in the revelry of the city that glowed before them.5 Lobster-palace restaurants, dance halls, and vaudeville houses conspired to overcome the stigma of vice and impropriety that the middle and upper classes had hitherto attached to nighttime public entertainment. Around 1910 cabaret arrived in New York, as the informal stage shows moved on to the dance floor and into the dining area, breaking down the barriers between audience and performers, diners, dancers, and restaurant staff. There was even a version of the Follies Bergères; “At last a New Yorker can look a Parisian in the face,” said Vanity Fair.6 Fostering a more relaxed and intimate atmosphere, these nightspots helped undermine the formerly rigid divisions between the pastimes of different classes, sexes, and ethnic groups. A vibrant gay culture was also emerging, its places of freedom and festivity often overlapping with those of “straight” New Yorkers.7

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Figure 4.1. W. Louis Sonntag Jr. (1869–1898), The Bowery at Night, c. 1895. Museum of the City of New York. Gift of William B. Miles [32.275.2]

By the 1920s, going out on the town would become almost as popular among middle-class women as would an afternoon shopping trip. As nightlife speeded up, the perennial warnings about the moral dangers of Sin City kept pace. In 1892 a popular song singled out the Bowery as the road to ruin: “I was out to enjoy the sights; / There was the Bow’ry ablaze with lights; / I had one of the Devil’s own nights, / I’ll never go there anymore.”8 W. Louis Sonntag Jr.’s watercolor, The Bowery at Night (c. 1895) captures the complexly seductive combination of light and bustle: pedestrians, streetcars, cabs, pushcarts, and the up- and downtown elevated trains compete for the viewer’s attention, while the cool Whistler blue of the night sky balances the warmly inviting glow from streetlamps, shops, carriages, and theaters. The colors meet in the dynamic diagonal of the El line that surges past the tumult below. For well-bred women who had grown up before public dining and dancing became the rage, propriety and late hours still seemed at odds. In 1915, a prominent socialite struggled publicly to bring her “fast” daughter under control, and the errant young woman eventually confessed to a newspaper, “I realize now I was dazzled by the glamour of the white lights and the music and the dancing of Broadway.”

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A cartoon in the same issue showed a debutante hesitating in front of a café, where a devil in the doorway urged, “Come On In, Kid.”9 Gradually, however, shopping, respectability, nocturnal outings, and sexual adventure began to overlap and merge. Outraging many readers, Theodore Dreiser signaled changing roles for women in his novel Sister Carrie (1900), when he created a working-class heroine whose sexual attractiveness and materialistic yearnings cause her to rise rather than fall. Unlike Crane’s Maggie, Carrie Meeber (whose name suggests a me-first attitude) is able to bridge the gap between a meager start in life and the seductive illusions of the music hall and theater. Eloping with an older man, leaving behind a deadening factory job in Chicago, she arrives in New York and manages to work her way into a chorus line and then into a showstopping role in a Broadway play. Carrie’s self-absorbed ascent shows that Dreiser was ultimately as interested in the wonders of electricity and illusion that make Carrie’s fortune, as he was in the naturalist mechanics of social Darwinism that drag Carrie’s lover, Hurstwood, down into desperate poverty. Despite what might be a fatal love of finery and bright lights, Carrie is uplifted at the novel’s end by two subtly related forces: her talent as an actress and the regard for higher things revealed to her by an electrical engineer. Both specialize in the chimera of artificial light. For all along Carrie is led onward by electricity—streetlights, shop windows, theatrical footlights. Meanwhile, Hurstwood, a Chicago saloon manager whose ventures fail in New York, loses his glossy veneer and must be discarded along the way. Taking a room in a cheap hotel, he kills himself, significantly, with gas. Around the turn of the century, then, going out at night could be less than fatal to a woman’s reputation; it might even, as in Carrie’s case, help make it. “Respectable women” were more and more finding a new freedom in the nocturnal city, taking their cue, it seemed, from the common folk. John Sloan helped popularize this idea, painting what he saw as the lively, healthy sexual energy of ordinary people. The Haymarket (1907) depicts two unescorted women entering a well-known concert saloon, while a little girl, under the glare of her mother, stares in great interest at their finery. In Sloan’s Movies (1913), the marquee announces that the feature will be “A Romance of the Harem,” and drawn by the bright lights the patrons, a mixture of adults and children, classes and ages, approach, with pairs of gals looking at pairs of guys. And in Sloan’s Six O’ Clock, Winter (1912), the El train symbolically roars over the heads of eager young men and women getting out of work and surging toward an evening’s distractions. The narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) speaks for both sexes and all races when he describes his first visit to New York: “As I walked about that evening I began to feel the dread power of the city; the crowds, the lights, the excitement, the gayety and all its subtler stimulating influences began to

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Figure 4.2. John Sloan (1871–1951), Movies, 1913. Oil on canvas, 19 7/8 ⫻ 24 in. (50.5 ⫻ 61 cm). The Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio. Museum Purchase Fund [1940.16]. Courtesy of Kraushaar Galleries, New York

take effect on me. My blood ran quicker, and I felt that I was just beginning to live.”10 “Straight” styles of nocturnal photography suited this accelerated tempo. Instead of assaulting viewers with raw flashes of tenement life or charming audiences with atmospheric time exposures of the city’s most attractive public spaces, newspaper and magazine photographers tried to capture the vibrancy of a night on the town with shots of traffic and crowds, out to enjoy the spectacle. For not only was there more to do, there was more to see, thanks to the electric streetlights that illuminated most of the city by 1910, and blazed especially brightly around the major hotels, theaters, and squares. In 1907, for example, Harper’s featured an essay on “Manhattan Lights” that included numerous photographs of nightspots both lively and romantic.11 The guidebooks of the period show a clear progression in the prominence of nightlife from 1899 to 1939. Rand McNally’s Fifty Photographic Views of Greater New York (1899) offers no nighttime pictures or skyline views of the city. But the Rand McNally New York Guide to Places of Interest in the City and Environs (1922) has a number of night scenes, such as “Lower Manhattan

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at Night from the East River,” “Luna Park, Coney Island, at Night,” and “The Great White Way,” the last two with electric signs ablaze in sharp focus. The guide mentions tours that include “Chinatown at Night” and recommends walks over the East River bridges for views of the skyline. By the time of the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City, nocturnal views and activities have become one of the city’s major attractions. Providing illustrations of the most popular nighttime sights, such as “Lower Manhattan Seen Beneath Brooklyn Bridge,” “Times Square,” and “Central Park at Night,” the book touts evening Circle Line tours and boat trips out to Coney Island as well as the Empire State Building observation deck, which stayed open until 1:00 a.m. daily. One of the strangest products of New York’s burgeoning all-night activity was the series of free verse poems known as archy and mehitabel, by journalist Don Marquis. Published in newspapers from 1916 to 1927, the poems purport to be the effusions of a cockroach named Archy who types at night while Marquis sleeps. Archy often discusses the doings of another “night owl,” his friend Mehitabel the cat. Everything Archy writes (by hopping from one typewriter key to another) is lowercased and unpunctuated because he cannot not manage the “Shift” key. While the after-dark doings of the animal world are his ostensible theme, Archy addresses the illusions and seductions of bright city lights on behalf of all species. In one poem, a lightning bug nicknamed “broadway” proves to have more flash than substance—so Mehitabel eats him. In another, “the lesson of the moth,” Archy goes to the heart of light’s attraction and counsels a wise prudence. One night Archy spots a moth “trying to break into / an electric light bulb / and fry himself on the wires.” The cockroach poses the logical question: “why do you fellows / pull this stunt i asked him . . . have you no sense,” and the answer gives him pause: plenty of it . . . but at times we get tired of using it we get bored with the routine and crave beauty and excitement fire is beautiful and we know that if we get too close it will kill us but what does that matter it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty

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Figure 4.3. George Herriman (1880–1944), Mehitabel Dances with the Moon. In Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel (1927). © Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

than to live a long time and be bored all the while . . . we are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves

—and with that the moth “immolated himself / on a patent cigar lighter.” The practical cockroach opines that he would rather have “half the happiness and twice / the longevity.” And yet he is unsettled by the moth’s passion: “but at the same time i wish / there was something i wanted / as badly as he wanted to fry himself.” Archy and Marquis are wary of the city’s bright lights, but there is a grudging admiration for those who abandon themselves to the spectacle, the recognition of some fundamental human (or animal) need. In “mehitabel dances with boreas,” the worldly cat sings under a frozen moon: spin mehitabel spin you had a romantic past and you re gonna cash in dancing when you are croaked at last.

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Better to live it up and be a fallen cat-woman than never to have danced at all: girls we was all of us ladies until we went and fell and oncet a thoroughbred always game i ask you wotthehell12

Nightlife Goes Native I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than governor of Georgia. —African American saying13

Besides Broadway and the Bowery, other parts of the city had their own special allure at night. Greenwich Village, for example, developed a bohemian reputation with its tearooms, cafés, nightclubs, and later its speakeasies. A tourist site not only for out of towners but uptowners too, the Village gloried in its counterculture reputation as an enclave that cared more for ideas and sexual or artistic self-expression than it did for respectability. Whether revolutionary or risqué, the liquor-fueled evening escapades of John Reed, Marcel Duchamp, John Sloan, Mabel Dodge, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Eugene O’Neill, among many others, made the Village a magnet for writers, artists, and activists.14 But even in a city seemingly dedicated to nocturnal frolic, one neighborhood stood out. “The legend of Harlem by night crossed the continent and the ocean,” wrote Lloyd Morris.15 Harlem became the symbolic center of the American night because of its association with “darkest Africa.” If the night was like Africa, then in Harlem one could meet the night head-on, exploring its mysterious attraction. Whites were not the only ones who made this connection. Langston Hughes’s poem “Negro” (1922) concludes, “I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa.” And in a riff on Keats’s opening line in “Ode to a Nightingale,” Hughes’s “Dream Variations” (1924) turns the Keatsian longing of “Tender is the night” into a consummatory identification with the darkness: “night coming tenderly—black like me.”16 Similarly, in Home to Harlem (1928), Claude McKay calls his characters “black lovers of life caught up in their own free native rhythm, threaded to a remote scarce-remembered past, celebrating the midnight hours in themselves, for themselves, of themselves.”17 Encouraging the assumption that African Americans embodied the night was the fact that given the uneven lighting in poorer areas, it was simply darker in Harlem than elsewhere in New York. Indoors and out, Harlem relied on gas lamps as late as the 1920s.18 In Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger

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Heaven (1926), the protagonist is still struggling with gas lighting in his boardinghouse. But what bright lights there were beckoned all the more. Noting that guidebooks sent visitors up to Harlem after downtown whites had gone to bed, Lewis Erenberg comments, “The lateness of the hour added to the sense that one was venturing to the heart of darkness, the city of night where all things forbidden during the day were available.”19 The “African” night enticingly promised not only amusement but also selfdiscovery, especially for whites. When it comes to having fun, “we AngloSaxons are the most incompetent of all the people,” said the president of the Playground and Recreation Association. Hence, he said, whites had to look to Paris, marginal groups, and especially to blacks, who never lose “a sense of the joy of living.”20 When America wants to relax, wrote Johnson, revising the colonialist script, it turns itself over to black music: At these times, the Negro drags his captors captive. On occasions, I have been amazed and amused watching white people dancing to a Negro band in a Harlem cabaret; attempting to throw off the crusts and layers of inhibitions laid on by sophisticated civilization; striving to yield to the feel and experience of abandon; seeking to recapture a state of primitive joy in life and living; trying to work their way back into that jungle which was the original Garden of Eden; in a word, doing their best to pass for colored.21

The jungle myth and the promise of an Edenic, prelapsarian uncovering of the body’s deepest urges drew people to Harlem in droves. As the entertainer Jimmy Durante put it, “You sort of go primitive up there.”22 Since the advent of ragtime in the 1890s, African American music and musicians had been working their way into mainstream white entertainment, and by 1910 whites were discovering new, self-liberating movements of the hips, arms, and shoulders as they tried black-originated dances such as the cakewalk, the shuffle, the Texas tommy, the turkey-trot, the fox-trot, and the Charleston. The great success of the all-black Broadway musical Shuffle Along in 1921–1922 made news across the country, and brought black music and dancing to an ever-wider audience. It also brought Hughes to Harlem, the poet later recalled, just to be near enough to go see it. Fueling the popularity of uptown Harlem nightspots in the 1920s was the way in which downtown performers were adopting ragtime and jazz. Jewish entertainers such as Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson not only used blackface but found in black music much of their best material. The first movie with a sound track, The Jazz Singer (1927), starred Jolson and traced a Jewish boy’s transformation into a vaudeville star. Featuring blackface performances and tunes like “Mamie,” it suggested to a national audience that the way for an immigrant to become “American” was to embrace black music and body

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Figure 4.4. Eddie Elcha, Crowd Outside Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, 1920s. Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Photo: Schomburg Center/ Art Resource, New York

language. Summing up Harlem’s appeal Johnson wrote, “A visit to Harlem at night—the principal streets never deserted, gay crowds skipping from one place of amusement to another, lines of taxicabs and limousines standing under the sparkling lights of the entrances to the famous nightclubs, the subway kiosks swallowing and disgorging crowds all night long—gives the impression that Harlem never sleeps and that the inhabitants thereof jazz through existence.”23 But Johnson knew better. Although Harlem’s nocturnal gaiety suggested that night’s colonizers had yielded to the darkness within and, “doing their best to pass for colored,” had “gone native,” the image and the reality parted company in several respects. Undercutting Riis’s theorem that a slum was most “itself” at night, it was the visiting night owls who never saw Harlem’s daytime poverty, the unemployed in the streets, the quotidian struggle to survive that found temporary relief in nocturnal music and dance. Recognizing the night as a place of escape as much as a moment in time, Van Vechten wrote in Nigger Heaven that for Harlemites, “the white world might do its best to rob their days of pleasure, but they could always look forward to the evening.”24 Yet finding even this respite was not so simple. Most working people, of whatever ethnic background, could be

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Figure 4.5. Adolph Dehn (1895–1968), Up in Harlem, 1932. Lithograph, 8 ¾ ⫻ 13 ¾ in. (22.2 ⫻ 35 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase 32.131

“white” up in Harlem; they could step outside themselves to enjoy passion and pleasure. But constrained by Jim Crow clubs and their own poverty, Harlem’s African American residents often had more limited access to the entertainments than white visitors. Famous venues such as the Cotton Club and Small’s Paradise featured leading black performers, but deliberately kept the audience mostly white.25 Adolph Dehn’s lithograph Up in Harlem (1932) shows limp-looking white men and women sitting at tables or watching the dance floor, while angular, curvaceous interracial couples clutch each other and surge past them. Another lithograph, William Wolfson’s Crazy Rhythm (Cotton Club) (1929), spotlights the whiteness and plantation-style exploitation that the club’s name suggests: in the foreground a white audience is being entertained by a frenzied floor show of half-naked, light-skinned women, with black jazz musicians and waiters pushed to the edges of the composition. McKay’s poem “The Harlem Dancer” (1917) explores the distress of Harlemites at being on exhibit, but also shows how both blacks and whites were caught up in the fascination of an African-coded erotic display. A halfclad performer sings and sways for an audience of prostitutes and their clients. Invoking tropical motifs, the speaker compares her to “a proudly-swaying palm” made “lovelier for passing through a storm” of staring eyes. Money and appetite pursue her: “Tossing coins in praise, / The wine-flushed, boldeyed boys, and even the girls, / Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze.” But the poet, claiming closer acquaintance, concludes that she is not enjoying being a spectacle: “Looking at her falsely-smiling face, / I knew her self was not in that strange place.” If Yeats asks, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” McKay implies that we can only know the dancer’s separation from her performance. She is not in “that strange place”—the

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Figure 4.6. William Wolfson, Crazy Rhythm (Cotton Club), 1929. Private collection

club, the Africanizing stage show, or even the poem; her reality resides somewhere beyond the fantasy of audience or poet.26 In a similar vein, Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven suggested that not all Harlemites were at home with the stereotypes. His heroine, a librarian named Mary Love, agonizes over her lack of abandon: “We are all savages, she repeated to herself, all, apparently, but me! . . . If she could only let herself go, revel in colour and noise and rhythm and physical emotion.” Van Vechten proposes that “savage” behavior is mostly a role forced on blacks by the inhibited white world: when Mary eventually does fall wildly in love with a black man named for the Romantic poet Lord Byron, she realizes that her turbulent emotions fulfill white expectations. When Byron says that all Negroes want from whites is “a chance to earn money, to be respectable,” she retorts: “I believe . . . that they actually prefer us when we’re not respectable.”27 Whether night has the power to perturb that respectability is the subject of two works that try to set the white world aside. In his primitivist painting, Midsummer Night in Harlem (1938), Palmer Hayden depicts the vibrant life that pours out of tenements in the summer heat: men and women relax

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Figure 4.7. Palmer Hayden (1893–1968), Midsummer Night in Harlem, 1938. Oil on canvas, 64 ½ ⫻ 30 in. (163.5 ⫻ 76.2 cm). Harmon Collection, National Archives, Washington, DC

and chat on stoops; kids crowd every window; a jam-packed convertible sits at the curb. In the background, a full moon and a streetlamp light the way of people coming from church. With the possible exception of a lightskinned woman in the car on the edge of the canvas, it is an all-black cast. While Hayden has been criticized for visually stereotyping his subjects (dark faces, white teeth, big eyes), his painting is a community-oriented idyll that resists sensationalizing; it exhibits none of the racial or sexual tension so often associated with the Harlem Renaissance. The hidden inner turmoil of the many lives that may go to make up such a harmonious scene, however, is glimpsed in Eric Walrond’s story “City Love” (1927). Walrond, an admirer of Van Vechten and McKay, uses two lovers’ quest for a place to have sex to connect the social tapestry of evening activities with the frayed and tawdry circumstances of private life. His setting is a jaundiced version of Hayden’s: “In the restless languor of the summer evening the Negroes wandered restively over the tar-daubed roofs, squatted negligeed on shelterless window sills, carried on connubial pantomimic chatter across the circumscribed courts, swarmed, six to a square inch, upon curb and step, blasphemously jesting.”28 Walrond separates a couple from the crowd, a young woman named Nicey and her married,

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would-be seducer, Primus. As the hapless Primus struggles to find them a room, he suffers rebukes from hotel employees, his wife, his infant son, and Nicey herself. But Walrond constructs a city night that irresistibly generates lust: “the emotion of being part of one vast questing whole quickened the hunger in Nicey’s and Primus’ breasts” (136). To satisfy proprieties, Primus finally has to acquire luggage and a hat for Nicey before they can check into a sleazy hotel (186). Pushed back into the crowd by the ordinariness of their desires, Walrond’s characters find themselves conforming to a double norm: they must appear “respectable” even as they yield in a conventional way to Harlem’s siren song. Novels such as Nigger Heaven and Home to Harlem gained much of their notoriety because they reinforced the idea that uninhibited amusement and violent emotion were inseparable from nightlife in Harlem. Structured around a series of dances, cabarets, and parties, the novels propose intimate amorous encounters or close friendships as a way of escaping the life of the streets and the racism of the workaday world. The sense of freedom that Harlem’s residents enjoyed, as well as their pride in or enjoyment of black musical talent seems to have depended a great deal on the often-difficult task of carving out a private space in the midst of this city within a city. Perhaps for this reason, interior rather than exterior scenes dominate, even in Walrond’s story. The art and literature of Harlem in this period explore the landscape of the night in ways that differ from what was going on downtown.29 If it was good to be a lamppost in Harlem, it was probably a lot better to be a spotlight in a nightclub or cabaret. But on the occasional nighttime promenades, savagery is held in abeyance as Harlem’s streets take on the delicate atmospheric beauty of a Whistler painting or a Steichen photograph. When Ray, the sensitive, poetic character in Home to Harlem, thinks about the neighborhood, he realizes that “it was the simple, lovely touch of life that charmed and stirred him most. . . . The warm, rich-brown face of a Harlem girl seeking romance . . . a late wet night on Lenox Avenue, when all forms are soft-shadowy and the street gleams softly like a still, dim stream under the misted yellow lights.” Or as McKay puts it later in the novel, “Twilight was enveloping the Belt, merging its life into a soft blue-black symphony.”30 The “blue-black” music of the Harlem night might be imagined as blending the calm harmony of a Whistler nocturne into the irregular jazz rhythms of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924), the title of which was inspired by Ira Gershwin’s trip to an exhibition of Whistler paintings. McKay seems to evoke the opening of Gershwin’s piece when he continues, “The animation subsided into a moment’s pause, a muffled, tremulous soulstealing note . . . then electric lights flared everywhere, flooding the scene with dazzling gold.”31 In a few phrases, McKay transports his readers from Chopin and Whistler to Gershwin and Stella, from the foggy past to floodlit

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modernity.32 For all the talk and the jungle vogue, it was still possible to wonder at nocturnal Harlem’s possibilities without seeing it in primitivist terms. The intellectual Arna Bontemps echoed McKay’s sense of gentle magic and sudden, blazing wonder when he wrote, “A blue haze descended at night and with it strings of fairy lights on the broad avenues. . . . From the window of an apartment on Fifth Avenue and 129th Street I looked over the rooftops of Negrodom and tried to believe my eyes. What a city! What a world!”33

Beneath the Singer Tower Even as the empire of light was reaching up into “darkest Harlem,” it seemed to be under assault from the purportedly benighted hordes that were filling the Lower East Side. By 1910, 41 percent of the city was foreign born. In 1907 alone, the year in which Henry James published The American Scene, more than a million people arrived in the city. Like many nativists, James wondered just who was “Americanizing” whom. Older New Yorkers, he said, now felt as if they were the strangers: If it be asked why, the alien still striking you so as alien . . . the answer, close at hand, would seem to be that the alien himself fairly makes the singleness of impression. Is not the universal sauce essentially his sauce, and do we not feel ourselves feeding, half the time, from the ladle, as greasy as he chooses to leave it for us, that he holds out?34

EdithWharton voiced a similar sense of dispossession in The Custom of the Country (1913). Just as Europeans had displaced Native Americans, so the flood of Jewish and Catholic immigrants was overwhelming the dwindling strength of the early Protestant settlers. Her protagonist calls the families of old New York “the Aborigines,” and he likens them “to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race.”35 It is this disorienting sense of the colonizer being colonized and the sheer modernity of New York slave driving everyone that Willa Cather explores in “Behind the Singer Tower” (1912). Designed by Ernest Flagg, the fortyseven-story Singer Building was the tallest in the world when it was completed in 1908. It was also the first skyscraper to be floodlit at night, its ornate tower of red brick with green and white accents drawing much attention. Alvin Landon Coburn’s nocturnal photograph Singer Building (1910) deliberately blurs the dark image of the tower and the street below to suggest that the tower is in motion, a spectral, troubling form emanating from the electrified city below (see figure 2.18). It is the provoking profile of the illuminated tower—iconic, commercial, artistic—that lies at the heart of Cather’s story.

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Figure 4.8. Anonymous, Singer Tower Illumination, June 19, 1908, 1908. General Electric Photo Archives, Schenectady Museum, New York

What makes the story so engaging is that it actually has two hearts—one light, one dark. For Cather has lifted her narrative frame wholesale from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. At night, six men go out in a motor launch on to the “brooding mournfulness” of New York harbor.36 Contemplating the lights of Manhattan, one of them, an architect named Hallet, tells the others a tale of greed and exploitation, about the horror of a misguided ideal that enslaves the “civilized” and technologically advanced society as well as the foreign people that it victimizes. As a young man, Hallet recounts, he had worked on the foundations of a skyscraper, continually appalled by the shoddy practices of a Jewish contractor with an Anglo-Saxon name, Stanley Merryweather. Finally, one hot night a cable breaks in the floodlit excavation and several Italian laborers are killed, including Caesarino, a young man with whom Hallet had developed a strong emotional bond. Merryweather wants to pay the dead men’s relatives only half a day’s wages, because they

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were killed in the middle of the shift. But Hallet forces a big private settlement to Caesarino’s mother, risking his own career in the process. Hallet finishes his story by wondering why Caesarino and “thousands like him . . . why do they come, like iron dust to the magnet, like moths to the flame?” He wonders equally why the richer and professional classes do the same, “throwing everything we have into that conflagration on Manhattan Island” (53). He concludes, like Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, that a grand “unborn Idea” is behind it: “What it will be is a new idea of some sort. That’s all that ever comes, really. That’s what we are all the slaves of, though we don’t know it. It’s the whip that cracks over us till we drop. Even Merryweather . . .” (54). Explicitly, the false ideal is height: “Our whole scheme of life and progress and profit was perpendicular,” says Cather’s narrator. “There was nothing for us but height. We were whipped up the ladder. We depended upon the ever-growing possibilities of girders and rivets as Holland depends on her dikes” (46). What has led these men to gather in the boat in the darkness is a traumatic event: the world’s tallest hotel, the thirty-five-story Mont Blanc, has burned down the night before, and some three hundred of the world’s richest and most famous people have perished with it. The men in the boat seek perspective at a moment when even “the city itself, as we looked back at it, seemed enveloped in a tragic self-consciousness. Those incredible towers of stone and steel seemed, in the mist, to be grouped confusedly together, as if they were confronting each other with a question” (44). It was in fact the Mont Blanc that Hallet had worked on with Merryweather. The kernel of Cather’s story was prompted by real-life disaster, though it occurred far from Manhattan. On the night of April 14, 1912, a month before “Behind the Singer Tower” appeared, the “unsinkable” Titanic sank, hundreds of the rich and famous dying as wondrous new technology failed. Turning the ship up on end, into a tower, Cather altered Conrad’s tale to focus on tall whiteness (the Mont Blanc Hotel) rather than the deep darkness (the Congo River) as a way of exploring New York’s ethnic tension and commercial rapacity. But the exploitative, imperialist drive that sucks the blood of city and jungle remains roughly parallel, and the severed hand of an Italian opera singer found on a window ledge of the hotel, dwelled on with barely repressed glee by the narrator, recalls the severed heads of Africans surrounding Kurtz’s encampment. For what triggers Hallet’s story is personal feeling and ethnic animosity. The racial drama beneath the “White Mountain” Hotel disaster carries with it an implicit concern with the meaning of light and whiteness, not simply the all-consuming drive for height. Seeing a ship full of Italian immigrants starts Hallet thinking about Caesarino, when Johnson the journalist remarks, “Those people are terribly proud of their new docks in the North River; feel they’ve come up in the world” (43). But it is a subsequent jibe by Johnson

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that provides the catalyst: “Did you ever notice . . . what a Jewy-looking thing the Singer Tower is when it’s lit up?” (46).37 Italians and Jews were the two largest immigrant groups in the city when Cather wrote, and their presence in such numbers deeply troubled the nativists. Between them these newcomers made up more than a third of the city’s population.38 In Cather’s story, the combination of Italian and Jew produces a subtext in which the former empire builders are now just “little Caesars” laboring in the night for the Jewish builders of the new world. Native-born Americans like Hallet and Johnson have become mere cogs in the machine; they can only stand on the sidelines and try to make sense of a city shaped by others. This bystander’s position is the author’s role, and also the artist’s. In his painting Excavation at Night (1907), George Bellows created a visual equivalent of Cather’s tale (color plate 15). The raw, massive hole that will become Pennsylvania Station is partially lit by arc lamps, partially plunged into a deep darkness punctuated by a raging fire around which huddle minute workers in the bottom of the pit. Like a battlefield at night, the scene gives evidence of a terrible and costly struggle; it is by turns garish, gloomy, infernal. As Hallet asks of Caesarino, “Why did he come so far to cast his little spark in the bonfire?” (53). Modeled on the Roman Baths of Caracalla, Penn Station was built in imperial style; it required “an army of Italian earth-diggers” to prepare the site.39 An uneven row of tenements, windows gaping, trails off into darkness on the far side of the excavation. In such buildings laborers like Caesarino lived. In an interview Bellows said, “Those tenement houses behind the excavation always give me the creeps. They’re just ordinary houses—but there is something about them that gets me.”40 What is frightening in Bellows’s world is scale and the human attrition it implies. In Bellows’s painting, we look deep into the city’s depths and far into its Manichaean streets. But Cather wants to connect the exploitative costs of construction, the suffering that is in a sense literally beneath the Singer Tower, to the significance of the profile that the finished skyscraper makes, what is figuratively behind the Singer Tower. At first glance, Cather’s anti-Semitism is fairly transparent, and her singling out of the Singer Tower as “jewy” is likely due to the Jewish garment industry’s heavy reliance on Singer Sewing machines and immigrant labor. But she complicates her story with alternate theories of what the Singer Tower represents: Zablowski, a Jewish doctor, is also in the boat, and he rejects Johnson’s claim that the incandescent lighting makes the building look “exactly like the Jewish high priest in the old Bible dictionaries,” with a “jeweled miter” and “high, sloping shoulders.” Zablowski retorts that the “high-peaked turban” belongs to a Persian Magi, “a fire-worshiper,” or even a Buddha (46). Cather’s narrator preserves the ambiguity, but makes it clear that the Asian-born skyscraper, and by extension the whole fire-worshipping skyline, has ominously eclipsed the light of Liberty: “Zablowski pointed with

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his cigar toward the blurred Babylonian heights crowding each other on the narrow tip of the island. Among them rose the colossal figure of the Singer Tower, watching over the city and the harbor like a presiding Genius. He had come out of Asia quietly in the night, no one knew just when or how, and the Statue of Liberty, holding her feeble taper in the gloom off to our left, was but an archeological survival” (46).41 Worse, the tower seems to be the illegitimate child of Liberty’s indiscrete dallying with the arriving hordes: “‘Who could have foreseen that she, in her high-mindedness, would ever spawn a great heathen idol like that?’ Hallet exclaimed” (46). In Cather’s story, immigration is represented as a nocturnal activity—the big ships landing—and thus the Singer Tower arriving “quietly in the night” becomes a sort of phallic mongrel, a “jewy” son whose flashiness mocks his mother, august Liberty. What is “behind” the Singer Tower? The story’s title hints at a tabloid exposé of ethnic impurity in the white city, and racial and social tensions exacerbated by the life-devouring “Moloch on the Singer Tower” (54), as Hallet calls it. Also lurking is the nativist scenario predicting the fall of the American empire, a scenario in which even the skyscrapers are unchristian immigrants, sneaking into the city by night. Then, too, the title gestures toward the multiple signification of the tower itself, its instant commercial legibility that permits us to imagine something behind the name. Early in the story, Cather’s narrator remarks, “As I looked at the great incandescent signs along the Jersey shore, blazing across the night the names of beer and perfumes and corsets, it occurred to me that, after all, that kind of thing could be overdone; a single name, a single question, could be blazed too far” (46). But it did not take long for businesses to realize that a building could blaze even further than ad copy. A year after the Singer Building opened, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building usurped its place as the world’s tallest building, the world’s largest advertisement. The Woolworth Building, called “the Cathedral of Commerce,” followed in 1913, its first illumination initiated by President Woodrow Wilson pushing a button in the White House. Regarded by its promoters as a “giant signboard,” the Woolworth Building showed that the “Asian” Singer Tower was no match for Christianized capitalism.42 Lest Woolworth’s imperial ambitions be missed, he designed his personal office in the building after the Empire Room in Napoleon’s palace in Compiègne. Later would come the distinctive shapes of the American Radiator Building, the Chrysler Building, Lever House, the Seagram Building, the Citicorp Center, and so on, each with a company name and a product behind it. Still, as Cather, working in the magazine industry, knew, the messages could be manipulated. Johnson’s belief that the Singer Building is a “Jewylooking thing” depends on an anonymous author: “The fellow who placed those incandescents must have had a sense of humor,” Johnson says. “It’s

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exactly like the Jewish high priest . . .” (46). A stand-in for Cather herself, the lighting engineer plays a joke on the corporate world by revealing how “Jewy”—perhaps in finance, management, and self-promotion—the mainstream corporation really is. Like a writer, the illuminator of buildings can be a muckraker, an anti-Semite, a sender of far-reaching messages that might say one thing and mean another. What’s behind the Singer Tower, ultimately, is the horror of light and things it says and shows about a city, a society, and a civilization that has mistakenly claimed to have conquered the night. Conradian in spite of herself, Cather reveals the loss of human value and compassion, her own included, when a city falls in love with too much height, too much light.

Electric Eden In the beginning was the word. “edison” blazed the first blinking electric sign, installed at the London International Exhibition of 1882. Quickly grasping that light would advertise itself no matter what it spelled, Edison and his followers moved on to other commercial messages, none of them very loquacious. Practicality, expense, and a shrewd sense of what the public would remember almost immediately conspired to determine the narrow parameters of electric advertising. Against the darkness the spectator would see minimal verbiage—a slogan or a brand name—embellished by attention-getting peripherals, such as flashing lights, arresting sequences, and seemingly animated figures performing clever tricks through the illusion of blinking incandescent bulbs. Advertisers realized that people would stop to regard a simple electric message, standing out against the framing darkness, that they would simply dismiss as urban clutter during the daytime. The first big electric sign in New York appeared on Broadway at Madison Square as the weather warmed up in the summer of 1892. Fastened to the side of a building near the eventual site of the Flatiron Building, the sign delivered a multistory message, line by flashing line: buy homes on long island swept by ocean breezes manhattan beach oriental hotel manhattan hotel gilmore’s band brock’s fireworks43

Thus the first night sign, stationed at the heart of the city, urged people to flee from it, at least temporarily. The hotels and entertainments

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were part of the burgeoning resort of Coney Island, which in the 1890s evolved from the more staid recreations of bathing, strolling, and dining at elegant beachside hotels toward the exotic architecture, exciting rides, raucous sideshows, and the more frenzied thrills of the modern amusement park. Electricity made it possible to shift the focal point of amusement from sea, wind, and sand to dazzling and unexpected artificially lit “attractions.” Boasting 250,000 incandescent bulbs to entice and amaze its clientele, Luna Park debuted in 1903, followed by the million-bulbed Dreamland in 1904. With their Electric Towers and elaborately bizarre buildings lit to feverish splendor, the parks transported customers to an erotically tinged fantasyland whose only equal could be found under the ads and marquees on Broadway. While the park’s nickname, “the Electric Eden,” promised an ultramodern return to primordial innocence, it was clear that the natural world had yielded to the artificial one. As the name Luna Park and its “Flight to the Moon” attraction suggested, one needed a theme park to see the heavens. Even the ocean had changed: Coney Island drew crowds who wanted to indulge in “electric bathing” under arc lights on the shore.44 As the center tried to sell the periphery, and Coney Island sent the laboring legions, refreshed for another day or week, back into the urban fray, the empire of light established a reciprocal relationship between them.45 The carnival atmosphere of the amusement park inverted American social values, as thrift, restraint, and order were given over to elaborate forms of unfettered “fun” that mingled social classes, country and city, night and day.46 Amusement became not a luxury but a necessity. Even in Cather’s “Behind the Singer Tower,” on a “night unnaturally black,” in which the city was “enveloped in tragic self-consciousness,” the pleasure excursions continue: “the Coney Island boats threw out their streams of light and faded away” (43–44). The night’s traditional enchantments, beefed up with millions of watts of electricity, made the park a carefully scripted theater of illusion, desire, and romantic adventure. The sheet music cover to a popular song, “Take a Trip down to Luna with Me” (1908), enticed the imagination with its bulb-bristling towers and rhythmic arcades of light receding into romantic darkness.47 In an O. Henry story, “Brickdust Row” (1907), a slumlord named Blinker goes slumming at Coney Island, where he meets a pretty young resident of his dilapidated housing. At first the commotion and glitter seem like cheap, vacuous amusements: “The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste, repelled him strongly.” But as he falls in love the rich man loses his blinkers: “By some miracle he suddenly saw Coney aright. He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys. . . . Here, at least, was the husk of Romance, the empty but shining casque of Chivalry, the breath-catching though safe-guarded dip and flight of Adventure, the magic carpet that transports you to the realm of fairyland.”48

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Figure 4.9. Samuel H. Gottscho, Luna Park, Coney Island, 1906. Museum of the City of New York.The Gottscho-Schleisner Collection [54.77.6]

Amid this temporary relaxation of social hierarchies, however, appeared reminders of the daytime world: there was a price on everything, and the commercially colonized night met its imperialist counterpart in stage acts representing “exotic” peoples and customs from around the world. Commodified mystery and packaged exoticism tantalized and beckoned. The park was, as O. Henry’s Blinker recognized, a “jolly conglomeration of fairy tales, incorporated.”49 The British poet Richard Le Gallienne suggested that the American empire maintained its health by occasionally succumbing to African impulses. He wrote in 1905 that “whatever else the speculators back of Coney Island don’t know, they understand the—Zulu. Coney Island is the Tom-Tom of America. Every nation has, and needs—and loves—its Tom-Tom. It has its needs of orgiastic escape from respectability.”50 A realm of profit-oriented exoticism, Coney Island was Thoreau’s poetic conquest of night’s dark continent with a vengeance. Samuel Gottscho’s stunning photograph Luna Park, Coney Island (1906) shows hundreds of dazzling lights but only two words—“wild animals.” It was not lost on more astute observers that the city’s endlessly inventive business sector had found ways to make its exploited servants pay even for respite from it. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky saw the signs and dazzle

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Figure 4.10. Paul M. Haviland (1880–1950), Luna Park at Night, c. 1910. Platinum print, 4 ¾ ⫻ 3 ¾ in. (12.07 ⫻ 9.53 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc. [2005.272690]

as capitalism’s way of fogging the mind and controlling the masses by bringing them literally into the light. Although he called Luna Park “fabulous beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful,” Gorky stressed the debilitating effects of so much light: “The visitor is stunned; his consciousness is withered by the intense glow. . . . People wander about in the flashing, blinding fire intoxicated and devoid of will.”51 A few years later, the poet Federico García Lorca would simply call Coney Island the “Landscape of the Vomiting Multitudes.”52 From a Freudian rather than Marxist perspective, Coney Island could be seen as the dream-coated juncture of Eros and Thanatos, an irresistible realm of sex and death. “It is just what I dream of when I dream of heaven,” said an immigrant girl.53 For James Huneker, visiting in 1916, the sex/death scenario was biblically inflected with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the dreadful appeal of the scarlet Whore of Babylon. Huneker called the park “a glorified city in flame. . . . The view of Luna Park . . . suggests a cemetery of fire, and mortuary shafts of flame. At Dreamland the little lighthouse is a scarlet incandescence. . . . Everything is fretted with fire.” Heuneker stayed all night, to see the summer crowd sleeping on the beach after

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the lights went off, in a scene reminiscent of Whitman’s “The Sleepers”: “A muggy moon shown intermittently over us, its bleached rays painting in ghastly tone, the upturned faces of the sleepers.”54 With its dark foreground and pictorialist blurriness, Paul Haviland’s photograph Luna Park at Night (c. 1910) draws viewers in the same disturbing direction, giving the landscape of light a brooding Conradian quality at odds with the stiff sparkle of Gottscho. Two black utility poles pierce the electric tower and the Luna Park sign, which bears a heart of mixed darkness and light as well as the legend “The Heart of Coney Island.” Danger lurks in the unearthly radiance. Whatever it symbolized, Coney Island challenged the visual artist: a new vocabulary had to be found to describe its effect on the eye, body, and mind. “When in 1912 I came back to New York,” wrote Joseph Stella, who had been in Paris absorbing Cubism and Futurism, “I was thrilled to find America so rich with so many new motifs to be translated into a new art. Steel and electricity had created a new world.”55 Coney Island was American modernity in microcosm, an experience that seemed to defy representation. “I built the most intense dynamic arabesque that I could imagine,” recalled Stella, “in order to convey in a hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machines generating for the first time, not anguish and pain, but violent, dangerous pleasures.”56 In retrospect, it seems only logical that what became the most striking representation of the park ever made, Stella’s Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913) (color plate 16), should have followed the path of semiabstraction that Whistler chose in his Nocturne in Black and Gold. As the electrified descendant of Whistler’s Cremorne Gardens, Coney Island’s landscape of light demanded an equally revolutionary approach, substituting blinding light for Whistler’s impenetrable darkness. Harder-edged, far more intensely colored, and more dynamically structured, Stella’s painting nonetheless holds to recognizable aspects of the site. Luna Park’s electric tower replaces Whistler’s blazing firework stand at the top center of the composition, capping a jagged mountain range of flashing pinnacles, while the twisting scaffolding of the various rides swirls across the middle of the canvas and the dark silhouettes of the park’s patrons surge up from the bottom in a frenzied tide of revelry. A curvilinear mosaic of light-fractured forms, both mechanical and organic, the painting’s surface produces a dizzying yet highly organized pulsation of riotous color. “I used the intact purity of the vermillion,” Stella said, “to accentuate the carnal frenzy of the new bacchanal and all the acidity of the lemon yellow for the dazzling lights storming all around.”57 A viewer could never take this for a daytime picture because the intensity of the white and yellow light, set off against darker counterpoints, shoots from a hundred different sources. This futurist mayhem makes even the most dazzling of the photographic views look static and stodgy.58

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The title deserves to be taken seriously. In this battle of lights, who is fighting? Is anyone winning? The Italian Futurists, from whom Stella had just learned a great deal, glorified war, speed, and machinery. Stella was likely thinking of industrialized warfare, including the war on the masses of the Industrial Revolution, as he explored how organized violence applies to mechanized amusement. His electric tower recalls the arc lights used in colonial wars, as he brings the capitalist battle for consumption and profit out of the realm of metaphor and into actuality. The competing lights and attractions, fighting for attention and business, signal a fundamental shift in the history of the night. No longer does light battle darkness; now light, divided against itself, engages in civil war. In the visual overload of the amusement park, light does not illuminate, it shatters. Whistler’s challenge to viewers stemmed from the minimal glow or briefly bursting light on his canvases. With Stella, for the first time in night painting, so much light is available that it floods the field of sight and drowns out what it should reveal. But no matter, since these lights are not there to reveal anything except themselves; they are the attraction. Historically, such blinding dazzle has been connected to the sublime—but this sublime signals recreation not revelation, distraction not understanding. In a sense, the mass-market spectacle at Coney Island was as aesthetically oriented as any highbrow Whistler; the visual quality of the scene was its whole meaning. The entrepreneurs, like the artist, sought customers who would pay not for substance but for the sheer pleasure of ephemeral appearances.

Empire of Signs The Broadway signs are our folk-art writ in fire on the sky. . . .When I turn into Broadway by night and am bathed in its Babylonic radiance, I want to shout with joy, it is so gay and beautiful. —“Broadway,” Atlantic Monthly 59

Fittingly, it was the showman P. T. Barnum who put up the first gaslit signs on a building facade, on his lower Broadway “Museum” in the later 1840s. Yet not until the 1890s did the blazing energy of illuminated advertising turn Broadway north of Madison Square into a “Babylonic radiance” that came to be known as “the Great White Way.” The phrase was coined by the promoter O. J. Gude, and with its interchangeably used companion, “the Gay White Way,” described a thoroughfare of luminous theaters, restaurants, movie houses, and pleasure palaces that gradually stretched by 1900 up to Longacre, soon to become Times Square. Broadway was a Coney Island of light in the midst of the city, lit up like a midway at a fair. It showed the world, as H. G. Wells remarked in 1906, that New York is “lavish of light” just as “it is lavish of everything.”60

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Even in the daytime, 350 electric signs shone on Times Square, according to a count taken in 1927. Early in the century, more than a million bulbs drenched Times Square in splendor every night, leading the visiting Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky to claim that Broadway actually was brighter at night than by day: “It is really white. . . . The street-lamps, the dazzling lights of advertisements, the glow of shop-windows and windows of the never-closing stores, the lights illuminating huge posters, lights from the open doors of cinemas and theatres . . . the lights of inscriptions in the sky. Brightness, brightness, brightness.”61 Sloan punned on the street’s nickname in his 1927 painting The White Way, which shows the nighttime crowds slogging across the street covered in snow, but the industrious Childe Hassam had preceded him by a quarter of a century. Hassam’s snowy nocturne Broadway and 42nd Street (1902) signals the arrival of the location not only as the new center of the city’s nightlife but also as an artistic subject. The snow-filtered radiance of electric lights that glows on Hassam’s horse-drawn cabs and the new electric trolleys hints at the spectacle soon to come. The Times Building, along with the subway station, opened in 1904, setting the stage for the first New Year’s Eve celebration there, on December 31, 1904, the inauguration of an annual nocturnal ritual that has mesmerized the city and nation ever since. Broadway’s fame and success heralded the birth of White Ways in big cities across the country. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and civic organizations subscribed to General Electric’s view that “the progress of civilization has borne a direct relationship to the progress and improvement of light.”62 This commercially driven settling of the nocturnal frontier meant that there was less resistance to electric advertising in the United States than in Europe, where electricity was regarded as a public service. If artificial light as used in department stores could lend a fairylike splendor to ordinary items such as towels and linens, as Zola had noted in his novel Au bonheur des Dames (1883), then the effect was even greater in outdoor advertising, where the mere idea of a commodity could shine without any reference to the actual object. Even art could be electrically improved: Sloan’s Window Shopping (1905) self-reflexively shows fashionable women examining shop windows at night—to buy a painting. The over-the-top illumination of the White Way made the rest of the city seem dark and drab, and established a new threshold of “everyday” lighting for a vibrant downtown. When Broadway signs were temporarily unplugged as an economy measure during World War I, the public distress was so great that authorities had to allow them to be turned back on in order to make the city seem “normal.” Throughout history, writers and artists have contrasted earthly lights to the starry sky above, but it took a twentieth-century American to imagine their reconciliation through the medium of electric ads. In “A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign” (1914), Vachel Lindsay applied the

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Figure 4.11. Anonymous, The Times Tower, c. 1910. Negative no. 70921. Collection of The New-York Historical Society

jungle/city metaphor to the colors of signs: “Wickedly red or malignantly green / Like the beads of a young Senegambian queen.” Mixing the organic and the artificial, the “blatant, mechanical, crawling and white” signs draw attention “by maggoty motions in sickening line / Proclaiming a hat or a soup or a wine.” But if Lindsay at first contrasts brazen signs to the “elusive

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and sweet” message of the stars above, it is only to collapse the distinction, ironically envisioning a future in which The signs in the streets and the signs in the skies Shall make a new Zodiac, guiding the wise, And Broadway make one with that marvelous stair That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer.63

Lindsay ends by proposing advertising as a stairway to heaven, with Broadway signs “guiding the wise,” as if stars over Bethlehem. And so the makers of the White Way could imagine themselves not just physically at the center of the world but directing its destiny as well. If the seemingly infinite interplay of electric messages made New York an empire of signs, the illumination quickly spawned signs of empire. The electrified landscape not only signaled the commercial might of the city but also gestured toward empires and colonies past, present, or to come. In a poem called “New York: A Nocturne,” Florence Earle Coates claimed that its light made New York the greatest of all cities: Not royal Babylon, Nor Tyre, nor Rome the great— In the all-powerful state Her wisdom and her armèd legions won— Was so illuminate.64

In 1910, the famous Roman Chariot Race sign debuted atop the Hotel Normandie at Broadway and Thirty-eighth Street. The thirty-second show, at seven stories high and ninety feet wide, was astonishing enough to stop traffic. Twenty thousand incandescent bulbs gave the impression of toga’d drivers snapping their whips over galloping horses as the wheels of their chariots spun through the night. Like Oscar Wilde at the New York Customs office, the sign had nothing to declare except its own genius. It sold nothing, but advertisers—up to ten in a minute—could bask in the glory of the spectacle by time-sharing a space for their names on the top of the billboard. Chariots came back to Broadway in 1925 when the first neon tubes were used to advertise the movie Ben-Hur. Steadily opposing this Roman circus approach to signs—colorful, rowdy, and brash—was the decorous imperial or “White City” ideal, dating back to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Still smarting from the defeat inflicted at the Dewey Arch by the giant green Heinz pickle, the Fifth Avenue Association and its allies managed by the 1920s to restrict flashing colors to areas on or near Broadway, while prescribing tasteful

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white lights for Fifth Avenue and genteel parts of the East Side. This battle of lights between the cultural elite and the masses spilled over into the future. On his first night in New York in 1924, the German filmmaker Fritz Lang suddenly had a vision of a looming, overbuilt, power-hungry city: “I looked into the streets—the glaring lights and the tall buildings—and there I conceived Metropolis.”65 In Lang’s 1927 film, the glowing skyscrapers of the future masters are sustained by subterranean colonies of slave workers who generate its power. For some, the empire of light was less than civilized. In 1924, George Moore published an article in England called “The Savagery of Electric Sky-Signs.”66 In his poem “On Broadway” (1920), McKay contrasted the “ bright fantastic glow” of “a hundred shouting signs” to the inner loneliness of the passerby: “Oh wonderful is Broadway—only / My heart, my heart is lonely.” While “the rainbow lights of Broadway blaze,” the dazed poet stands “as in a dream.” Broadway’s stunning lights are the disembodied projection of a society’s desires—“Desire naked, linked with Passion.” But in the midst of this expensively orchestrated, shimmering mirage of potential personal fulfillment, McKay can only conclude, “My heart, my heart is lonely.”67 If as an African American McKay stoically measures the distance between himself and Broadway’s promise, the French writer Pierre Loti analyzed the signs as a form of capitalist assault on all individuals: “The opulent shops, with their immense show-windows, remind one of our own boulevards; but the electricity which flows in rivers, and dominates everything, is a thousand times more aggressive than it is with us. Everything seems to vibrate, to crackle. . . . One is himself electrified almost to the point of quivering under the stimulus.” Loti tries to seize the secret of what seizes him: it is the near-instantaneous compression of motion, consumption, and oblivion. The apparitions flash out, move, fade away, quickly, very quickly—so quickly, indeed, that the eye barely follows them. From time to time, some enormous advertisement perched on top of a dark sky-scraper, almost invisible in the murky atmosphere, breaks out into red flame, like a constellation, hammers some name in your memory, and then as quickly vanishes.68

The scene is transitory in more ways than one, since by day the sign’s power vanishes. In a poem called “Signs” (c. 1920), Theodosia Garrison pointed out, as Dickens did in his daytime visit to Vauxhall Gardens, the poverty of the materials that go into fashioning a nocturnal fairyland. “Through all the blaring, crowded nights” the signs “dim the glory of the stars,” while in the daytime we see only “poor things of lettering and wood.” Cast out of electric Eden, the poet realizes how the commercial empire has exploited artificial light to woo the dazzled consumer who,

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bedazzled by the neo-Babylonian blaze, now lacks the will to embrace the natural light of heaven. What’s a moth to do? Before the door of heaven, the sun; Before the marts of men, the mean And burned-out lights of Babylon,— And we—bewildered moths—between.69

Picturing the Imperial City I had witnessed the growth and expansion of New York . . . and therefore I was feeling entitled to interpret the titanic efforts, the conquests already obtained by the imperial city in order to become what now She is, the center of the world. —Joseph Stella, “The Discovery of America”

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Stella had a triple insight: as an Italian, he realized that Rome was no longer the Imperial City and Europe was no longer atop the heap of world civilization; as a American immigrant, he understood that New York was assuming cultural and commercial supremacy; and as an artist, he saw that only through the city’s form-shattering nocturnal display of light could “the titanic efforts” of the new “center of the world” be definitively rendered on canvas. His response was to create The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted (1920–1922)—a towering, shimmering, eighteen-foot long, semiabstract evocation of blazing Broadway and soaring skyscrapers, flanked by views of the harbor and Brooklyn Bridge (color plate 17). In this five-panel work, Stella produced the greatest American futurist evocation of the new “imperial city,” and probably the largest nocturnal representation of a city ever attempted.70 All his panels are night scenes, owing to the artist’s own nocturnal wanderings, and express his sense that “the depth of night tempers and renders mysterious the geometrical severity” of the city.71 He called his work a symphony and arranged it like a Renaissance altarpiece, but most conspicuously he gave each section a three-part vertical structure: underworld, urban world, and floodlit heavens. His New York was a Divine Comedy, and the viewer was Dante, exploring all three levels—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—in true New York fashion, frenetically, all at the same time. By the end of the First World War, it was clear that in comparison to New York’s sparkle, Europe was still in the dark. Loti wrote that “when I return from here, Paris will seem just a quiet, old-fashioned little town, with tiny, low houses; nor will any of its Fourteenth of July illuminations approach in brilliancy the phantasmagoric display that one may see in New York on any night of the year.”72 In George Luks’s painting Armistice Night

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Figure 4.12. George Luks (1867–1933), Armistice Night, 1918. Oil on canvas, 37 ⫻ 68 ¾ in. (93.98 ⫻ 174.63 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of an anonymous donor. Photo: Geoffrey Clements

(1918), the wildly waving flags and crowds, radiant and reveling under skyscrapers and streetlights, celebrate not only the end of global conflict but also the de facto inauguration of a U.S. reign in world affairs. Yet what kind of art or artist could register the energy, ambition, and concomitant inhumanity of the place? “Who shall paint New York? Who?” asked the critic Robert J. Coady in 1916.73 Until about 1915, it seemed that the only way to absorb the ever-more outsize scale of the city had been to muffle the roar of its towers and traffic with a cloak of mist or snow, or at least a picturesque play of light and shadow. Even the horrified James could admit that the city was “in certain lights almost charming” as “an element of mystery and wonder entered into the impression.”74 Hassam had helped set the tone, following Whistler, when he said that the best views occurred “in the early evening when just a few flickering lights are seen here and there and the city is a magical evocation of blended strength and mystery.”75 Even Stella looked back toward Whistler. From his early nocturnes in industrial Pennsylvania to his pastel Nocturne of 1918, he played Whistlerian tonality against angular urban forms.76 Unsurprisingly, then, he too used misty nocturnal atmospherics to tame the aggressive futurist planes of his first Brooklyn Bridge (1919–1920). The tonal harmony and near abstraction of Whistler’s approach helped him both to create and control a stylized version of Manhattan. Critics were as convinced as the artists that urban beauty depended mightily on the Whistlerian veil. Rhapsodizing over the

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“beauty and mystery” of the night view, in 1913 Claude Bragdon noted how “the harsh jazz of the jagged skylines is muted by a velvet curtain of darkness painted with a silver river and bespangled with innumerable points of lights.”77 Yet around the time that Stella returned from Europe and began thinking about Coney Island and the Brooklyn Bridge, the art of the night city began to evolve once more. Karl Struss, a second-generation member of the photo-Secession once influenced by Coburn, shifted to hard edges in his 1912 view of Brooklyn Bridge, Man’s Construction. Romance gave way before technology, as the structure appeared, not through a filigree of bare trees, but between the freight cars and cranes of the dockyards. Meanwhile, the painter Max Weber applied cubist and futurist techniques to the cityscape, describing his New York at Night (1915) as “electrically illumined contours of buildings, rising height upon height against the blackness of the sky now diffused, now interknotted, now interpierced by occasional shafts of colored light. Altogether—a web of colored geometric shapes, characteristic only of the Grand Canyons of New York at night.”78 Weber’s writing was more exciting than his somber cubist painting, but a new approach based on geometry and simultaneity had emerged. The title of Stella’s massive work draws us back from the visual, however, and toward the properties of language and sound. If his painting is “New York’s voice interpreted,” then interpreted from what original medium, to what effect, by whom, and for whom? While interpretation plays a vital role for all artists, Stella’s experience as an immigrant and a skilled portraitist of immigrants made him a sort of Ellis Island go-between, a translator who spoke for two cultures. He facilitated a dialogue between Europe and the United States, explaining to both worlds what New York was saying with its heights and lights. As a modernized Italian who came to New York from a traditional village, then left and returned again after artistic pilgrimages to Paris and Rome, Stella could also interpret American modernity back into the language of the Old World, setting it in Christian, Dantesque terms. Stella builds each panel on a subterranean predella of tunnels and vaults surmounted by earthly turmoil, topped in turn by Babel towers and lights through which come glimpses of the artificially lit heavens. Describing an earlier version of his Brooklyn Bridge, Stella made it clear that he was combining Aeneas’s classical journey to the underworld with Dante’s trip to an urban hell, both of which take place in Italy. “To render more pungent the mystery of the metallic apparition, through the green and red glare of the signals I excavated here and there caves as subterranean passages to infernal recesses.”79 In his learned allusions Stella was picking up on popular wisdom about New York. In 1905, the story went around of two strangers meeting in the city: “ ‘What do you know of New York?’ said one wanderer to another. ‘Only what I have read in Dante,’ was the bleak reply.”80 Later,

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Isabel Bishop would paint Dante and Virgil in Union Square (1932). The overall color effect of Stella’s work is like stained glass, and he styled the entire five-panel structure as a sort of altarpiece. Suggesting that America’s god is the almighty dollar, Stella fills the tall central panel where one would usually find Christ, the Madonna, or a saint, with well-known corporate skyscrapers whose shadowy surfaces form a giant dollar sign. Stella, whose name means “star” in Italian, could envision himself guiding the way from the depths of the infernal subway to the top of the capitalist Paradiso. But another way of looking at the title dispenses with the need for a Dante-Stella interpretation: the first words, The Voice of the City, imply that the painting is a direct expression of a city that speaks for itself. Stella may have got both his title and idea from O. Henry’s book The Voice of the City (1908). In the eponymous lead story the narrator searches all over New York, at night, for “the composite vocal message of massed humanity,” to “interpret its meaning” since “it must have a key.” New York’s voice, O. Henry imagined, would have to be “a mighty and far-reaching utterance . . . the tremendous crash of the chords of the day’s traffic, the laughter and music of the night . . . the rag-time, the weeping, the stealthy hum of cab-wheels.”81 What kind of sound does Stella’s painting make? Stella grandly called his work “five movements of a big symphony,” implying that the voice was not given to explicit denotative sound, even if the musical form suggests a Whistlerian vocabulary and harmony. It was, he said, “a symphony free in her vast resonances, but firm, mathematically precise in her development . . . highly spiritual and crudely materialistic alike.”82 Seeking to express this tension between the spiritual and the material, Stella may also have had in mind the climax of Israel Zangwill’s hit play The Melting Pot (1908). Among the tenements, Zangwill’s Russian-born Jewish hero realizes his American dream: he expresses the collective immensity of the immigrant experience in New York, in all its harsh reality and undaunted aspiration, by composing an assimilationist symphony, played and applauded by the immigrants themselves. Viewers can imagine Stella’s symphonic painting as a subway roar, a cacophonous babel of words, signs, and sounds. Or perhaps something more melodic and swinging, the strident urban rhythms balanced by the more subtle ups and downs of jazz and blues. Two years later, Gershwin would get his Rhapsody in Blue rhythms from a subway substitute—a train ride between New York and Boston. What Stella’s Voice of the City does articulate visually is intricately organized: the central panel and two edges are composed in cool nighttime colors (predominantly black, violet, blue, and blue-green), and are interspersed in an ABABA pattern with the two “White Way” panels, composed in the warm or even hot colors of artificial light (reds, oranges, yellows, and whites). Each panel has a basic structure: reading from left to right, a cross, an X, a shadowy S, a grill of verticals, and finally an inverted V, the tip of

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a Gothic arch. One can imagine the overall grouping like a map or crosssection of the city, the two outer, water-related panels (The Port and The Bridge) surrounding an island comprised of Broadway lights flanking the skyscrapers of downtown (White Way I, The Skyscrapers, and White Way II).83 Meanwhile, the subway tunnels below them unify the disparate parts of the city. Yet each panel seems to operate on a different scale, looking in a different direction: The Bridge looks west, through the arches of the bridge toward the city; White Way I looks upward (it was originally called “The Great White Way Leaving the Subway”); White Way II appears to confront the billboards head-on; The Skyscrapers looks south past the Flatiron Building; and The Port with its airplane wing and steamships seems to face east past the Long Island airports toward Europe. Thus, while The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted is modernist in some ways—in its geometric forms, in its hybrid of architectural motifs and multiple perspectives—Stella’s use of dark and light values as well as overall visual rhythms ties to tradition what may be the last gasp of old-fashioned darkness. In his work, the visual poetry of the night city seems to shift for a new generation—away from Whistlerian mist toward a hard-edged interplay of bright lights and aggressive forms. But not entirely, if we read the painting as Stella conceived it. According to Stella, inspiration came during one of his habitual night walks, as he arrived at the Battery in Manhattan: “All of a sudden flashed in front of me the skyscrapers, the port, the bridge, with the tubes and subways.”84 Charged with power, the double meaning of the Battery—as a container of electric energy or (originally) a group of cannons—was appropriate for Stella’s grand ambitions. Conventionally, the viewer starts on the left side of five panels, arriving like an immigrant at The Port (as “The Battery” later came to be called). Then one can proceed via Broadway’s dazzle to the all-dominating Skyscrapers (first called “The Prow”), back to Broadway, and then finally to Brooklyn Bridge for an uplifting finale. But Stella himself hinted at a very different, zigzag itinerary back in 1923 when his unsold work was introduced to the larger public. In an unsigned magazine article, the collector and painter Katherine Dreier, who apparently collaborated with Stella in writing it, outlined this sequence of viewing, quoting Stella as she went along: the central “Prow,” then the “Bridge,” followed by “Broadway” and the “Great White Way Leaving the Subway,” and finally the “Battery.” If we do not think of the panels as a unidirectional line of text but as a geography to explore freely, then the trajectory makes sense. The eye goes first to the biggest canvas, where the tour begins. Dreier quotes Stella: “The central panel is an interpretation of the city’s colossal skyscrapers blended together in a symphony of lights in the shape of a huge vessel’s prow.”85 The prow is of course the Flatiron Building, routinely compared (by newspapers, artists, and photographers,

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including Stieglitz) to a huge ship bearing down on the rest of Manhattan Island. Then the eye skips to the most simplified and legible form, the Brooklyn Bridge, called by Stella “a sinewed span of human energy.” Like so many others, Stella often came into Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge, and so logically saw it as an elaborate Gothic window or doorframe for the skyline. After that the two pulsating “White Way” canvases draw attention, as the transition from the cool tones of The Bridge to the hot colors of White Way I and II emulates Stella’s aim “to catch the sensation produced by the glare and dazzling brilliancy” as the artist emerges on to Broadway from the subway. Finally one arrives at the darkest and least agitated of the scenes: the port. The scene bathes the viewer in restorative calm: “you have left the noise and glare of Broadway.” As a wary immigrant who never completely yielded to the hoopla of New York or the United States, Stella saw the harbor as a point of departure as well as arrival; many times he left the port to head back to Europe. If we trace the itinerary in more detail, the trajectory seems literally and figuratively darker and more ambivalent than the usual progression. Its overall direction is not upward and onward to the transcendental bridge but rather a downward pilgrimage, from the tallest point, the skyscrapers, to the next tallest, the Brooklyn Bridge, then to the midlevel of the midtown signs, and finally to sea level at the port. One passes through air, over water, past the fiery sky signs, and at last down to earth’s—and water’s—edge, at the port. “The Prow” or The Skyscrapers easily handles its central position not only because tall buildings have become the defining feature of New York’s modernity but also because, as Cather’s “Behind the Singer Tower” makes abundantly clear, giant-prowed ships delivered the immigrant labor needed to build the great towers. Here, Stella’s Flatiron Building sails uptown towing “the city of dreadful height” in its wake.86 The buildings seem built over thin air, as if they were a vision—of the immigrant’s or capitalist’s New Jerusalem, perhaps—emerging from the night sky. At the top of the canvas rear the profiles of skyscrapers that surpassed the Flatiron in height: the Woolworth, Metropolitan Life, Heckscher, and Singer buildings preeminent among them. Over them arcs a giant ray of light, like the rainbow of the covenant, as a diadem of searchlights radiates out from behind them. And the dark dollar-sign shadow hovers over all. Where is the observer in regard to all of this display of heavenly favor or condemnation? We have to imagine ourselves rooted below, gazing upward in awe like Steichen’s cabbies before the actual Flatiron, wondering and subservient. But Stella, who called the city “she,” and who said, “New York is my wife—I always come back to her,” refuses phallic skyscraper imagery.87 If the buildings of the prow dominate in any sexual sense, they are linked via the V shapes and reddish underpinnings to the Whore of Babylon, the selling of body and soul to the seductive materiality of floodlit Babylon.

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Figure 4.13. Joseph Stella (1879–1946), The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Skyscrapers, 1920–1922. Oil and tempera on canvas, 99 ¾ ⫻ 54 in. (253.4 ⫻ 137.1 cm). Collection of The Newark Museum [37.288c]. The Newark Museum, New Jersey. Photo: The Newark Museum/Art Resource, New York

If we go next to The Bridge, following the Dreier/Stella reading order of 1923, the spiritual thrust of that now-iconic image becomes less lofty than before, more fraught with the tension of the city into which the bridge leads. The bridge, fittingly, becomes a transitional point and not a destination in itself. This also gives the viewer a better chance of understanding the complex whole of Stella’s efforts to convey his experience of the bridge. As he worked on the earlier version of the Brooklyn Bridge (1917–1919), he said, “I appealed for help to the soaring verse of Walt Whitman and to the

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Figure 4.14. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Bridge, 1920–1922. Oil and tempera on canvas, 88 ½ ⫻ 54 in. (224.8 ⫻ 137.1 cm). Collection of The Newark Museum [37.288e]. The Newark Museum, New Jersey. Photo: The Newark Museum/Art Resource, New York

fiery Poe’s plasticity.” Stella’s choice of Whitman and Poe evokes a divided, double vision of universal communion and individual torment, confirmed by warning bells as the natural and artificial clash in his next sentence: “Upon the swarming darkness of the night, I rung all the bells of alarm with the blaze of electricity.”88 Stella’s work was not the straightforward futurist glorification of modernity it is sometimes said to be. Critics are fond of quoting his concluding revelation, which seems expressed in the panel’s Gothic arches and upswinging cables: “I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.”89 But they less often consider the anguish that immediately precedes this passage, a suffering expressed in the

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predella and the jail-bar verticals that join the bridge to its cables and that merge into the skyscrapers beyond: Many nights, I stood on the bridge—and in the middle alone—lost—a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness—crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers—here and there lights resembling the suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites—shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like the blood in the arteries.90

This is a darker, more desperate vision than usually associated with this canvas, but Stella’s biographer, Irma Jaffe, has noted that while enthralled with New York, Stella apparently never said a fully positive word about it.91 A few years after Stella’s nocturnal rambles, a miserably lonely foreign poet was wandering the city, looking at the same architectural symbols for his own clues about the meaning of America. With an unflinching refusal to idealize, Lorca created the harshly surrealistic poem “Unsleeping City: Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne.” This work, from Poet in New York (1930, published 1940), helps bring into the open the desperate alienation of the immigrant alone in the city at night. “The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city,” Lorca wrote, “are extra-human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.”92 In his poem, Lorca like Stella uses the bridge to represent both city and culture, and he regards night as the time when its secrets are revealed. But he utterly rejects transcendental flights, his reiterated point being, “Life is no dream! Beware and beware and beware!” Urging his readers not to fall asleep in the face of injustice, he insists that “neither dream nor forgetfulness, is: / brute flesh is.” He denounces moonlit romantic transformations of the workaday city and demands that his readers to see its poisonous theatricality: “down with the trapdoors and let there be seen in the moon / the perfidious goblets, the theater’s skull, and the bane.”93 Night needs demystification. Lorca might have been writing of Stella’s three central panels when he said, “At first glance, the rhythm can seem to be gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines you understand it as a typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and banditry forgivable means of evasion.”94 There was another poet shadowing Stella and Lorca in the late 1920s. In The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane took the starlit form of Brooklyn Bridge as his central subject, well aware of its earlier artistic representations. Though the project was never realized, Crane had first intended to approach the bridge through Stella’s painting, which he hoped to reproduce in color as the frontispiece for his book. The compressed energy of Crane’s lines and his multisection treatment of the bridge strongly echo Stella’s radiant, multipanel panorama.95

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Crane structured his poem as a mythical journey from day to night, and from the present moment in New York to America’s legendary past and its utopian future—a journey for which the bridge serves as both a starting point and destination. For Crane, as for Stella, the bridge at night symbolized the terrible mystery not only of the city but also the continent that lay beyond it, and Stella’s religious symbolism sets the stage for Crane’s biblical language. Calling the vertical cables and roadbed of the bridge a “harp and altar” with “choiring strings,” Crane sees “the traffic lights that skim thy swift / Unfractioned idiom” as an “immaculate sigh of stars” that “condense eternity.” Yet the city night gives the heavenly light its meaning: “Only in darkness is thy shadow clear,” writes Crane to the bridge. In his belief that a dim dark outline best conveys the hidden sources of the city’s power and beauty, Crane reveals the extent to which he has been taught to see by the nearly abstract nocturnal photograph of Steichen (see figure 2.20) and Stella’s iconic rendering of the bridge at night: “we have seen night lifted in thine arms.” The idea of the harplike bridge as a dark sweeping form whose visual melody could convey us from time to eternity reverses the infernal imagery of many earlier nocturnes. Crane, like Steichen with his mystic glow around the bridge’s tower, wants his “sleepless” bridge to make good on the promise of the prophets: “Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend, / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.”96 Symbolically situated under the bridge in its shadow, as is Steichen’s viewer, the poet awaits the final deliverance that the Brooklyn Bridge, as a work of iron and art, can achieve by spanning, in a literal and transcendent way, the river of life below. As with the conventional left-to-right sequencing of Stella’s five canvases, Crane’s poem brings the reader back to the Brooklyn Bridge in the final section. After a subway journey to the underworld that recalls Stella’s predella, the narrative bursts back out aboveground and grants the poet a final glimpse of the bridge. The culminating appearance of the Gothic-arched span seems itself to bring redemption. Or as Stella put it, “The bridge arises imperturbable with the dark inexorable frame among the delirium ranging all around the temerarious heights of the skyscrapers and emerges victorious with the majestic sovereignty sealed on his arches.”97 In the final section of the poem, Crane re-creates the visionary intensity of Stella’s painting, as he discovers that the bridge’s granite and steel embodies the very “index of night.” His bridge becomes a transcendental span that the poet follows upward along its moonlit cables in order to find in its harplike outline “Deity’s glittering Pledge.”98

The Apotheosis of Electricity But unlike Crane’s Brooklyn-bound journey, Stella’s bridge looks towards and leads back into the city. Following that line of sight, viewers can take the bridge toward the two “White Way” panels that, according to Dreier,

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Figure 4.15. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The White Way I, 1920–1922. Oil and tempera on canvas, 88 ½ ⫻ 54 in. (224.8 ⫻ 137.1 cm). Collection of The Newark Museum [37.288b]. The Newark Museum, New Jersey. Photo: The Newark Museum/Art Resource, New York

are meant to capture “the glare and dazzling brilliancy of the theatrical district’s electrical display,” which is “thrust suddenly upon the artist’s vision as he comes up from the subway.”99 Stella used his most futuristic style here to turn advertising signs into a whirl of bursting visual excitement, a modern version of the perennial firework motif in nocturnal art. As with Whistler’s fireworks, any sense of everyday pictorial space is lost; Stella has carefully constructed a composite, abstracted representation of theatrical and commercial lights that creates a surface and depth of its own. A fantasy landscape of the telescoped sort seen in Broadway song-and-dance extravaganzas replaces the familiar one- or two-point perspective of the impressionist cityscape. Scattered and backward letters, rays, streamers, kaleidoscopic wheels, and frenetic patterns emerge. In 1911, the critic Louis Baury had called on artists to notice that “the vital message of the age is

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Figure 4.16. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The White Way II, 1920–1922. Oil and tempera on canvas, 88 ½ ⫻ 54 in. (224.8 ⫻ 137.1 cm). Collection of The Newark Museum [37.288d]. The Newark Museum, New Jersey. Photo: The Newark Museum/Art Resource, New York

flashed forth in the incandescent signs on Broadway,” but even the loquacious Stella hesitated to spell out a translation.100 They are signs of the times, but what do they say? Of the many descriptions of Broadway signs, maybe the closest to Stella’s vision is that of a French visitor, Odette Keun: “As soon as dusk falls, Broadway bursts into a scintillation which has no equal in America or anywhere else in the world. . . . All around you is the apotheosis of electricity. It makes your head reel . . . it flares, flows, writhes, rolls, blinks, winks, flickers, changes color, vanishes and sparkles again.” This is Stella exactly. But then Keun continues: Red, white, green, yellow, blue, orange, purple, they urge, solicit, press, command you to go somewhere or buy something. Bottles of beer appear

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on the firmament and transform themselves into dwarfs drinking; showers of gold peanuts fall from the skies; dragons breathing smoke become a film title; cigarettes are ignited; automobiles materialize. Mountains, towns, lamaseries, men with top hats, nude women with teeth, spring into existence on the façades and are wiped off into oblivion.101

Dwarfs and dragons, beer and nuts, spiffy men, naked women, and far-off landscapes—this fairy tale hodgepodge is what Stella leaves out. Not to mention the brand names. The artist concentrates on the discharge of energy that causes products to “spring into existence” and then get “wiped off into oblivion” as the commercial empire of light consumes itself. But aside from the pixie-ish figure of the “spearman” from the giant Wrigley’s chewing gum billboard poised at the top of White Way I, Stella has deliberately omitted recognizable ads. Some witnesses have claimed that Broadway’s agglomeration of electric signs induces a temporary alexia, producing an effect too crazy and clashing to fathom. In 1928 a visitor said of Times Square: “Here the eye does not read any writing, it cannot pick out any shapes, it is simply dazzled by a profusion of scintillating lights, by a plethora of elements of light that cancel out each other’s effect.”102 Rendering this visual incapacitation seems to be part of Stella’s project. But for most onlookers the White Way proved only too legible. G. K. Chesterton visited New York in 1922 when Stella was finishing his painting, observing, “What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.”103 The remark recognizes the impossibility of not reading. Trivial as commercial lighting instantly became, the messages were so crude and powerful that legibility was unavoidable, even if, as Loti noted, their legibility was tied to their evanescence: “Everywhere multicolored lights change and sparkle, forming letters, and then dissolving them again. They fall in cascades from top to bottom of the houses, or in the distance seem to stretch in banners across the street.”104 Chesterton might have been thinking of someone like Stella, gone from mountain village to villainous Manhattan, when he elaborated on his imagined prelapsarian encounter of innocent illiteracy and seductive advertising: “Let us suppose that there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant” who is “as innocent as Adam before the Fall. He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming sword or the purple and peacock plumage of the seraphim; so long as he did not go near the Tree of Knowledge.” For Chesterton, reading was a fall from Edenic grace into a sorry understanding. The signs of the great republic do not, alas, say “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” but rather “Tang Tonic Today; Tang Tonic Tomorrow; Tang Tonic All the Time.”105 In effect, this is what Stella recognized—he intensified the color, lights, and excitement of Broadway by translating the commercial message into

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form and color. His is a wordless interpretation of New York: he deliberately substitutes artistic “legibility”—the stylization of color and form, what he called a “hymn of praise”—for commercial legibility—the logos, trademarks, and copyrighted slogans.106 He apparently chose, as Sloan did earlier in The Coffee Line, not to give free advertising to big business, even as he recognized the artistic and cultural importance of the electrified landscape that capitalism had created. Stella portrays the lights themselves, beyond any specific message they might send. But even if the signs cancel each other out, this apparent Babel is not meaningless. Stella’s hymns of praise are clearly not directed to God or democracy but to Mammon. Although Stella makes it possible not to read, he conveys his ideas schematically through the chorus line of dollar signs that he creates in White Way I, as the S lines of light cross the insistent verticals on the right-hand side, like the edges of stage wings, receding toward the center of the panel. And in White Way II the golden, jail-bar verticals imprison the sight, denying the viewer-consumer access to the commodified promised land. If, as the London Times remarked of the Hudson-Fulton celebration, lighting engineers made the skyscrapers look more like “palaces and dreams” than “the sober realities of the modern Land of the Dollar,” Stella reversed this familiar Whistlerian transformation by bringing dollar signs back to into view.107 What makes The Port a satisfying end point to the journey is its darkness, its relative calm. This is in keeping with O. Henry’s story “The Voice of the City,” which ends with the narrator finally discovering New York’s elusive voice in the quiet moonlight. Stella’s masts, rigging, ships, water, and the paraphernalia of ocean commerce stand still for the night in silent equipoise. The imprisoning verticals of the other panels have faded away. The concentric circles of shadow that fill the lower-right corner ripple gently like an ebbing tide. Of The Port Stella remarked: “You have reached the harbor—you are standing where all the arteries of the great giant meet—and a quiet sea and sky overwhelm you—you have left the noise and glare of Broadway—you have left the prow of the boat—the ruthlessness which cut through you—all the harshness and brilliancy fade away in the stillness of night.” The port is a worthy destination because it offers calm after the storm, “the ruthlessness which cut through you.”108 The whole painting acts as both a voyage and a ship. “The prow of the boat,” the skyscraper panel, is as much the prow of the painting as it is of the city. The concept enables Stella to bring the sea into the center of the city and link his three cool-colored panels through water imagery, whether beside it (the port), on it (the prow), or over it (the bridge). Reflecting on the multiscene journey now behind him (“you have left” is repeated twice),

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Figure 4.17. Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Port, 1920–1922. Oil and tempera on canvas, 88 ½ ⫻ 54 in. (224.8 ⫻ 137.1 cm). Collection of The Newark Museum [37.288a]. The Newark Museum, New Jersey. Photo: The Newark Museum/Art Resource, New York

the artist offers self and viewer the repose of an old-fashioned nocturne: “all the hardness and brilliancy fade away in the stillness of night.” The first Futurist manifesto (1909) had proclaimed that “we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons.”109 But Stella wanted his harbor to be a safe and pensive one. For all the geometries of modern travel, the dark sky and mast-sectioned picture plane suggest balance and tranquillity, as do the evenly spaced ships on the horizon. Its heart is one of meditative darkness rather than imperial light; The Port is anchored in the nocturne tradition, Whistlerian after all.110 Yet Stella, like Remington, Cather, Lorca, or Crane, was in his own way foreseeing the end of night, not its triumph. By this period the urban darkness

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already seemed lighted almost to daytime levels. A polarized landscape of prosperous brilliance and ruthlessly illuminated misery, the night appeared to be approaching a point of crisis. Having spread light everywhere, the colonizers could now say, “You have light, what more do you want?” In 1928, Berlin held a festival of illumination, prompting the poet Max Epstein to respond: They leave war-cripples to freeze on the streets, But they illuminate the streets. This is its true and terrible face: Berlin in the light.111

The ultimate position, for the missionaries of light, was that people had no more claim to sympathy than the lights themselves—and were surely less interesting artistically. There are no people at all in Stella’s New York Interpreted; its voice is utterly disembodied. As the Futurists wrote in 1910, “The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heartrending expressions of colour.”112 Giacomo Balla’s now-iconic painting of a sizzling streetlight (1909) was initially called “Suffering of a Street Lamp” (see figure I.8). If the nocturne, with its partisan love of darkness, had served in many ways as an aesthetics of resistance, the high modernist “battle of lights” did not have a literal dark side that the rebel could side with. Stella successfully depicted a carnal bacchanal, but barely found room to oppose the frenzy. What can we make of the dark-defying night of Stella’s imperial city and its Great White Way? Historian David Nye argues that the light-driven editing of the nocturnal landscape after 1900 effectively dematerialized the night city, destroying any sense of depth or perspective. It became a selfcanceling concatenation of messages, an “ethereal abstraction” that in its sheer size and complexity transcended the human capacity for comprehension. Whereas the natural sublime dwarfed and chastened human spectators, and the technological sublime exalted the human mastery of natural forces, for Nye this “unintended” electrical sublime of commercial light managed to tear viewers in both directions at once. In so doing, it created a “disembodied spectacle with an alluring promise of personal transformation” that “urged the viewer to merge the scintillating landscape into the self.”113 Apt as this analysis is, many of the elements are familiar. The modern city’s chaotic concentration of nature and artifice, suffocating closeness and mind-boggling sprawl, has been overwhelming people and eluding their grasp at least since the time of Wordsworth and Blake, Dickens and Baudelaire; Babel has been as common a word as Babylon to describe the overall impression the city has made on its observers. The self-annihilating,

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self-transforming spectacle of beckoning commodities has an equally long, if ever-accelerating, history. What truly makes Broadway’s ultracolonizing of the night at the start of the twentieth century so special is its deliberate ephemerality. For the first time a landscape changed every few seconds. Its de-spacialized, vibrating, ever-moving script of light prompted casual spectators as well as artists and writers to register and rematerialize its simultaneity through multiple perspectives and composite, semiabstract constructions. The cubist or futurist technique of reassembling the electrified city, beginning with Battle of Lights at Coney Island, becomes necessary in a way it would not be for the more static effects of a rural landscape, a daytime view of a skyscraper, or a gaslit street. As Dreier comments of Stella, “It has not seemed possible for him to interpret these sensations of cold, hard, metallic brilliancy in any of the older forms of art.”114 Yet Stella grounds his stellar construction in a netherworld of deserted, light-haunted tunnels. Despite his plunging or dizzying perspectives, he enables viewers to maintain some critical distance after all, for the somber base of his images allows them to separate the landscape from the self. This may be because Stella and so many of the other commentators on the city—Riis, Cather, Loti, Lorca, Chesterton, and Keun—were especially sensitive to the way in which the viewers could change almost as rapidly as the signs blinked. If nocturnal modernity had to be traversed, the pace of the individual passage was picking up. The surging crowds of the city, and in particular the one out of every two or three who had been born outside the United States, confronted the city lights with probably as much trepidation as wonder. Their travels and travails had prepared them to use mobility as a defense; they knew power when they saw it. In the early decades of the twentieth century, much was sacrificed to the light; whether to praise it or resist it, one had to come into its reach and thus under its spell. Perhaps, as Conrad wrote of imperialism, “what redeems it is the idea only.”115 But the idea remained elusive, though it was caught up in and fraught with power and control: conquest, domination, market share—the power of power as expressed in the power to let there be light, make there be light, to sell the idea of light for its own sake. The electrical sublime in art and literature ultimately threatened to become a form of the advertising that gave it birth—not advertising products, for people knew from the start how fleeting that effect was—but selling light and spectacle in and of themselves, an insubstantial nightly ritual that, as in Berlin, fed few but left thousands hungry for more. The larger implications of night’s colonization had been grasped in a simple fable back in 1895—a fable written by a New Yorker who had prowled the electrically lit streets and who would soon in Cuba know firsthand the face of U.S. imperialism abroad. In one of his ironic free verse

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poems, Stephen Crane evoked the human dilemma posed by the everspreading empire of light: I was in the darkness; I could not see my words Nor the wishes of my heart. Then suddenly there was a great light— “Let me into the darkness again.”116

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chapter

FIVE

Evening is coming fast . . . and the great city is blazing there in your vision in its terrific frontal sweep and curtain of star-flung towers, now sown with the diamond pollen of a million lights, and . . . night has come . . . and a wild intolerable longing in you that you cannot utter. —Thomas Wolfe, No Door

Skyscraper Fantasy When Walt Whitman proclaimed, “I sing the body electric,” he might have been dreaming of skyscrapers scintillating in the night.1 Maybe it was an illusion, but the sight of skyscrapers all lit up seemed to promise anyone who glimpsed New York, from near or far, that a tangible romance, a human touch, awaited somewhere amid the glitter. As the commodification of night grew ever brasher, artists, writers, and photographers continued to find something of the nocturne’s emotional and aesthetic charm in the way the night’s gleaming banquet was spread on the urban tapestry before them. In the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, the pleasures of the night wound like creeping ivy around the bases and up the shafts of skyscrapers, until the lighted skyline and the sexual siren song of the tall buildings became inseparable, almost universal icons of the nocturnal city’s appeal, a central feature of literary and visual art. The sweep, the height, and the plenitude of towers and windows utterly transformed the now-ordinary sight of lights coming on as the day departed. Even miles from the Great White Way, human bees could douse themselves in what Thomas Wolfe called “the diamond pollen of a million lights” as the sight of the city with its “terrific frontal sweep and curtain of star-flung towers” awoke in them “a wild intolerable longing.”2 The era of skyscraper fantasy is indelibly marked by the irresistible power of the sight itself. To portray what William Carlos Williams called “that miracle, the buildings all lit up,” was to embark on a difficult, often-tortured quest to maintain artistic balance and find a way to question the city’s romance even while invoking it.3 Maybe the moon was, as Charles Reznikoff said, “only another street-light.” But he was willing to admit that in the

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Figure 5.1. Anonymous, New York City at Night, c. 1935. National Archives, Washington, DC. Photo number 306-NT-174-.352c

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aggregate, New York’s thousands of hive lights aroused the appetite and were food for thought: feast, you who cross the bridge this cold twilight on these honeycombs of light, the buildings of Manhattan.4

Neither the spectacle nor the emotions it stirred were entirely accidental. Fascination with the skyline—like the word itself—had become a regular feature of urban journalism by the end of the 1890s. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, architects, engineers, and businesses adapted to the actual city the well-known magnetism of lights at fairs and amusement parks. Illuminated skyscrapers were descendants of “electric towers” such as those at Coney Island or at the 1901 Buffalo World’s Fair, whose nightly lighting was a standard festive ritual. The early towers were mostly outlined in bulbs that emphasized their architectural silhouette. But by 1910, engineers were able to switch to floodlighting that could make the whole building seem to glow against the black night sky; and with judicious use of shadow they could retain or intensify the three-dimensionality of the building, or color parts of it for special effect. The Woolworth Building, which in 1913 began taking its turn as the tallest building, was specially designed with highly reflective stone to bring out its dazzlingly white Gothic filigree. Gleaming around the clock, it emulated Coney Island, becoming a twentyfour-hour-a-day advertisement.5 Among the other important towers of this golden era of skyscrapers were the Metropolitan Life Tower (the world’s tallest building when it was erected in 1909), with its giant illuminated clock and a spire whose beacon light was visible far out to sea; the 1915 Equitable Building, whose huge bulk sparked the 1916 setback regulations for all later buildings; the art deco masterpiece Chrysler Building (1929); and the 102-story Empire State Building (1931) that capped off the era and crowned the skyline. At night skyscrapers offered a double pleasure: impressive sights in their own right, they contributed to the ever-more popular skyline views, especially along the East River; but they were also sites from which to see other sights. By the 1930s, people thronged the observation decks and cocktail lounges of the skyscrapers themselves.6 The glamorous Rainbow Room of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center gave the term “upper crust” a new significance, as the city’s elite caroused far above the teeming streets below. The idea of illuminated New York became such a part of the city’s self-image that for the 1939 World’s Fair, Consolidated Edison could think of nothing better as an exhibit than a diorama called The City of Light, in which a faithful model of the city went through a twenty-four-hour cycle, with the main emphasis on the dramatic lighting effects at nightfall.7 With ever-greater

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Figure 5.2. Anonymous, The Woolworth Building at Night, c. 1913. Library of Congress, Washington, DC

technological sophistication, lighting designers played on the age-old attraction of moths to flame, so that each major addition to the commercial real estate market was also engineered as an almost-human presence, born looking for attention, admiration, and maybe even love. From the start it was evident to New Yorkers that skyscrapers were not simply material structures or corporate symbols; they were containers of human energy, images of modernity, icons of Manhattan’s glittering grandeur. But also, and especially at night, they seemed something more: “By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul,” as Carl Sandburg wrote.8 Tossing off the old cloak of suggestive darkness to reveal itself arrayed in sequined splendor, by the 1920s the fully electrified city was ready to

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Figure 5.3. Busby Berkeley, director, Ruby Keeler and Dancing Skyline, from 42nd Street, 1933. MGM. National Film Archive/Stills Library

entice and provoke. For the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the city was a devious harlequin, from whose glittering brain the helpless viewer was signaled by “ravishing sirens, each waving her hand-mirror.”9 In Busby Berkeley’s movie 42nd Street (MGM, 1933), the leggy star Ruby Keeler strutted and sang her way through a dancing skyline made up of an invisible chorus wearing skyscraper-shaped boxes that totally covered their bodies. But the same features that made the city at night so attractive to the creative imagination also made it daunting. The visual immensity and emotional intensity of the spectacle seemed beyond representation. Williams lamented that he was “unable to say anything much to the point / though it is the major sight // of this region.”10 Or as O’Keeffe recalled, depicting it seemed “an impossible idea—even the men hadn’t done too well with it.”11 Hard to capture and too ardent to cool, the multigendered sexual heat of the city frustrated as well as fulfilled, generating a sense of impotence and infertility as well as exhilaration. Tellingly, the spectacle appeared most alluring just where the sexuality ascribed to it was most ambiguous, contradictory, uncertain. For in the eroticized landscape of light, the whole city seemed to drip with a pervasive, omnidirectional desire. In the sexual steam press of New York at night, as John Dos Passos wrote in Manhattan Transfer (1925), everything “oozes light,” everything exudes the juice of passion: “Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and

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chimneys and watertanks. . . . Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt light. Night crushes bright milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks until they drip red, yellow, green. . . . Light spurts from lettering on roofs . . . stains rolling tons of sky.”12 Babylon’s sinfulness was forgotten as nocturnal skyscrapers, imaged in organic ways ranging from bodies to beehives, played a teasing game of cross-dressed provocation. The towers’ artful artifice kept people guessing about their apparent sexual attributes and implications. While a masculine worship of the tall building appears to dominate the views of Hugh Ferriss, Frank Lloyd Wright, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz, gender confusion and revision dictate the evocations of the skyscraper’s body by MacKnight Black, Janet Flanner, and Paul Cadmus. Meanwhile many women, including Berenice Abbott, Sara Teasdale, and Amy Lowell, flattened out the profile of tall buildings by looking down from or on them. O’Keeffe’s skyscraper paintings display an exhibitionist androgyny that counterpoints the identification of flowers, towers, and sexual power in Williams’s poems. And the tormenting siren lights of Bishop’s New York cause spectators to beg for release. Whether imagined as male or female, straight or gay, transsexual or androgynous, the night city intimated a sexuality waiting to be defined and embraced. As the ongoing process of discovering nocturnal New York shifted toward what had irrevocably become a vertical world, people responded to the sexual energy almost universally perceived to be emanating from skyscrapers. Whitman had astutely remarked that “all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,” and had chided his readers, “Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?”13 Now the image-makers, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, set about deciphering or assigning sexually coded qualities to the body electric—a body that the mutely shimmering city seemed so eloquently to offer.

Lights, Height, Sex, Romance Le Corbusier had heard all this folderol. To New Yorkers, Le Corbusier is best known for his famous pronouncement, “A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.”14 As a rationalist, “Corbu” detested Manhattan’s helter-skelter, unplanned, broken-toothed profile, not to mention the organic qualities Americans projected on to their buildings. He also knew, disdainfully, that while New York’s astonishing towers and lust for height were unique, Europeans had the technology to have built something similar, had they wanted to. But at night, he fell for the skyscraper city anyway. For what follows in his book on American architecture—the explanation of what makes the catastrophe beautiful—is a transcendent nocturnal

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experience. As an unwilling convert, Le Corbusier provides one of the best descriptions of what looking at the night view does to the spectator— perhaps because he was trying to explain it to those who had never seen the city or anything like it. After sunset cocktails, he recounts, he climbed out on the roof of an American friend’s apartment house near the East River: The night was dark, the air dry and cold. The whole city was lighted up. If you have not seen it, you cannot know or imagine what it is like. You must have had it sweep over you. Then you begin to understand why Americans have become proud of themselves in the last twenty years. . . . The sky is decked out. It is a Milky Way come down to earth; you are in it. Each window, each person, is a light in the sky. At the same time a perspective is established by the arrangement of the thousand lights of each skyscraper; it forms itself more in your mind than in the darkness perforated by illimitable fires. The stars are part of it also—the real stars—but sparkling quietly in the distance.15

The passage enunciates several ideas that underlie the skyscraper fantasy of this era. First, there is the extravagant and festive quality of what in New York is only a mundane event: “The sky is decked out.” Then there is the obligatory comparison of lights and stars: “It is a Milky Way come down to earth.” But here Le Corbusier starts to transcend the clichés: “you are in it. Each window, each person, is a light in the sky.” Much of skyscraper art and literature focuses on light emitted from within the building. For Le Corbusier, urbanites are not merely spectators; they become stars themselves, or angels. Moreover, the architect is now talking not about individual tall buildings but the overall effect of seeing so many of them at once. While a semblance of urban organization “is established by the arrangement of the thousand lights of each skyscraper,” this is a subjective, psychological landscape that he himself helps shape: “it forms itself more in your mind than in the darkness.” This internalized city is not the whole picture, however, for nature demurely lends a backdrop to the scene: “The stars are part of it also—the real stars—but sparkling quietly in the distance.” Having sketched his vision, Le Corbusier orchestrates its emotional impact: Splendor, scintillation, promise, proof. . . . Feeling comes into play; the action of the heart is released; crescendo, allegro, fortissimo. We are charged with feeling, we are intoxicated; legs strengthened, chests expanded, eager for action, we are filled with a great confidence.

As he details the visceral effect of the city night, the music swells—“crescendo, allegro, fortissimo.” With masculine energy that would do the Italian

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Futurists proud, “we” who read and see along with Le Corbusier enjoy this invigorating, intoxicating experience, ready to act with “expanded” capacities. The sexual rush could hardly be more clear. But he saves his most striking reaction for last: “Everything is there, and it is real.”16 In Le Corbusier’s rhapsody, as in the art of the city, dreams take actual life in the urban night. Seeing is believing. In this vision, lived and relived with infinite variation in the art of this period, skyscraper fantasy shades into skyscraper illusion, skyscraper delusion. The individual skyscrapers signify as part of an eroticized landscape of light, of which their height, lights, and silhouette are the key elements, both symbol and reality. They stand, they promise, they deliver. In the ubiquitous script that the architect’s words spell out so lucidly, the diamond-studded city becomes for anyone who gazes a vast dreamscape molded by desire, a tantalizing topography to be traversed at will by the commanding imagination. In Adolph Fassbender’s photograph The White Night (1932), for example, artificial light renders nature, in its Central Park guise, even more beautiful, while the snowy landscape lends the skyscrapers an organic quality whose delicate romance suggests a commingled innocence and desire. The same scene, though in a different season, prompts the poignant memory of New York’s inescapable allure in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “My Lost City”: “Invariably I found a moment of utter peace in riding south through Central Park at dark toward where the facade of 59th Street thrusts its lights through the trees. There again was my lost city, wrapped cool in its mystery and promise.”17 Yet the “reality” of Fassbender’s image, as well as that of Le Corbusier’s vision, is further complicated by its having been artfully inspired. For Europeans, it was obvious early on that skyscrapers were perhaps the American art form par excellence. Marcel Duchamp, who regarded the Woolworth Building as a “ready-made,” a work of art to be discovered rather than created, said in 1915 that “New York itself is a work of art, a complete work of art.”18 The English painter C.R.W. Nevinson remarked in 1920 that skyscrapers are “undoubtedly the most vital artworks of the day.”19 And when the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whose skyscraper-inspired Bird in Space marked a new direction in modern plastic arts, visited New York City, he told Americans that they had “a great new poetry seeking its peculiar expression. In architecture you have found it already in the great skyscrapers.”20 This complicated piece of art reality undergoes a special transformation at night as its physical bulk fades and its moneymaking activities relent. Its interior illumination projects outward, carving a new, dematerialized shape in the dark. The skyscraper’s genius in an economic or architectural sense is superseded by its intangible coalescence of individual and collective fantasy—it becomes a body, a corpora rasa on which to write the story of one’s dreams. More complex than a nude—a body turned to art—this is a

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Figure 5.4. Adolph Fassbender (1884–1980), The White Night, ca. 1930. Vintage gravure, 11 ⫻ 7 5/8 in. (27.9 ⫻ 19.4 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc. [ 2005.27.2651]

human-made and inhabited object, whose art and artifice turn back into a body, a giant whose skin, whose footprint, whose trunk, crown, and myriad eyes command our gaze.21 To be enraptured by a floodlit skyscraper is to shift from a Babylonian, moralized nocturnal landscape to a Freudian dreamscape, and from fairyland to fantasyland.

Manhattan, the Night-Blooming Cereus The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The electric lights of Broadway were glowing—calling moths from miles, from leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and attend the singeing

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school. Men in accurate clothes . . . turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them. Manhattan, the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead-white, heavy-odored petals. —O. Henry, An Unfinished Story22

It was probably O. Henry, that literary barometer of the changing city, who popularized the idea that nightfall in New York broadly signifies romance rather than sin. Some earlier writers, like Howells, might insist against the odds on the respectability of the night view, while others, such as Foster, Dreiser, or Crane, dwelled on its harsh realities. But O. Henry boldly and unapologetically set forth the night’s pleasures; his moths have a right to their flame. In “An Unfinished Story” (1906), the author’s floral metaphor captures the fleeting attractions of the city: having spent time in the West, he knew the night-blooming cereus as a prickly cactus whose beautiful nocturnal flowers are short-lived, and that the cereus giganteus, growing up to sixty feet tall, was the floral skyscraper of the desert plains. Besides anticipating the night-blooming buildings of Georgia O’Keeffe, his image suggests the biological imperative driving Dulcie and the men who stare at her. O. Henry is the king of Ash Can romance; he gives names and stories to the urgent, animated young menn and women that jostle for attention in John Sloan’s etchings and paintings. In almost every episode, he shows how unpredictably and yet inevitably the seemingly random paths of lovers cross. His trademark coincidences abound in the urban night, as we see in so many of the stories in The Four Million (1906), including “Tobin’s Palm,” “Mammon and the Archer,” “The Cop and the Anthem” “The Skylight Room,” “The Coming-out of Maggie,” “Between Rounds,” “A Cosmopolite in a Café,” and “Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock.” He states his case most plainly in “The Green Door”: “In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. . . . [A]t every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers.”23 But one must be ready to act on these clues when they come, “The Green Door” shows. One night on the street the story’s hero, Rudolph Steiner, a “true adventurer,” receives a handout that says “the green door” when everyone else gets an ad for a local dentist. Steiner goes into the nearest building and knocks at a green door, only to have it opened by a lovely young woman who faints into his arms. The bold Adventurer finds true Romance. But then comes the twist: Rudolph later discovers that all the doors in the building are green; and when he demands of the card distributor how he alone received “the green door” card, the man points down the block where he sees “above the entrance to a theater the blazing

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electric sign of its new play, ‘The Green Door’” (101). Signs can take you to wonders, if read rightly; the story proposes that art can lead back to life, if we follow words into deeds. It was a spiritual descendant of O. Henry’s Rudolph Steiner, Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, who helped make a transition from street-level romance to skyscraper fantasy. In The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick links the young clerk’s yearning for evening adventure to the sight of couples in taxis “throbbing” in the dusk: “At the enchanted metropolitan twilight,” he finds himself seeking “the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. . . . Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.” Later in the book it is from a speeding car that Nick has his revelatory vision: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time.”24 The view of the skyscrapers, and particularly their dazzling whiteness by night as by day, eventually becomes for Fitzgerald the symbol and substance of the city’s appeal. He later wrote of how he rediscovered his own passion for the city: “As the ship glided up the river, the city burst thunderously upon us in the early dusk—the white glacier of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge to rise into uptown New York, a miracle of foamy light suspended by the stars. . . . From that moment I knew that New York, however often I might leave it, was home.”25 For Sloan, who never left the city in any significant way, “home” was utterly different: a down-to-earth, ever-changing combination of ordinary people and humble neighborhoods, often cast into relief by special spots, such as in Easter Eve, Washington Square (1926), or contemplated from rooftops, as in Sunset On West 23rd Street (1906). A Village socialist, Sloan was not readily sold on skyscraper romance. But in The City from Greenwich Village (1922), he attempted to join the pieces of his ongoing urban mosaic into a larger statement about night and light, making a bridge from his bohemian enclave out over the elevated trains toward the distant towers beyond the low-slung Village (color plate 18). In the upper background we glimpse “the city,” the skyscraper territory of Stella and Fitzgerald, a sort of radiant New Jerusalem gleaming unapproachably in the distance, while the dark prosaic form of an elevated train roars down the canvas, toward the viewer. Like Stella’s New York Interpreted, Sloan’s painting creates a composite of essential urban elements, from subway to tower and sidewalk to sign; it even contains a triangular, flatiron-shaped building. But crucially, it’s an apartment building, not an office tower. While Stella goes for a symphonic grandiosity, a visual onslaught of modern turbulence and technique that engulfs the viewer like a breaking wave, Sloan prefers domesticity and distance assembled in a traditional style. Instead of being crushed by the empire of signs, viewers can find a place for themselves in the picture; there are people walking under an umbrella

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while others ride by in a car or on the train. Sloan includes different modes of transit, just as he represents different forms of living and light. In humorous reference to what his picture leaves out, he does limn one glowing gold sign. Painted on the side of a tenement, it spells the word “Moonshine.” Positioned on the lower left to counterpoint the illuminated skyscrapers on the upper-left horizon, which have taken the place of the moon, Sloan’s invented lunar sign alludes to both modernity’s missing moonlight and the bootlegger’s way of bypassing Prohibition, which had begun January 15, 1920. Yet the sign also suggests that from the Greenwich Village point of view, skyscraper mania is a whole lot of foolish “moonshine” too. Unlike Stella or a few years later O’Keeffe, Sloan refuses to erase the human side of New York’s nightscape. So the jokey moon and its alcoholic glow is set literally on a level with the central streetlight. Together, they throw a complicitious wink toward the close-knit couple under the umbrella as they pass beneath. But Sloan was bucking the trend. Almost everyone else seemed to feel that high art, high passion, and high rooflines should be related—the more intimately, the better. Visiting from England in 1912, Arnold Bennett wrote, “A great deal of the poetry of New York is due to the sky-scraper. At dusk the effect of the massed sky-scrapers from within, as seen from any high building uptown, is prodigiously beautiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world. The early night effect of the whole town . . . seen from the New Jersey shore, is stupendous, and resembles some enchanted city of the next world rather than this.” As the city of salvation goes vertical, New Jersey is next door to the New Jerusalem. Moreover, the tall building strikes an emotional chord that goes beyond any impression of its beauty or divinity. “In the skyscraper,” Bennett mused, “there is a deeper romanticism than that which disengaged itself from them externally.”26 The “romanticism” of skyscrapers can be read in several ways. There is the transcendental Hegelian mysticism of the engineers, such as that of John Augustus Roebling, the visionary designer of the Brooklyn Bridge; the organicism of Louis Sullivan, who shaped the earliest skyscrapers as tendrilcovered shoots bursting from urban soil; the exoticism of the Singer Tower; or even the spiritualized capitalism of Cass Gilbert and F. W. Woolworth’s Gothic-styled cathedral of commerce. But perhaps the most enduring sense in which skyscrapers are “romantic” is the popular one—a sense of romance that carries with it the glamour of a night on the town with the promise of physical and emotional bliss before dawn. Lights, height, sex, romance: the sparkles seem both companions and destinations; they are the sea in which the urban imagination swims. In Thrust at the Sky (1932), the American futurist poet MacKnight Black wrote, “Now the skyscraper, . . . / Flamed suddenly like the mounting stillness / Of thighs, loins, breasts, lips, / Not steel but flesh.”27 Or as Williams more decorously put it in “Flight to the

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Figure 5.5. Martin Lewis (1882–1962), The Glow of the City, 1929. Drypoint, 11 3/8 ⫻ 14 3/8 in. (28.9 ⫻ 36.5 cm)

City” (1923), the whole sight is like a courting gift for a girlfriend: “skyscrapers / filled with nut-chocolates.”28 Sensing their exclusion, immigrants and the poor were especially sensitive to the wonder of the vision. Marie Ganz remarked that as she looked out of the Lower East Side toward Fifth Avenue, “it was little we really knew of the strange world that lay just beyond our own domain—of the region that lay before us dim and mysterious in the distance on summer nights as we stood on the house-tops.” Venturing out of her neighborhood one night, Ganz was transported by the unreality into another realm: “It is growing dark. Great white lights are throwing a magic glare over streets and buildings. All the windows of the palaces and great buildings glow with light. Mysterious shadows come and go. Nothing seems real. Am I awake or am I dreaming?”29 Yet the chiaroscuro also reminded slum dwellers how fully they were cut off from the light. In Martin Lewis’s memorable etching The Glow of the City (1929), a woman wistfully regards, from her laundry-ribboned tenement roof, the apparently unapproachable radiance of the commercial district. Hemmed in by clotheslines and caged by the railings of her fire escape, her dark and rooted form accentuates the elusiveness of the tall tower she faces, its top dissolving into light. It is the just-completed Chanin Building at Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street. Like Nick Carraway peering at lovers huddled inside taxis, the economic outsiders gazed nightly upward toward a promised land of economic fulfillment that waved flags of light in their disenfranchised faces, both mocking and beckoning at the same time.

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Inside the dream factory, the torment continued. Up close, the lights in the windows were not diamonds or dollar signs but electric meters measuring the human cost of the inhuman spectacle. The poem “City Windows” (1920) by Charlton Lawrence Edholm captures an indispensable idea of the period. More of an organic hive than an inanimate building, the skyscraper was a monstrous container “packed with the essence / Of human desires,” storing the honeyed emotional sacrifice of its worker bees: “Honeycombs! That’s what they are, / Those lights from city windows.”30 Human yet dehumanized, the harvest glow of the skyscrapers signals how well the drones have collected Wolfe’s “diamond pollen.” The skyscraper appeals not only because of its combination of imposing form and enticing lights; there is also the magnetic pull of its human interior—and perhaps an underlying relief that one is not imprisoned there too. As Sandburg pointed out in “Skyscraper,” ordinary people create the skyscraper’s stirring soul: “It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories.”31 What makes Edholm’s version of these 1920s’ commonplaces so striking is his lack of cynicism. In the famous parable from Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books, bees are admirable because they produce what humankind needs most: honey and wax for candles, sweetness, and light. In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold took up the fable to make sweetness and light the very essence of culture. But Edholm, along with so many observers of the city in the 1920s, implicitly connects the harvest of flowers to commercial exploitation. In language Whitman might have used, Edholm dwells less on the fatal sense of the sexual drive that coalesces in and around skyscrapers than on the saturation of this landscape with an incalculable human energy and yearning. He concludes that the building is packed “mostly with the rich, sweet harvest / Of your hearts, O men and women: / Of the unguessed flowers of cities.”32 In a poem built around the poetic aura of crass socioeconomic certainties, “unguessed” is the most beautiful word. But there’s not much room for critical distance from the spectacle or the elusive emotions involved. As Le Corbusier noted, “you are in it.” O. Henry had a pretty good guess about the nocturnal city’s floral character—a guess that Edholm and many others found written in the pollen-filled lights. Dead white and irresistibly attractive, the night-blooming cereus turns out to be us.

I Am Seeing Great Things Everybody knows that real New Yorkers do not crane their necks like tourists to gawk at tall buildings. They have more pressing items on their visual agenda, like the treacherous cracks in the pavement or the Whitmanesque possibility of catching “the swift flash of eyes / Offering me love.”33 But when they do look up, they are as susceptible as anyone to projecting their state of mind

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on to a looming expanse of girder and glass. The next few pages take a man’s tour of the city’s aerial sights. Wallace Stevens might have been speaking for many men when he wrote in 1916, “The night is of the color / of a woman’s arm; / Night, the female, / Obscure, / Fragrant and supple, / Conceals herself.” But Stevens, who soon left New York for Hartford, Connecticut, turned a blind eye to the charms of the nocturnal city. He was later to see Hartford in terms of “lights masculine, lights feminine,” but for now he insisted: Not all the knives of the lamp-posts, Nor the chisels of the long streets, Nor the mallets of the domes And high towers, Can carve What one star can carve, Shining through the grape-leaves.34

Wrong, wrong, wrong—at least as far as Manhattan’s legions of skyscraper lovers were concerned. Stacked up in the right order, carving light and space in a bold new way, a few million office lights were worth far more than a bunch of stars, any night of the week—especially when the innumerable lights had made the paltry stars invisible. As Ezra Pound boasted, “we have pulled down the stars to our will.” Stevens’s poem tries to rescue some of the now-passé attraction of the natural world, “one star . . . / Shining through the grape-leaves.” But by his day, the vertical city had thoroughly appropriated the pungent beauty of organic forms, even as it revivified them by their re-presentation on an unnatural scale. A leitmotif of the era, the skyscraper/honeycomb analogy resonated more profoundly than stars and grape leaves because of its human dimension; people, like skyscrapers and hives, have exteriors shaped by art and artifice even as biological destiny drives them through the day and into the night. Curiously, the honeycomb image, with its awareness of the minuscule significance of individual desire amid the larger project of light-producing toil, repeatedly fails to provide any emotional immunity to the wondrous sight. Like Le Corbusier, the young urbanist Lewis Mumford felt himself rising to meet the challenge of “these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass.” In the midst of perceiving how little he matters, the observer, galvanized by all the sexual energy around him, suddenly swells with ambition and confidence in his newly awakened potential. Confounding himself and the city, he surrenders to the imperatives of the hive even as he seems triumphantly to master them. Crossing Brooklyn Bridge, Mumford recalled, I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before I reached the Manhattan end, these

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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 me, beckoning me. . . . In that sudden revelation of power and beauty all the confusions of adolescence dropped from me.35

Literally a rite de passage, the trip from Brooklyn to Manhattan combines the qualities of religious awakening (“revelation”) and sexual initiation (“all the confusion of adolescence dropped from me”). Though in a later period the Manhattan-bound trajectory would signal adulthood for many young women, such as the heroines of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) or Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), the fantasy of a skyscraper-induced maturity and potency is mostly masculine in the skyscraper era. In the complicated back and forth gendering of the city’s appeal and menace, men respond to its perceived sexual force by personifying the city as both male and female. If in Western culture cities have traditionally been seen as feminine enclosures, their space is staked out with public areas and buildings predominantly masculine in aura. In modern times, skyscrapers appear to announce the supremacy of male artifice and phallic power over “mother” nature. But not all men feel that they share in this power. Unable to measure up, shamed by the might of height, they view the city as a sexual enemy that will seduce or frustrate them unless they assert their control over it. Perhaps because men often feel that they should dominate the city, frustration hounds those who try to assign tall buildings a feminine persona. “Thou art a maid with no breasts,” Pound addresses the poetically intransigent city in “N.Y.” (1912), while Dos Passos’s protagonist in Manhattan Transfer (1925) imagines his unapproachable wife as an illuminated office tower with no doors.36 Darkness accentuates and aggravates the struggle. The civic, ceremonial language of the daytime—in which cities father and nurture—may be replaced at night by images of impotence, seduction, or violation. “I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night,” says Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway. “I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives.”37 In his poem “Post Impressions” (1925), e. e. cummings speaks frankly of “the lithe indolent prostitute / Night.”38 A more lurid, violent fantasy of domination surfaces in “Two Women on a Street” by Maxwell Bodenheim, where the poet spots a woman whose “eyes are beaten disks / Of the lamplight’s ghastly keenness. / She glides away as though the night / Were a lover flogging her.”39 And so the fabled freedom enjoyed in the city at night is often the freedom to fantasize, perceive, or act according to familiar constructions of masculine heterosexual desire. In a word, the gaze is likely to be male, and the city as

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object is likely to be female. The situation is neatly summed up by a tourist postcard of 1903, captioned, “I Am Seeing Great Things.” Here the great things are the ankles of a woman who has made the mistake of walking past the newly erected Flatiron Building, exposing her skirts to its notorious updrafts of wind.40 With his triangular design, the architect Daniel Burnham managed to turn the flatiron, an emblem of women’s household work, into a skyscraping symbol of man’s pleasure. But soon enough it seemed possible to “see great things” without actual women, as human figures were displaced by massively looming skyscrapers. Although we now take a vertical orientation—“tall is beautiful”—very much for granted, the earliest skyscrapers were not all constructed to this ideal. Despite his motto, “It should be tall, every inch of it tall,” even Louis Sullivan, often called “the father of skyscrapers,” controlled the upward impulse of his buildings by capping them with a heavy Renaissance-style cornice.41 Moreover, the earliest photos and postcard views of New York’s tall buildings tended to emphasize the horizontal lines of their office-block bases as much as their campanile-style towers, stressing how they related to the street rather than broke away from it. A tower without a base, the Flatiron Building was something of an exception, although even then the frequent reference to its “prow” suggested a horizontal rather than vertical thrust. Only between 1920 and 1930 did most people begin to regard the skyscraper in the now-current fashion, with all the emphasis placed on the vertical elements.42 One of the most intriguing promoters of the tall building’s tallness was the architectural fantasist Hugh Ferriss, who produced starkly romantic drawings of skyscrapers both real and imagined. His darkly brooding studies of skyscrapers still to come lent a Byronic intensity, a wild Heathcliffean mystery, to the structures of the future. His collection of illustrations, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), suggested that a skyscraper-dominated utopia was already here today, giving the same high-contrast, dramatic treatment to some of the latest buildings, such as the ziggurat-massed Shelton Hotel, as it did to the skyscrapers of his Fritz-Lang-like dreams. In Night in the Science Zone (c. 1925), Ferriss sends a chisel-shaped tower, armored with hardedged buttresses and blunt setbacks, up past its rivals to jut alone into the charcoaled sky, where its unearthly pallor is lit by the stars and the glow of an invisible moon. For Europeans like Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Lang, who fetishized modernity, the whole city was indeed a “science zone” that Ferriss’s geometric chiaroscuro brought to its logical conclusion: a deserted science-fiction city where all human emotion had been subsumed by the aggressive hulks of phallic fortresses. One can regard the fascination with such skyscrapers, and perhaps especially with those that never left the drawing board, as a culturally determined expression of the American taste for the “geometric sublime”—that is, enormous human-made objects. The

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Figure 5.6. Hugh Ferriss, Night in the Science Zone, c. 1925. Charcoal, crayon on paper 17 ½ ⫻ 10 ½ in. (44.5 ⫻ 26.7 cm). In Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929). Reprinted by permission of Ellen Leich Moon and Princeton Architectural Press. © 1986. All rights reserved

same materials and tools were available in Europe, but such towers were rarely constructed there. Nor were they so profitable even in New York. When Woolworth’s designers apologized to him that his building’s cost was unlikely to be recuperated by enough income-producing floor space, he confided that it was as an enormous advertisement that the building would pay for itself.43 What drove dreamers like Ferriss and millionaires like Woolworth was the knowledge that skyscrapers had a life of their own, something that people could not resist looking up to.44 Two photographs taken at the culminating moments of the building boom emphasize the romantic profile of single skyscrapers. In The Chrysler Building,

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New York City (1929) Gordon H. Coster captured at nightfall the slim elegance of a sleek new building that was just gaining its short-lived right to the title of the world’s tallest, while in Empire State Building, Night View (c. 1930) Lewis Hine glamorized its successor as it sprang from a river of light, its unfinished upper extremities merging back into the reflective heavens. The photographs can serve as illustrations of a skyscraper rhapsody from an unlikely source. Even an urban critic as caustic and curmudgeonly as Frank Lloyd Wright—“skyscraping is not merely a falsity but a moral, economic, aesthetic, ethical monstrosity!”—felt compelled to acknowledge that night made all his objections fade away: But, heedless of the meaning of it all, seen at night, the monster aggregation has myriad, haphazard beauties of silhouette and reflected or refracted light. The monster becomes rhythmical and does appeal to the love of romance and beauty. It is, then, mysterious and suggestive to the imaginative, inspiring to the ignorant. Fascinating entertainment, this mysterious gloom upon which hang necklaces of light, through which hang clouds of substitutes for stars. The streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wisteria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are a shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-drop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain and amaze. The lighted interiors come through it all with a sense of life and well being. At night the city not only seems to live. It does live—as illusion lives.45

Wright, who is best known for buildings that hug the landscape, could not resist skyscraper magic. Late in his career he even unveiled plans for a milehigh skyscraper. Here, in what may have been a turning point, he is so struck by the rhythmic “romance and beauty” of the sight that he succumbs to its “mysterious and suggestive” spell. He gradually piles on more and more organic imagery, from necklace-wearing womanly monster to star-replacing clouds, to hanging wisteria to gossamer veil, until the passage finishes on a note of consummation as “the lighted interiors come through it all,” and he is finally left with “a sense of life and well being.” Wright is unwilling to go as far as Le Corbusier would do in claiming reality for his vision—his nocturnal city “does live” but only “as illusion lives.” Yet in showing how the lights augment the sense of mystery rather than destroy it, he lends the building veils power to intensify the fantasy, “to dazzle, entertain and amaze.” Still in the forefront of photographic exploration during the 1920s and 1930s, Alfred Stieglitz did studies of Rockefeller Center as it was being erected, shooting from the window of his apartment in the Shelton Hotel. For Stieglitz, the skyscraper represented personal territory, not merely a shape in the sky. In 1925, he and his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, became not

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Figure 5.7. Lewis Hine, Empire State Building, Night View, c. 1930. Museum of the City of New York, Permanent Deposit of the Empire State Building [L638.3]

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Figure 5.8. Alfred Stieglitz, Evening from the Shelton, 1931. Printed in 1947 by Lakeside Press, Chicago. Photomechanical (halftone) reproduction, 8 ⫻ 6 ½ in. (20.9 ⫻ 16.6 cm). George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

only among the first visual artists but also among the very first people anywhere to live in a skyscraper. Hitherto skyscrapers had been zoned as strictly commercial. But although apartment towers were still forbidden, a change in the city’s laws permitted tall residence hotels, and Stieglitz and O’Keeffe took a flat on the twenty-eighth floor (later moving to the thirtieth) of the Shelton, now known as the Halloran House, at Lexington Avenue and Forty-ninth Street.46 In the Shelton, Stieglitz wrote, “Georgia and I don’t seem to be of New York—nor of anywhere. . . . We feel as if we were out at midocean—All is so quiet except the wind—& the trembling shaking hulk of steel in which we live—It’s a wonderful place.”47 The honeymoon scene Stieglitz describes—they had married the year before—did not last long, and Stieglitz may have been finding a skyscrapercoded description of their increasing emotional distance when he photographed Evening: New York from the Shelton (1931). In the picture, “the

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trembling shaking hulk of steel” of their marriage tower opens outward on to the classic twilight transformation of the city, just beginning as the lights come on in the office towers of midtown. In the right foreground the silhouette of a tall dark building pushes out of the image at the top and bottom, its vertical thrust accentuated by the rows of lights that rise with it. Out to the left in midground, several blocks away, an unfinished building stretches upward, ten or so of its upper stories sketched out in open girders. Because Stieglitz’s camera cuts diagonally across the grid of streets, the towers seem to have to struggle upward from the huddle of lower buildings that the lens squeezes up against them. It partly seems as if Stieglitz is exploring Wright’s idea that the isolated skyscraper is the “gossamer veil” for a festive scene: the stairwell lights in the dark tower in the foreground seem to perforate the building, while one can literally see through the mesh of girders of the skeletal building in the background. Even further back another big building pokes its more stolid bulk up from the horizon, almost touching the silhouetted end of the tall dark tower, though in the distance it appears only a tenth of its size. There is something powerfully alien about the three towers, each successively lighter and farther from the viewer, that lift themselves up above the entirely human-made horizon, ready to march like Wellsian space invaders across the landscape. Yet the overriding emotion is a sort of helpless aesthetic admiration. Was Stieglitz thinking, as he looked at the three buildings rooted so beautifully in pictorial space, of his own inner disposition of attention? The dark tower may represent his own lofty stature, his sexual and artistic ambitions. Is the skyscraper-in-progress his unfinished, marriage-endangering affair with Dorothy Norman, while the dwarfed but tower-touching third building represents O’Keeffe self-protectively keeping her distance?48 On a less personal plane, the glorification of the tall building creates a tension between aesthetic approbation and political resistance that troubles the work of Stieglitz. How can the Depression-era artist celebrate the brazen emblems of a corporate capitalism that many felt was impoverishing the United States, both spiritually and economically? And yet Stieglitz, like Steichen, treated the verticality of skyscrapers with awe and respect. By concealing the tops, they enhanced the sense of height, majesty, and mystery of buildings that loom over the viewer. They celebrated the lofty masculine power of solitary skyscrapers, reinforcing their commercial dominance by granting them a formal, aesthetic authority over the disorderly world at street level. The crime-and-disaster photographer Weegee spoofed this reverence in his book Naked City (1945).49 In one of the uncanny coincidences that made him the O. Henry of photography, he snapped a scene that took the mickey out of the Wrightian monster. Weegee’s picture of a tall commercial

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Figure 5.9. Weegee (1899–1968), Simply Add Boiling Water, c. 1940s. Gelatin silver print, 13 ¼ ⫻ 10 ¼ in. (33.66 ⫻ 25.04 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc. [2005.27.2820]. Used by permission of International Center for Photography, New York

building on fire gleefully deflates the full-blown sexual and aesthetic claims of skyscraper worship and the modernist art photo. Wreathed in steam, the building burns beneath a giant rooftop billboard advertising Hygrade frankfurters. The ad slogan that lends the photo its name, Simply Add Boiling Water, is placed halfway down the building. The ad not only connects the two phallic images of skyscraper and hot dog (high-grade, at that) but also describes how the firefighters below struggle to extinguish the blaze.

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In a serendipitously balanced composition, they go up their ladders on one side of the building as the inhabitants scramble down fire escapes on the other. The steam swirling out of the upper stories turns the whole image into a tabloid parody of O’Keeffe’s smoke-and-cloud-wreathed picture of the American Radiator Building. Converting potential tragedy into potent comedy, Weegee suggests that the overheated sexual symbol has to be humorously hosed down.

The Body of a Skyscraper If skyscrapers get people excited, what kind of bodies do they have? No one shows better how height, love, and lust were mixed up in this era than the now-forgotten poet MacKnight Black. In May 1931, while New York was still agog at the latest constructions, the publisher Simon and Schuster gave the Philadelphia copywriter a book contract for a thousand-line narrative poem about a skyscraper. Black died while revising the manuscript, but the book’s topic was too hot to let expire. Written just as the Empire State and Chrysler buildings were taking their places as twin peaks of the midtown skyline, and published unfinished in 1932, Black’s Thrust at the Sky reveals how the race to construct the world’s tallest building captured the contemporary imagination. As he tried to put the essence of skyscrapers into words, Black developed an ever-more tactile sense of their presence that overpowered his respect for both geometric abstraction and human flesh. By the end of Thrust at the Sky, Black was close to the Futurist position that “the warmth of a piece of iron or wood is in our opinion more impassioned than the smile or tears of a woman.”50 In Black’s narrative, a New York architect named Thomas Haig dreams of constructing the ultimate skyscraper. Yet his enthusiasm for his project becomes confused with his excitement over the woman he has just met—Lee Wood. After their first date, Haig takes her not to his apartment but to the just-finished Empire State Building. The overwhelmingly phallic presence of the building in the night acts as a symbol of ultraphysical consummation: These two With heads back, pouring their sight far over the Empire State’s Skygoing lean waste of pale verticals, Over the last dip into emptiness spattered with star-points, Were stripped of speech.51

As Haig’s eyes penetrate the Empire State Building’s skin, “paring / The white shaft stark to its thrusting steel” (25), the X-ray vision engenders in Haig’s mind a design for his own skyscraper—one that resembles William Van Alen’s art deco Chrysler Building. But Haig has more than a touch of

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Ferriss’s penchant for theatrically limned shafts that want to copulate with the cosmos. Black’s description of the projected building emphasizes a sexual power independent of human concerns, even while it represents the passion of its creator. He imagines the building soaring upward, “until, the passion fed, the ecstasy fulfilled through eye and brain, / The tower no longer stood as though with roots / Far in his blood, but was complete beyond him” (38). After this passage gives the skyscraper a parthenogenic birth, Haig’s building springs from eye to mind to blood to blueprint. At over fifteen hundred feet, it will surpass the 102-story Empire State by twenty stories. As he strives to convey the tower’s seductiveness, Black nearly articulates the unspoken assumption that skyscraper worship is an acceptably autoerotic proof of manliness. Two decades later, the openly gay painter Paul Cadmus would electrify the convention by taking it seriously: the reason people look longingly at a sparkling skyscraper is because the beauty of the human form has inspired it. While Cadmus’s Architect (1950) projects an alignment of masculine sexual and monetary power similar to that in Thrust at the Sky, here the nocturnal skyscraper becomes an undisguised product of homoerotic creativity (color plate 19). The overly angular architect is seated at his desk with rectilinear lighted buildings visible through the window behind him. With a blueprint spread before him, he stares straight ahead; he holds out a T square in his left hand and makes a right angle of the fingers on his right hand. Reflected in the window glass on the left we can see the object of his measuring gaze: a naked man stands before him in a life-class pose, at once natural and monumental. The skyscraper that rises in the background distance above the architect’s head is the consummation of his vision, the supple proportions of the male body transformed into soaring glass and steel. As an emblem of male-male desire, both its yearning and fulfillment, the homosexual tower avoids the woman question entirely, along with the transgenderings that entangle the heterosexual lover of tall buildings. But driven by a marriage plot, Black must retrofit his manly skyscraper into a womanly form. Looking at his drawing, Haig realizes for the first time that what he has been sketching is not only male but also female—a female whose body seems inseparable from the architect’s conception: Now the skyscraper, stroked in graphite and color On the thin whiteness of woven paper Flamed suddenly like the mounting stillness Of thighs, loins, breasts, lips, Not steel but flesh, its straightness softened By slight curving until it rose Newly whole, like a woman poised Meaningless and serene, her feet pressing the earth. (39–40)

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A feminized phallus that bypasses the actual woman (rendered “meaningless and serene”), the skyscraper becomes not merely the projection of Haig’s desire but the sole object of it. Black’s poem breaks off with the architect facing a dilemma. Lee Wood is also sought by the chairman of the American Power and Light Company—the only man who has sufficient vision and money to build Haig’s dream tower. In the poem’s final lines, the chairman puts the choice plainly before Haig: “ ‘If you will give her up . . . leave her now. . . . This building is yours to design’ ” (54). What might look like a sacrifice is really an uneven trade, for as a projection of power, light, and lust, the skyscraper has in the course of the poem become sexier than the woman. In love with the tower, Black’s architect makes the inevitable symbolic exchange of Lee Wood for “thrusting steel.” Black tried to force the skyscraper into a female mold, even though its contours more strongly suggests male self-arousal. But for the novelist Janet Flanner, there was no need to regender a tempting tower against prevailing conventions. To Delia Poole, Flanner’s worldly, ambitious heroine of The Cubical City (1926), New York is not at all female but instead possesses the provocative libertine visage of a young man: “inventive, violent, spoiled, the face of a nervous, handsome and clever only son. Paris had an old girl’s countenance, shaded by a trollop’s gay wig. . . . But here by the Atlantic was a promising Pantagruel, dissipated before he had learned to shave.”52 Flanner shows that while the sexual appeal of the city may lie in the eye of the beholder, a different sexual orientation does not have to alter the coding of the tall building as provocatively masculine. Intrigued and uninhibited, Delia embraces the spectacle of the night city with gusto. Her eye boldly settles on the tip of a Fifth Avenue office tower: On the peak of this set of small lights, pricked about by their halos and cased within the walls of white fog, rose the colossal cock of the Heckscher fortress, the bird flashing like a weathervane mounted in the marketplace. All Delia’s provincial emotional enthusiasm for Manhattan ran through her like quicksilver as she saw the sight. . . . All else in the land should be covered from sight and shunned as consisting only of incivil torso and vulgar loins. But this, like all capitals, was the country’s flaming provoking face. Here one stared.53

“Here one stared”: this is the hungry female gaze, which turns the male from subject to object. In The Cubical City a woman forthrightly enters the struggle for sexual dominance, casting the American heartland as “incivil torso and vulgar loins” in order to declare the “flaming provoking face” of light-pricked Manhattan to be the more legitimate source of her passion. If

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the familiar alliance between masculinity, tall buildings, and economic power persists, Flanner give a revisionary reading of the “colossal cock” of the urban marketplace as the glamorous target of sophisticated female desire. By the novel’s end, Delia wins a successful husband and material success. Putting a young man’s face to Black’s tantalizing trunk, Flanner, like Cadmus, further humanizes the skyscraper’s body. For all three its stirring physique bespeaks a flesh-and-blood origin, making it a catalyst for fantasies yet to come.

Down-Gazing I Behold Confronted by Manhattan’s apparently relentless masculinity, women have developed various strategies to deal with its architectural aggressions. While Flanner boldly turned the phallic towers of male mastery into objects of desire rather than intimidation, other women have pictured the city as a place of vulnerability and resistance. They represent the city as threateningly male, a place where skyscrapers seemingly spawned by rapacious business practices suggest rape itself. The vertical city becomes a visual manifestation of potential violation that looms around women wherever they go in it.54 At night, a woman’s very presence on the street is often assumed to signify sexual availability. Beneath “the fiery lights of the picture shows” is “where the girls with thirsty eyes go by / On the errand each man knows,” Sara Teasdale writes in “Union Square” (1911).55 The connection between lights and male desire also troubles the speaker in Amy Lowell’s “The Taxi” (1912). Writing to the woman she loves, Lowell complains how “streets coming fast . . . Wedge you away from me.” Without her lover’s company she cannot shield herself from the cutting, piercing attention of the night city: The lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?56

Often writers and artists displace the male-female tension on to an opposition of artificial and natural forms. Teasdale laments in “Broadway” that “the million lights blaze on for few to see, / Robbing the sky of stars that should be hers.”57 In O’Keeffe’s painting City Night (1926), the moon—a traditional female symbol—rises only to the bottom of the picture, seemingly trapped and overpowered by what Lowell calls in “New York at Night” (1913) “this man-begot / and festering wilderness” of skyscrapers.58 And in a primordial scene of sexual aggression, the poet Frances Shaw connects the “fall” of night to “an iridescent serpent with black jaws.”59 But although they registered their sense of peril, women were hardly content to picture themselves as helpless victims of the night city. They

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found original ways to subvert the usual gendering of the night streets and tall buildings as flauntingly male. Shaw’s novel perspective, announced in her title “The City Lights from a Skyscraper” (1915), furnishes a succinct motto for this subversion: “From my high window at the fall of night, / I see the low-hung firmament of light.”60 For the most strikingly effective way women found to deflate the lordly skyscraper was to flatten it pictorially. During the glory years of the skyscraper, foreshortening emerges as a frequent tactic for women who wanted to register the city’s appeal to—rather than appetite for—them. Shaw concluded her brief poem by reducing her fantastic, threatening earlier similes—the serpent and the city’s “wild writing on the heavens like a doom” to a reassuring, low-slung image of innocent domesticity: the city lights are, finally, “just the cottage-candles in a wood / Where children play together and are good.”61 If Shaw sounds too innocently like the admirer who said to Mae West, “Goodness! What a diamond,” there are others whose delight in the jeweled sparkle recalls West’s reply: “Goodness had nothing to do with it.” In “New York: A Nocturne,” Florence Earle Coates begins with a vision of wonder to which she is literally superior, in a god’s position: Down-gazing, I behold, Miraculous by night, A city all of gold.

The Olympian poet sets New York in the company of other queenly cities—Babylon, Tyre, Rome, Venice, and Naples—then claims that even the night itself “never wore / A robe so gemmed before.” Shifting mythologies, she contends that the glow of Manhattan is “so glorified and so transfigured here” that nothing has ever been more beautiful since God “Breathed from His awful lips the mystic word: “Let there be Light!” But the appearance of divinity is due to darkness; the poem deifies New York only by hiding its faults: it is a city “that, dreading darkness, still conceals its care / And hides its gaping hurt ’neath veils of light!” Its glory descends at night, with “opulence and squalor hid from sight.”62 The overall image of the discrete city covering its poverty and wealth “’neath veils of light” suggests a woman with a past, having charms to set off and sins to hide. What if a woman builds her own skyscraper from which she can descend at will? Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “I Too Beneath Your Moon Almighty Sex” (1936) treats the tower as a symbol of the poet’s wayward nightlife. Its loftiness represents poetic aspiration, but its base is just that—a low-down physical fact: I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex, Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,

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Leaving the lofty tower I laboured at For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex With tittering chalk. . .

This is a portrait of the young poet as Mehitabel, a moonlit cat in heat. But the moon not only calls her down from her tower, it helps her build it. All of her experience counts toward its construction: Such as I am, however, I have brought To what it is, this tower; it is my own; Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought From what I had to build with: honest bone Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought; And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.63

Though “reared To Beauty,” the tower depends on materials taken from the “shadowy” side of life, becoming in its composite of fleshly failings a sort of tower of Babylon, a proud castle whose drawbridge is always ready to be lowered. Millay’s tower rises and falls as a monument to unregretted promiscuity, simultaneously phallic and female, and ultimately self-sufficient. Whomever she has been with, the whole poem leads up to the last word: “alone.” Probably the best visual example of unrepentantly tempting lights is Berenice Abbott’s stunning photo of New York at Night (c. 1935). One clear winter night, Abbott shot downward from the Empire State Building toward the city that stretches out before her camera like a welcoming blanket of stars. Celebrating the sparkle of the entire city below rather than gazing raptly up the shaft of a single skyscraper, Abbott created a representational photographic equivalent of the “all-over” style of urban abstraction that the New York School of painters would employ a decade later. In doing so, she implies that the romance of Manhattan’s spectacle has no center, limit, or vertical axis—it spreads diagonally from corner to corner, giving equal weight to short and tall structures, encompassing them all. The more one looks at the downward view, the more the setbacks of the upper stories come into play; hard to see from the street, from above they entice with their promise of penthouse luxury even as they seem to ripple and recede off the edges of the scene. Abbott shows how the power of—or the power over—the city’s heights and lights depends on the position of the viewer. To question the tall building’s privileged position in modern art, one must adopt a privileged point of view near the skyscraper’s summit. Such a city seems there for the taking; it is like a pile of gems to plunge into. As the novelist Dawn Powell wrote of that same view downward from the Empire State Building, “The town lay spread out in its spangles like

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Figure 5.10. Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), New York at Night, c. 1935. Berenice Abbott/ Commerce Graphics Ltd., Inc.

Christmas presents waiting to be opened.”64 Here the emphasis is on female agency; the reclining city spreads its treasures before her and awaits her pleasure in investigating them. As we will see later, a similar strategy underlies the work of the foremost contemporary painter of New York nocturnes, Yvonne Jacquette, who for forty years has specialized in aerial views of city lights, foreshortening tall buildings into a quiltlike pattern of lights. By looking down on the city, women can effectively squash the assertive individuality of the single skyscraper, producing instead a decorative pattern, a picture of a community, perhaps, where no one towers above anyone else.

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The downward perspective also recalls an idea articulated by Gertrude Stein when she visited New York in 1937: “It was the Rockefeller Center building that pleased me most. . . . Alice Toklas said it is not the way they go into the air but the way they come out of the ground that is the thing.”65 This is a gardener’s organic approach, focusing on the relation of the base to its soil, rather than how the tip of the erection stabs the sky. Yet the power of the downward female gaze is not an instant remedy for skyscraper worship, nor does height alone guarantee immunity from what Lowell calls the “ugly and foul” jut and jag of the city’s buildings. In “New York at Night,” Lowell speaks as a beleaguered woman, “cut brutally” and “goaded” by “her anguished labors” that find no respite at night, since “straight streets, monotonous, / From north and south, from east and west, / Stretch glittering.” The poet longs for a restorative darkness, “dim and tree-shadowed, where the light / Is shed from a young moon, mysteriously bright.” But there is no feminine nature, no night, no peace, no place for women in New York. Masculine violence reaches from the nightmare streets, “man-begot” like Frankenstein’s monster, to the poet in the isolated and uneasy vantage of her high-up room—men, lights, and noise sum up the inhospitable no-woman’s land beneath her: “the glaring, man-filled city groans below!”66 Stella F. Simon’s photograph New York at Night (1931) catches some of this angst, but also works toward resolving it. Being up high, Simon shows, can mean having to deal on eye level with the immense, intimidating shapes of the night, rather than looking down in a reassuring way. Here the dark, giant, jutting smokestack of a power plant near the Fiftyninth Street Bridge utterly dominates the more feminine elements of the East River and fretworked bridge. Simon, who studied with the pictorialist photographer Clarence White, transmutes the aesthetic of his harmonious shots of everyday natural objects on to an extrahuman scale where geometry rules. Dark cylinders, squares, and rectangles set the boundaries against which play the soft and scattered glow of lights. And yet the inverted arch of the bridge’s suspension cable nags the eye; it seems waiting to cradle the tall tube of the power plant, which in its turn seems to grow tired of its rigid pose. The bridge is also called the Queensboro, and it will not let the smokestack remain a solitary king of the night. “And the tower will be laid on the earth,” writes Teasdale in “From the Woolworth Tower” (1915). When romance combines with the downward view, it looks as if the skyscraper-flattening perspective might provide a revisionary image of sexual passion. “Vivid with love, eager for greater beauty,” the poet and her lover take the elevator to the top of the recently erected Woolworth Building. In an icy wind, “over the edge of eternity we look / On all the lights / A thousand times more numerous than the stars.” They marvel at the tapestry of “lines and loops of light in unwound chains.” But

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Figure 5.11. Stella F. Simon, (1878–1973), New York at Night, 1931. Gelatin silver print, 9 3/8 ⫻ 7 3/8 in. (23.81 ⫻ 18.73 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc. [2005.27.2821]

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after imagining the “warm millions” circulating, eating, loving, and giving birth below them, the poet, like Xerxes reviewing his army, suddenly realizes that “in a hundred years / Not one of these blood-warm bodies / But will be worthless as clay.” And so it’s not lovemaking or feminine strength that will lay low the skyscraper but rather the sweep of cosmic time that eventually levels the vertical electric civilization: “Ages will come and go, / Darkness will blot the lights / And the tower will be laid on the earth.” Only the sea will remain, along with the stars, “brilliant and unconcerned.” While this might sound like the eventual triumph of “feminine” natural properties over masculine artifice, it’s the vantage point atop the skyscraper that gives love its temporary triumph over death: “Here on the abyss of eternity / “Love has crowned us / For a moment / Victors.”67 This is height-hype after all, a short-term phallic surge of specular superiority over the urban abyss and the doomed millions laboring below. Laid low for brief poetic effect, the crowning tower pops back up, good for a few more centuries of airy sway.

I’ll Make Them Big: O’Keeffe’s Exhibitionist Androgyny If Louis Sullivan was the father of skyscrapers, Georgia O’Keeffe has a good claim to be considered their mother. With her posterish and provocative nighttime views, she produced the most significant images of skyscrapers done by anyone in the 1920s, male or female. In the process she gave tall buildings a sprightly personality and an artistic “upbringing” into the highest echelons of modern art. She rightly thought that her nocturnal city scenes were among her best work, and contemporaries praised O’Keeffe for not using European styles to approach New York’s unique landscape. Having moved her portrait of modernity beyond impressionism without recourse to futurist or cubist fracturings of space, she developed what seemed an “American” style—one that respected the urban object even as it found new ways to explore Manhattan’s exceptional skyline. Her nocturnal skyscraper scenes focus tightly on a single building or group of buildings, but it is the way that towers and sky interpenetrate each other that interests O’Keeffe formally. Dancing back and forth between ideologically loaded dyads, she touches many bases—modern/traditional, urban/pastoral, solid/diaphanous, light/dark—resolving them into memorable, emotionally affecting shapes.68 O’Keeffe sensed that the nocturnal city’s appeal was due in part to its refusal to satisfy simple stereotypes. The genealogy of her New York paintings crosses the natural with the artificial, “female” blossom with “male” skyscrapers. For it was the scale of New York’s buildings that had stimulated O’Keeffe in 1924 to begin painting her famous blowups of flowers: “I thought I’ll make them big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they’ll have to look at them—and they did.”69 When she came a year later to making paintings of the architecture that inspired her, she

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worked on a large, vertical scale, creating a romantic, engagingly erotic city that both triggers and confutes conventionally gendered readings. O’Keeffe’s much-discussed vulval shapes, identified with her flower paintings, loom out of the haze created by lights, clouds, and steam, and then mingle with the darker, stronger lines of the architectural masses, competing for attention with their assertive verticality. In her mural design Manhattan (1932) she even painted flowers superimposed on skyscrapers.70 Finding flowers in the city was not a new pastime. As soon as real plant life became less endemic than endangered in the urban world, people started assigning organic properties to the iron, stone, and steel that prevented the flora from flourishing. Sullivan decorated his skyscrapers with tendril motifs, for instance. What O’Keeffe added to the mix was an unsteady sense of metaphor. She plays back and forth with the artificial and the natural, male and female forms, giving none a decisive edge over the other. While edges are immensely important in her work, there is always a circle, a haze, a cloud, or a glow that blunts the impression of severity. Two crucial nocturnal experiences shaped O’Keeffe’s work. On her first trip to New York, in 1907–1908, she studied at the Art Students’ League, making, she would later recall, no significant progress. But one moonlit night in 1908 on Riverside Drive, she saw “two tall poplar trees breathing— rustling in the light spring air. The foliage was thick and dark and soft—the grass bright in the moonlight.” The next day she tried to render what may have been the soft-focus, Ryderesque elemental simplicity of it, but a fellow student spoiled her effort by claiming that he knew what she was after. Taking his brush, he painted over her canvas in an impressionist style. Later toward the end of this trip, on Lake George, she had another powerful nocturnal vision of trees, this time white birches: “In the darkness it all looked just like I felt—wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer. It was the second thing I had to say after those trees at night on Riverside Drive.”71 Trying to capture these two experiences, O’Keeffe joined the nocturnal tradition. Like Whistler and so many others she painted her night vision from memory the next day, and in the process, detail disappeared as simplified shapes emerged. Already technically accomplished, O’Keeffe was learning to express herself in the language of the night. But this is also where she left tradition behind. The formal simplicity of Whistler and his successors requires a calculated subtlety of tone and nuanced surface. O’Keeffe would eventually be painting a boldly lit, wide-awake, vertically vigorous city that had little in common with the peaceful rivers and faint lights of the classic nocturne. Like the engineers of the Woolworth tower who selected its materials with floodlighting in mind, O’Keeffe would eventually hit on a stylized approach to urban form that flattened out the surface of buildings and paintings, as does

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artificial light. Abandoning most delicacies of surface and atmosphere, she found the necessary depth in the double-edged interplay of buildings with the air around them and the lights within them. The clean lines of Charles Sheeler’s architectural photos and paintings, along with the combination of organic curves and rectilinear buildings in Charles Demuth’s Pennsylvania scenes, were influential in preparing her for the Manhattan of the 1920s. O’Keeffe’s first skyscraper nocturne was New York with Moon (1925) (color plate 20). Almost two decades after she saw the trees on Riverside Drive, she had been back and forth between the city and the West many times, having gradually developed her characteristic, semiabstract treatment of organic forms. Hence it was nature—the sky—that led her to the skyscraper: “I saw a sky shape near the Chatham Hotel where buildings were going up. It was the buildings that made this fine shape, so I sketched it and then painted it. This was in the early twenties and was my first New York painting.”72 What artists call “negative space”—the air around the object, the passage between the crook of the elbow and the ribs—was something immensely positive for O’Keeffe. But to describe New York’s sky she needed its buildings too; they display a reciprocal relation in this first work vital to the nighttime dynamic in all her subsequent images. Skyscrapers turn into sky shapers. In this painting, the sky shape emerges from a steeple that gives it a spread-legged torso as it starts on the lower left, reaches angularly up and over the central building, and then goes down to a narrowed knifepoint on the right. If we begin from the right side, the knifepoint seems to become the widening beam of a spotlight, shooting up to illuminate the more feebly lit territory of the night sky. With its jagged outer edges, formed by the impossibly overhanging corners and cornices of peripheral buildings in shadow, the sky shape echoes the outline of the central building, just as the full moon amid the clouds echoes the globe of the streetlight haloed in front of the building, near the center of the canvas. There are no viewers or participants in O’Keeffe’s urban night. She carries over the private intensity of her earlier visions to convey a direct, unmediated experience. There’s little point in seeing the tension between dominant streetlight and retiring moon, cushioned on sensuous clouds that recall O’Keeffe’s flowers, as a contest between the natural and the artificial—a contest that the natural has almost always lost since the Industrial Revolution. Rather, as parts of the same visual system that generates the sky-building outlines, both the natural and the artificial are emphasized by the central building. The light stands out against its bulk; the moon is literally underlined by its directive cornice. We could measure them against each other: the soft feminine heavens above, the hard dark masculine bricks below. But the streetlight is almost shaped like a heart, a moony heart of light circled by a glow that seems to want to turn into a sexy flower on its lamppost stem. Orbs become bulbs, lamp bulbs blossom. While Lowell feared she would “wound myself

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Figure 5.12. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), City Night, 1926. Oil on canvas, 48 ⫻ 30 in. (121.9 ⫻ 76.2 cm). Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Gift of funds from the Regis Corporation, Mr. and Mrs. W. John Driscoll, the Beim Foundation, the Larsen Fund, and by public subscription. © 2007 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society, New York

upon the sharp edges of the night,” O’Keeffe finds ways to make the edges less lacerating than alluring. The moon magnetizes the background again in City Night (1926). But this time it shines from the bottom of the sky shape described by three skyscrapers—two black and one white—that lower over the scene. The cool precisionism of the skyscrapers dwarf both viewer and moon, making this the starkest, most threatening, and least humanly engaging of O’Keeffe’s urban

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scenes. At first it seems as if the moon’s glow has cast the long, knifelike shadows against the clearly outlined bulk of darkened skyscrapers. But logically the illumination must work from foreground to background. It is artificial light that carves out the buildings, particularly the white one in the background. Ingeniously, the picture does not so much thrust upward with the towers toward the sky, as backward and downward toward the glowing circle of the moon. Every O’Keeffe night scene has a lighted circle to draw the eye, and here the moon, with no competition except a bit of a light to the lower left, is irresistible. Forced upward by this brightness, the tightly constricted sky shape seems to jump on either side to what must be corners of the dark towers. It splits them so that they stand, particularly the one on the right, like pairs of trousers no one is wearing. As do precisionists Sheeler, Louis Lozowick, or Preston Dickinson, O’Keeffe sets the geometry of art against a backdrop that has little room for the unastonishing productions of the natural world. But the emotional tidal pull of the moon, floating in a bit of sky-blue sea beneath the violet of the night, tugs the viewer back in time and space. Meanwhile, the fissured trunks of the black towers gesture upward inscrutably, the crisp-pressed pants of invisible men. After the flat, inhospitable rigors of City Night, O’Keeffe’s next nocturnal painting, Radiator Building, Night, New York, seems to welcome with open arms (color plate 21). At the turn of the century, Henry James had spoken of the city as “hugely hatted and feathered and flounced”—a perception sustained by the elaborate top of O’Keeffe’s central building. Unlike her husband, O’Keeffe does not shy away from presenting the tip of the building in its crowning glory. Raymond Hood’s American Radiator Building (1924) was designed with gold trim against dark walls so that at night its fanciful tracery would stand out.73 Flattened by spotlights, the building’s profile and paper cutout details fit perfectly with O’Keeffe’s posterlike style. The sweeping lines and architectural frills that look so fanciful in O’Keeffe’s painting are actually a fairly close rendition of how the owners of the building chose to present it, though the artist has substituted bluish white for gold at the building’s peak, preferring to reserve yellow-gold lights for the lower half of her picture. Beneath the red bar midway on the left, the colors warm up. A pair of triangular, Halloween pumpkin eyes (probably parted curtains) stare out on the far left. Yellow and orange window squares to either side of the central tower accent the silvery uniformity of its windows. O’Keeffe may have had a personal reason for singling out this cool tower that the lower lights try to warm up. For the glowing red bar of color on the left-hand side of Radiator Building becomes on closer inspection a neon sign that says “alfred stieglitz” in blazing capital letters—stamping the cityscape with the name of the most patriarchal figure in American modernism. Stieglitz hated to advertise, but O’Keeffe makes her majestic fashionplate building enter into a commercial relation with the empire of signs he

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disdained. The painting anticipates by a year Demuth’s poster-portrait homage to Williams in I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), and the Stieglitz sign forecasts Demuth’s “Bill” and “Carlo” set in lights. Demuth’s poster-portrait series, begun in 1923, included one of O’Keeffe, so the influence probably ran both ways. Picabia had earlier done a “portrait” of Stieglitz, “Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz” (1915), that showed a bellows-lensed camera. Hence the incarnation of modernism’s aging impresario as a skyscraper, a thoroughly modern form that he also lived in and photographed, had both a personal and artistic logic to it. There are other traces of Stieglitz’s achievement too. Though he used a camera rather than a brush, Stieglitz was as interested in the abstract forms of nature as either O’Keeffe or Demuth. The smoke cloud that undulatingly dissolves in the ray lines of searchlights on the right side of the canvas, opposite the red sign on the left, invokes Stieglitz’s pioneering series of over four hundred cloud photographs that he began in 1922 to explore the abstract possibilities of photographic art. Stieglitz called the images “Equivalents,” explaining that “shapes, as such, do not interest me unless they happen to be an outer equivalent of something already taking form within me.”74 Perhaps Radiator Building is O’Keeffe’s “equivalent” of her husband’s career, and the building is an idealized Stieglitz, not as how he saw himself, but as O’Keeffe would have liked to see him. Like its title, the building fairly radiates light and heat, and Stieglitz was the premier “radiator” of American modernism.75 Still, the painting may ultimately be more about the artist than about her husband. If the central, seemingly “feminized” Radiator Building steals center stage from the darkened bulk that sports his name in lights, what it shouts out, visually rather than verbally, is “Georgia O’Keeffe.” The painting embodies the female skyscraper city epitomized by Harriet Monroe: Oh, the city trails gold tassels From the skirts of her purple gown, And lifts up her commerce castles Like a jewel-studded crown.76

At the least, O’Keeffe with utter confidence creates a magisterial image, an urban hybrid, a half-artificial, half-organic composition that softens the imperiousness of masculine form with spotlit smoke and the ray lines of searchlights.77 The clouds of smoke turn into clouds in the sky, so that nocturnal urban civilization does not so much battle the heavens as find suitable replacements. Whose skyscraper is it? One answer might be that for O’Keeffe, painting such scenes was a conscious, contentious response (“they’ll have to look”) to male views of the city. It was she, rather than Stieglitz, who chose the upper floors of the Shelton Hotel as a place to live. “I had never lived up so high

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before,” she said, “and was so excited that I began talking about trying to paint New York. Of course, I was told that it was an impossible idea—even the men hadn’t done too well with it.” Bram Dijkstra points out that in the heavily gendered artistic climate of the 1920s, where abstraction and cubism were regarded as masculine while traditional ways of rendering natural forms were dismissed as effeminate, O’Keeffe fought an uphill battle to win recognition as a modern painter of organic form. Yet within the decade, breaking out of the gender boxes that Stieglitz and his circle had helped to construct, she achieved a balance: she integrated an “American” preference for full-bodied organic form with a “European” and “intellectual” concern for flattened pictorial space that treated mechanistic form abstractly. If she boldly, unapologetically painted “flowers as flowers” in defiance of how she knew most people would read them, the same is true of her skyscrapers.78 “From my teens on I had been told that I had crazy notions so I was accustomed to disagreement and went on with my idea of painting New York.” She later recalled that she sold her first picture of the city at night (New York with Moon) on the first day of her solo show in 1926: “No one ever objected to my painting New York after that.”79 For the men apparently, commercial success validated her attempt to see the city in her own way. Though “living up high” clearly inspired her skyscraper work, a night view out over the city from a high place does not show up in her painting until Radiator Building at Night. In some ways the most “feminine” of her night views, it blossoms into angel’s wings of light at the top of the tower. Here, O’Keeffe looks the tall building straight in the eye on equal terms. She allows for no perspectival distortion; it is as if the viewer were level with each story. The painting has become even more of a American icon than Hood’s skyscraper because of its subliminal message—a message that O’Keeffe would later make jump out of a cow’s skull. A mosaic of black and white, manly stone and frothy frill, the tower of the American Radiator Building stands proudly androgynous—patriotically signaling what the country has achieved. Between its blazing neon sign and its white smoke cloud, it delicately tapers into the night on sky-tinged, spotlit wings: red, white, and blue. Thus O’Keeffe found her own ways to revel in the glory of the skyscraper, even while she challenged the conventions of the artistic marketplace and the drive for self-promoting height. In New York, Night (1928–1929), she stressed the organic quality of the view from the window of her apartment at the Shelton, domesticating the Upper East Side by enveloping it in a warm, ember-toned darkness (color plate 22). “Lexington Avenue looked, in the night,” she wrote, “like a very tall thin bottle with colored things going up and down inside it.”80 City and nature seem melded, the city’s power tamed by the suggestion of the moving traffic as lightning bugs caught in a jar. The artist, again delighting in the eclectically styled top stories of a skyscraper, this time focuses on the pagoda-style Berkley residence hotel. Her scene

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almost exactly parallels that photographed by Stieglitz the previous year, in From the Shelton Looking North (1927). But O’Keeffe’s picture is cropped closer, and she uses the street, almost totally lost in Stieglitz’s daytime view, as she had hitherto used her sky shapes, as a vital, light-filled counterbalance to the dark outlines of the tall buildings. By turning the horizontal street into a vertical structure (“like a very tall thin bottle”) that dislocates the dominance of the buildings perpendicular to it, O’Keeffe requires us to rethink the city’s psychological landscape. Here she anticipates Abbott’s New York City at Night, which also uses the street as a strong diagonal element that unsettles the city’s rectilinear grid.81 In “The Jolly Corner,” James had presented the deserted family house as a symbol of a lost past in a changing city. Haunted by the ghost of what might have been, the protagonist realized how vital it was that he had escaped to Europe before modern New York crushed the fineness out of him. Two decades later, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe moved the house of American art to a tall tower whose shape and shimmer had become an image of the culture’s utmost yearnings, the only thing big enough to aspire to but too big to possess. Instigator and radiator of delocalized desire, at once inaccessible and fulfilling, the tower appeared finer and brighter than anything Europe had to offer. Its panoptic view was far enough removed from the hurly-burly of the street to promise a utopian reconciliation of the human, the inhuman, and the natural. It was a prescient Satan who took Jesus up to a high place to tempt him with all the worldly riches of the sight. Though mere mortals would not get the chance to enjoy that temptation for almost two millennia, they were sure to yield when they did. “I realize it’s unusual for an artist to want to work way up near the roof of a big hotel in the heart of a roaring city,” O’Keeffe told an interviewer in 1928, “but I think that’s just what the artist of today needs for stimulus. He has to have a place where he can behold the city as a unit before his eyes.”82 Even at fairly close range, looking up, O’Keeffe seems to preserve some of the detachment of the distant view. If she offers a Whitmanesque embrace of country and city, the people have vanished and the rough edges have been smoothed over. As we have seen, the skyscraper-smitten poets of the era hastened not to appear indifferent to the human price paid for the spectacle: “Ten thousand jewels flash out / When the darkness of night appears,” wrote Charles Hanson Towne in “The Lights,” but he imagined them as tears shed “through the terrible strife of the day.”83 Calmly exhibiting neither pity nor pride, O’Keeffe’s lights nevertheless signal human presence through the same mechanism as the honeycomb metaphor; that is, in her work the lights have to be read as organic. They are allied with, rather than against, the moon and clouds. She recontextualizes the prodigious prominences of American individualism by tying them into a pattern of interacting human and natural spaces, suggestive of community even in

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the absence of human figures. The whole radiant, light-checkered ensemble functions like a stage set where the buildings jostle one another as if they were characters competing for our attention. O’Keeffe told the same interviewer, “Today the city is something bigger, grander, more complex than ever before in history. There is a meaning in its strong warm grip we are all trying to grasp. And nothing can be gained by running away. I wouldn’t if I could.”84 A few years later she did turn away, pursuing other shapes in wider western spaces. But by then she had made the pictures necessary to convey her rich but unperplexed admiration of the city’s mystery. Her admission that “there is a meaning in its strong warm grip” was as close as she came to spelling out the city’s appeal. It’s a powerful embrace that seizes the artist. But the telling ambiguity of the next phrase—“we are all trying to grasp”—takes us straight back to the relaxed androgyny of her night paintings. Is it the meaning of the grip or the grip itself that we try to grasp in return? Is it a mental grasp or a physical one? Stieglitz had photographed vast rail yards under the title The Hand of Man. O’Keeffe’s grip doesn’t attach to any specific location. Her moons and towers, skies and streetlights, convey the warmth of the urban body; the artist’s touch—feminine or not—gives meaning enough.

Nobody to Say: Pinholes “The first time that I saw America, I mean New York,” wrote Henri Matisse in 1930, “at seven o’clock in the evening, this gold and black block in the night, reflected in the water, I was in complete ecstasy.”85 Matisse’s joy might have been due to his status as a visitor: he felt no compunction to wrestle with Manhattan in a work of art. For William Carlos Williams, however, based just over the Hudson River in Ridgewood, New Jersey, skyscrapers were mostly a misery. Williams loved Matisse, modernism, and modern art; he frequented the Stieglitz circle; he admired Duchamp; he even went so far as to declare the poem “a machine made of words.” But he never lusted after skyscrapers. In his poems the tall building seduces and torments, yet always on the way to disillusion, introspection, and selfconscious metaphorizing about women and poetry. In the 1920s and 1930s, Williams raised the loudest voice debunking the skyline mirage that promised so much and delivered so little. Nobody else was so honest about what he wanted from the glitter, or so aware of how being a sucker for lights helped him engineer his own disappointment. Every day and every night, Williams could see Manhattan’s new growth poking up over the low hills and the Jersey marshes. “A petal, colorless and without form / the oblong towers lie,” he begins “The Flower” (1929).86 “Towers lie” has a double meaning, since, as Williams says in another poem,

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the city is for him “a dream / toward which / we love— / at night / more / than a little / false.”87 The problem was, as often as the mirage shattered, it recomposed itself, its nocturnal love call importuning more than ever. In “The Flower,” the alien petal/towers impinge on his suburban world and, real or not, insist on becoming part of his life: It is the city, approaching over the river. Nothing of it is mine, but visibly for all that it is a petal of a flower—my own.88

O’Keeffe gets all the press about flower-towers, but it was Williams who kept engendering the city in specific, conventional ways, constantly coming back to bald floral metaphors in hopes of retreading them into something with artistic traction. “One man like a city—but innumerable women, each like a flower,” reads the central formulation in his late epic, Paterson (1948–1963).89 By constantly shifting and undercutting his own position, reacting with alternating desire and disillusion, Williams successfully peeled back the starry backdrop to show how the night’s images arise to consume the beholder. In several poems, mostly written in the early 1920s, Williams explicitly addressed the sexual doubleness that O’Keeffe intimated. While Williams’s “The Great Figure” (1921) has become his best-known nocturnal image of New York, its terse description of a hurtling fire truck is not typical. Confronted with the city’s otherness, Williams almost invariably spoke of it as organic, human, and sexually active. Like O’Keeffe and Bishop, Williams rejected the notion of the skyline as a strictly masculine presence, comparing the tall towers to enticing female flowers that distress the male poet: they are unobtainable, a test of manhood he cannot meet. In “To a Friend Concerning Several Ladies” (1921), the unapproachable city symbolizes the sexual opportunities that the poet regretfully dare not take up as well as the poem, almost synonymous with sex, that he yearns to write: I have watched the city from a distance at night and wondered why I wrote no poem. Come! yes, the city is ablaze for you and you stand and look at it.

Here Williams targets both the apparently individual quality of the appeal (“the city is ablaze for you”) and the helpless inertia before it. Afraid to

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act, afraid not to, unsure whether the risk is worth it (“Must I go home filled / with a bad poem?), he hears women respond, “Who can answer these things till he has tried?” The lights and women seem to say “you are a child, / oh, a sweet one, ready to play / but I will make a man of you and / with love on his shoulder—!” But unable to muster his friend Pound’s confidence—pulling down the skyscraper stars to his will—Williams concludes his poem on self-induced paralysis by comparing himself to a lifeless, sterile version of the towers by the Hudson: reeds by a dike that “move on their stalks and rattle dryly.”90 In “Flight to the City” (1923), Williams again regards the city as a teasing mix of the organic and the artificial, attraction and disillusion, impelling him to romantic action. But with the half-fractured syntax and immense, colloquial compression that mark Williams’s contribution to modern poetry, he makes his vision resonate on several levels: personal, literary, social, religious, and cosmic all at once. This is the whole poem, probably the greatest skyscraper poem of the era: The Easter stars are shining above lights that are flashing— coronal of the black— Nobody to say it— Nobody to say: pinholes Thither I would carry her among the lights— Burst it asunder break through to the fifty words necessary— a crown for her head with castles upon it, skyscrapers filled with nut-chocolates— dovetame winds— stars of tinsel from the great end of a cornucopia of glass.91

With the last image we arrive at one of the master metaphors of modernity. Yet as T. S. Eliot said of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, what makes this poem so remarkable is “not the quality of the faith, but the quality of the doubt.”

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Summoned like Dante by Easter stars, drawn like a modern man by flashing lights, the poet resists the allure of the city heavens: “Nobody / to say it—Nobody to say: pinholes.” No one will help him expose the magic of the stars as mere pinholes in the fabric of the night, and so he yields to the promise of ecstasy with his Beatrice—“Thither I would carry her / among the lights”—taking perhaps an angel-assisted flight to the heavenly city. There he hopes, as usual, to find fulfillment through both exposure of the illusion (“burst it asunder”) and a poetic reward that is inseparable for him from romantic bliss: “the fifty words / necessary.” In the literally crowning moment, Williams anticipates O’Keeffe’s blossoming buildings with the fantasy of offering his beloved “a crown for her head with / castles upon it, skyscrapers / filled with nut-chocolates” that pour out “from the great end of a cornucopia / of glass.” The poet longs to thrust aside the city’s romance in order to take concrete action as a lover and writer, even as he recognizes that the “pinholes” have inspired him in the first place. Despite his mounting awareness that his goal is illusory, that he is the only one who will dare to say that the stars are just “tinsel,” the poet cannot prevent himself from participating in the myth. The final image, “a cornucopia / of glass,” suggests glass fruit—beauty maybe, but also perhaps deception and disappointment for the hungry lover. On the cornucopia’s transparent ambiguity the whole poem balances, reassuring and troubling at the same time. For though we hardly notice it at first, the poem is a secular journey toward a possible resurrection of faith and hope in the city lights. The Easter stars and their coronal twinkling initiate a backward sequence of allusions to key Christian events: the bursting asunder of city/tomb, the crown of chocolates/thorns, tinsel/Bethlehem stars, “dovetame winds” of the poetic/holy spirit, and so back to the fruit of the fall and the mystery of creation itself, something from nothing, a cornucopia of glass. In the intermittently divine comedy of modern life, the lighted city looms as if waiting to be known and possessed, like a woman or a poem, but it’s a maddeningly intangible entity that constantly eludes the poet’s increasing desire for consummation. And yet the fantasy itself rewards. If “Flight to the City” had been able to “break through” toughmindedly to “the fifty words / necessary”—to make a poem to crown the poet’s beloved—it would stop with the word “skyscrapers.” There would be no nut-chocolates. “The Flower” is Williams’s fullest statement of the woman/flower/city equation that aroused him as he looked across the river toward the lights of Manhattan. Here, if the city is even more explicitly “a petal of a flower—my own,” it is a bloom he cannot pluck. Again it represents the poetic potency he lacks, the artificial he cannot naturalize: “For years I’ve been tormented by / that miracle, the buildings all lit up— / unable to say anything much to the point.”92 Because the miracle is not his, the poet admits, his silent

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frustration represents a typically male response to other male power. The flower/city that he desires is a naked woman, about 38, just out of bed, worth looking at both for her body and her mind and what she has seen and done. She it was put me straight about the city when I said, It makes me ill to see them run up a new bridge like that in a few months and I can’t find time even to get a book written. They have the power, that’s all, she replied. That’s what you all want. If you can’t get it, acknowledge at least what it is.

Although New York may be surging with masculine energy, not all men can share it. Recognizing the truth of what the woman says, the poet chastises himself for being “foolish to rhapsodize over / strings of lights, the blaze of a power // in which I have not the least part.”93 Sympathizing with the naked woman who represents another kind of power, the city as location of sexual desire, Williams implies that the glittering lights delude and disadvantage both men and women; they shift the attention from connection to possession; they tease rather than satisfy. And yet the “blaze of [electric] power” does spark his emotion and energize his poem. He resolves the dilemma by resolving to turn himself into a blaze of productive action: “I plan one thing,” he says, “when I am fresh, in the morning, when / my mind is clear and burning—to write.”94 Suspicious as he was of night’s charms, Williams warned in “The Black Winds” (1923) that the mind must not “slip / into the old mode” of opposing light and darkness. It must not believe that Hate is of the night and the day of flowers and rocks. Nothing is gained by saying the night breeds murder—It is the classical mistake.95

If Williams sounds like Poe’s Dupin trying to solve a crime of passion, it is because he wants to upset “classical” dichotomies regarding what is possible emotionally and poetically. In “Light Becomes Darkness” (1923), Williams

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discovered the visual code by which he would love and write: “woe is translatable / to joy if light becomes / darkness and darkness / light, as it will.”96 Attempting to expose the illusions of the night city, Williams translated their light-induced woe into poetic joy, by revealing light as a thing of emotional deception and darkness—at least for him. While he could not shake the notion of the skyscraper city as a woman, he was ready to “acknowledge / at least what it is.” O’Keeffe lived up among the towers he saw sparkling from out in the sticks, perhaps confirming for Williams the undoing of another “classical mistake.” The old power-hungry man-city was now a woman-city; all the flowers had gone to town. Nature was artifice after all, as the reed-dry poet could feel. Having understood this, the poet could rejoice not “in a string of lights” but in what their rejection showed; agony and insight were helping poetry turn “darkness / light, as it will.”

Lamé with Lights Hang-over moons, wane, wane! —Elizabeth Bishop, Love Lies Sleeping 97

For Elizabeth Bishop as for Williams, the night city intoxicated, but it was a distressing sight close up and sober. Irresistibly drawn into the staging of their own passions, both poets tried to locate the source of the disturbance, to figure out whether it was the urban lights or the poet’s need to manufacture moonshine that kept them up at night. They made a conscious decision to examine their own roles as purveyors of poetic moonlight in a skeptical modern culture of which New York is the supreme symbol. As city and self, mind, body, and metropolis seem to merge, New York’s shimmering surfaces become ever more literally a psychological landscape where sexual metaphors reveal the poet’s anxieties about artistic control and fecundity. Bishop’s contemplation of the city’s elusive sexuality produces not a dialogue of sky and stone, moon and bulb, as in O’Keeffe, but coolly phrased fables of tortured frustration. Her nocturnal poems, from the early “Imber Nocturnus” (1928) to “Night City” (1976), one of her last, hover between fantasy and insomnia, between the seductive, transforming quality of city lights and the human anguish that they provoke. Despite their ironic tinge, Bishop’s nocturnal poems possess something of the haunting loneliness of Edward Hopper’s urban scenes. In “The Man-Moth” (1946), she uses the pretext of a newspaper misprint (“Man-Moth” for “mammoth”) to create a mysterious creature who represents both the condition of modern urban man and the interior world of the artist seeking inspiration. The Man-Moth, a light-activated relative of the flâneur, embodies practically

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all the figures who have created nocturnal urban art. In particular he seems to be a graduate of O. Henry’s immolation institute: “The electric lights of Broadway were glowing—calling moths . . . to come in and attend the singeing school.”98 He lives to investigate and bathe in the nocturnal glare, though unsure of its provenance. When the Man-Moth visits the surface of the city under whose sidewalks he lives, the light of the moon draws him relentlessly up the sides of buildings. His shadow drags “like a photographer’s cloth” behind him, emblem both of the images he longs to make and of his own insubstantiality. He is a ghostly print struggling to emerge into the light. Like Williams seeing the stars as pinholes, he “thinks the moon is a small round hole at the top of the sky.” He continually makes a vain effort to gain the illumination that might come from poking “his small head through that round clean opening.” But unable to reach or discredit this radiance, “he returns / to the pale subways of cement he calls home,” dormant until the night lights draw him helplessly forth again.99 Bishop reconfigured the troubling nocturnal appeal of the city in “Late Air” (1946). Instead of attracting a human moth, the lights that illuminate the vertical axis of the city’s desires signal the inaccessible nesting place of an immortal bird. “Late Air” begins by conjuring up the radio waves that “distribute all their love-songs / over the dew-wet lawns” of the city. But Bishop rejects the familiar self-deceptions of urban longing in favor of something rarer, purified by fire: —on the Navy Yard aerial I find better witnesses for love on summer nights. Five remote red lights keep their nests there; Phoenixes burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb.100

High up above the dry docks of the Brooklyn Navy Yard nests the phoenix, male and female symbol combined, loving without partners and reproducing without sex, far removed from the “dew” of mere human lovemaking. The phoenix of mythology is unique; it dies in fire in order to be reborn from ashes. But Bishop’s New York in its fabled plenitude offers five of the solitary birds, manifesting the vast unquenched desire of the city. Bishop’s finest creature-image of the metropolis appears in “From the Country to the City” (1937). As if again building on the words of O. Henry, for whom the glowing city reaches out into the dark hinterland, “calling moths from miles, from leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around,” Bishop personifies the metropolitan region as a giant harlequin stretched out in the night. The stripes on his trousers are roads, and past “the long, long legs, / league-boots of land,” and past “his tough trunk, dressed

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in tatters, scribbled over with nonsensical signs,” the poet drives, straight to the center. The poet’s itinerary along the length of the harlequin follows the trajectory of cars heading from suburb to city described in Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer: “The cars space out, flow in a long ribbon along the ghostly cement road, between blackwindowed blocks of concrete factories, between bright slabbed colors of signboards towards the glow over the city that stands up incredibly into the night sky like the glow of a great lit tent, like the yellow tall bulk of a tentshow.”101 And the star of the skyscraper tent show is the harlequin, time-honored lover and buffoon of the commedia dell’arte. In Bishop’s poem he plays all the roles. His urban body is male; his motley signposted torso is an indecipherable text. His head, however, shines through his hat. “Lamé with lights,” suggesting a female consciousness in an evening gown, it reveals the familiar trappings of tarted-up skyscrapers, “jeweled works at work at intermeshing crowns.”102 And sure enough, As we approach, wickedest clown, your heart and head, we can see that glittering arrangement of your brain consists, now, of mermaid-like, seated, ravishing sirens, each waving her hand-mirror.

The crowned woman-city arises once more inside the male metropolis. The “wickedest clown” has like the Wizard of Oz been sending deceptive projections of his oversized head, “throned in ‘fantastic triumph.’” Pulling back the curtain and literalizing the city’s siren call, Bishop reveals a bunch of beached mermaids, “ravishing sirens” who compose the harlequin’s brain. They signal tantalizingly to the male body with the mirrors in which, legend goes, they usually admire themselves. The harlequin’s dreams become their siren song, “vibrations of the tuning-fork / you hold and strike / against the mirror frames,” vibrations sent “for miles . . . / out countrywards.” But ultimately the city’s allure, the narcissistic self-arousal of its own rural extremities, generates an unbearable tension between its feminine and masculine attributes. Mind and body can communicate only through the poet’s mediation, which concludes the poem by registering a desperate plea to cease this fatal beckoning: “We bring a message from the long black length of body: / ‘Subside,’ it begs and begs.”103 Samuel H. Gottscho got a glimpse of the harlequin when he photographed View North from the RCA Building (1933).104 The long lines of lights stretching out on either side of Central Park seem partly legs, partly the outlines of a body whose ragged motley breaks into anthropomorphic curves. Taking his picture from inside the harlequin’s brain, up high enough to become a man-moth with his photographer’s cloth, Gottscho captured

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Figure 5.13. Samuel H. Gottscho, View North from the RCA Building, 1933. The Museum of the City of New York. Gottscho-Schleisner Collection [34.102.3]

a mirror image of what the sirens saw. His print sends it out to the world, showing “the long black length of body” its own distant portrait. From the 1910s through the 1930s, the seemingly universal impulse to sexualize the nocturnal landscape repeatedly took the form of eager, agonized journeys toward the elusive body of the city—and the equally elusive bodies of its inhabitants. As wary as Williams, Bishop countered with the implication that the poet’s mission is never to arrive, but to study the outlandish, semihuman night forms—the man-moth, the light-phoenix, the siren-harlequin—that one might meet along the way. In her poems, she does not so much gender the city as try to estrange and neutralize its flagrant, frighteningly irresistible appeal. Yet even then, “lamé with lights,” the dazzled mind has no choice but to regard the city’s nocturnal body through seductive metaphors of its own makin.

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chapter

SIX

We had run through a lot, though we had retained an almost theatrical innocence by preferring the role of the observed to that of the observer. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City

Staging the Night: Theater, Voyeurism, Violence Thus far, this has been a book about looking at the city at night—seeing it as a Babylon, a nocturne, a dark continent, an object of fantasy. Now it is time to look at looking itself. Since the advent of artificial light, images of the city have been training people to apprehend the night in new ways—to make or refuse moral judgments, to enlarge their sense of the beautiful, to accept or resist their roles as consumers of light and the fantasies of control or romance that light opens up. But increasing familiarity with the nocturnal spectacle has also generated renewed interest in the age-old metaphor of the city as theater, spurring an investigation of the place of the viewer within the sequence of looking. The illuminated city is par excellence a place to watch people and to watch the watchers. In New York the theatrical conceit was freely adopted from the start. The city’s rise to prominence coincided with the period in which gaslight, arc light, and electric light reorganized the night to dramatic effect. Hence, while Shakespeare might have longed for “a muse of fire” to glorify his stage, New Yorkers could bask in the glow of the latest patented gas and electric models as they blazoned their fame on the night. With Drummond lights outside and flaring gas within, by the 1840s art galleries and auction houses, saloons, hotels, and department stores were proving how nocturnal visibility and economic viability went hand in hand. Electric light, which had its origins in the theater, came into lavish commercial supply by the mid-1880s.1 From Castle Garden to Madison Square Garden, New York’s showplaces used the latest technology to light the stage, the lobby, the street, and the signs out front. By the later nineteenth century, even New York’s construction was lit up like a theatrical event. The around-the-clock digging to create the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge was carried on through the midnight hours using limelights, the same kind of spotlights

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that have become synonymous with a stage production. Night, once a void that could be filled only by the imagination, became by the twentieth century a privileged space of spectatorship. Electrified New York presented itself as a ready-made aesthetic space, a living theater. Like spotlights, streetlamps created pools of light to direct the viewer’s gaze; like stage sets, lit interiors framed glimpses of intimate life for strangers watching in the dark. Merging them into one another, paths of light connected formerly separate private and public spaces. The streets and apartments, the shops, restaurants, and parks served as an arena where each urbanite could become both audience and actor. And as the architectural term “curtain wall” suggests, buildings opened like theaters, “hanging there,” as Frank Lloyd Wright remarked, “against the backdrop of a black night sky to dazzle, entertain, and amaze.”2 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that as a midwesterner he was so dazzled by the city’s renowned display, “the New York that offered itself for inspection,” that “no actuality could live up to my conception of New York’s splendor.” In the making of its own myth, Manhattan’s glamour recapitulated the glory of its European ancestors. As if in an English fable or a novel by Balzac, Fitzgerald recalled, “I was Dick Whittington up from the country gaping at the trained bears, or a youth of the Midi dazzled by the boulevards of Paris.” It was the spectacle that conquered Fitzgerald, like so many others: “I had come only to stare at the show, though the designers of the Woolworth Building and the Chariot Race Sign . . . could ask for no more appreciative spectator, for I took the style and glitter of New York even above its own valuation.”3 Yet as Williams and Bishop had insisted, there were moth holes in the fabric of the illusion. In the 1930s and 1940s, as skyscraper fantasy lost its freshness, self-consciousness about the process of nocturnal image-making grew, along with doubts about the power of light. By the time Fitzgerald came to write “My Lost City,” in July 1932, he was disenchanted: “I have lost my splendid mirage.”4 As New York’s fraying self-image provoked revaluation, those loyal to the city once again remolded the mystique of New York’s nights. A hungry-eyed, tarnished burg of grit and glass took shape beneath the indifferent skyline; flashy New York shaded at the edges into a noir town of irony and disillusion. Exploiting New York’s perennial sense of its own theatricality, artists and writers focused on a strengthening and disturbing undercurrent: the moral, psychological, and physical risks of spectatorship.5 Shifting their emphasis from the glamorous vista to the closerange visual encounter, from buildings to people, they pursued the ancient association between darkness and danger, on the one hand, and darkness and sex, on the other. But they did so by considering a further element: how unreliably darkness or light furnished protection and legitimacy to the witnesses and actors in any scene. As the century unfolded, the act of looking became more perilous. The complex visual web of seeing and being seen—and being

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seen to see—in violent and erotic contexts wrapped the viewer and maker of the night image in a skein of aesthetic and moral issues that entangled visual pleasure with guilt and oppression, callousness and complicity, even as darkness and concealment gave way to self-conscious performance. The self-reflexivity of nocturnal looking in this period may be related to the slowdown of change in lighting technology and in the physical appearance of the city.6 From the 1930s to the 1960s, there were momentous national and world events to which New York was hardly immune. But on the local level, the Depression and World War II caused the nocturnal city to hold fairly steady: without the sweeping changes in illumination, nightlife, and the skyline witnessed from 1880 to 1930, the most striking development in the look of the night was the fading of its momentum, as novelties aged, sensibilities grew jaded, and the bright lights browned out during the war. What was new was the lack of newness; a sense of seedy stagnation, of empty loneliness, undercut the city’s brashness and energy with irony and fatigue.7 In the absence of new sights, people turned to look at each other, seeking sensation on the human level, scrutinizing the bits of sex, death, violence, and suffering that fell into the public purview. Appropriately, what loomed on the horizon of novelty at the end of this era were exhibitionist glass boxes: the tall Sixth Avenue variety confirmed the staginess of business as well as private life, while the small ones made by General Electric and Motorola siphoned off nightlife even as they glamorized Manhattan as the source of any human drama worth televising. Those who created or inhabited texts and images in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s mostly seemed to reject the premises of the meditative nocturne. As in the time of Poe and Foster, the night city still had to be traversed and experienced—this time not to see it but to be seen as part of it. Too self-conscious to sustain earlier ideas about night’s morality or beauty, New Yorkers appeared haunted by Walt Whitman’s words from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: “Who knows . . . but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”8 Even if visibility meant vulnerability in a city of visual predators, it authenticated identity: I see or am seen, therefore I am. While the pervasive lights and cameras taught that no one could escape visual scrutiny, they also suggested how little could be learned from the spectacle. Even as the night image teaches people to accept their participation in a well-lit specular network, it also asks them to question whether light and looking reveal anything beyond their own coercive functions. Flooding the market, light announces its own cheapness, its own weakness as an instrument of revelation or knowledge. Subject and object sink toward a light-drowned invisibility. Voyeurs, actors, lovers, rubberneckers, corpses, victims: night images repeatedly show people looking past, around, or through each other. The broken visual circuit is a recurrent emblem of the New York night from the 1930s to the 1960s.

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The fractured, frustrated dynamics of staging the night begin with William Dean Howells and O. Henry, who were among the first to explore how electricity and the El train turned New York into a moving theater.9 More self-consciously, John Sloan and Henry James revealed how these often-sexual visual pleasures were related to seeing without being seen. Going a step further, Edward Hopper cast the viewer as voyeur and his provokingly motionless characters as gorgonized victims of city life; our sight has turned them to stone. In the corpse- and crowd-filled photographs of Weegee, the quest for specular immobilization reaches a sensationalized extreme, proving that while the dead have a certain gestural eloquence, only the living can look. For Ralph Ellison, the lack of visibility was an unequally dangerous liability. The electric power of the whole city is barely enough to bring Ellison’s African American hero on to the stage of white consciousness. In his quest for illumination, in his effort to be seen as an individual, Ellison’s invisible man is not so much an aberration as perhaps the most typical nocturnal character of all. Embodying the conflicted mythology of nocturnal New York, he confronts the failure of light even as he hopes that more of it will somehow brighten his life and lend him tangible form. Yet there may well be a limit to what art and light can achieve; the night stage may finally collapse under the murderous onslaught of reality. In William Carlos Williams’s aptly named car-crash poem “The Last Turn,” body and city brutally swerve out of artistic control.

Better Than the Theater: Spectacle and Spying in Motion The Rubberneck Auto was about ready to start. . . . The sidewalk was blockaded with sightseers who had gathered to stare at sightseers, justifying the natural law that every creature on earth is preyed upon by some other creature. —O. Henry, Sisters of the Golden Circle10

Visual predation is an old story, and so is retribution for it. The Greek myths of Actaeon and Diana or Cupid and Psyche, the biblical story of Susanna in the bath, Herodotus’s “history” of Gyges spying on the Persian queen—all treat the dangers of seeing too much, and the often-fatal consequences of being seen to see. With the growth of the modern city, professional onlookers arrived to take the risks and pass on the mediated thrills of forbidden sights. As described in chapter 1, the flâneur and his alter ego, the devil Asmodeus, opened up the visual delights of the night world to stay-at-home customers. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new developments further democratized the hitherto privileged act of urban spectatorship. The elevated train, the omnibus, the

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streetcar, the automobile, and the tour bus—O. Henry’s “Rubberneck Auto”—made it possible for large numbers of people to see the city and its inhabitants from unexpected and mobile points of view. The heyday of the sophisticated strolling observer was coming to an end. Protected by the speed and anonymity of public transport, almost anyone could find something rare, wonderful, or supposedly secret to consume by the eyeful. The city seemed to have become a theater of real life, where the audience moved effortlessly away from any danger. And yet, as O. Henry noted, now there were sightseers to watch the sightseers, forcing new roles, new self-consciousness, about the predatory laws of human visual dynamics. Two of O. Henry’s stories convey the pitfalls of nocturnal perception; at the same time, they document the demise of the flâneur. In “Lost on Dress Parade” (1906), a young working-class hero saves his money carefully so that once every ten weeks he can rent clothes to go out on the town: “Up Broadway Chandler moved with the vespertine dress parade. For this evening he was an exhibit as well as a gazer. . . . [H]e was a true son of the great city of razzle-dazzle, and to him one evening in the limelight made up for many dark ones.” But when he meets a beautiful rich girl in disguise who is looking for some authenticity in her life, he can’t stop pretending: “He was on Broadway, surrounded by pomp and style, and there were eyes to look at him.”11 Unable to act naturally, he lets the poor-looking rich girl get away. The poor are drawn to illusion, the rich to reality, but those who put on a show cannot see through the shows of others. While Broadway has always been a self-conscious production, the stroller who once unmasked its pretensions is now exposed as not “real” enough himself. The apparent flâneur is a fake. O. Henry drove the last stake in the heart of the nocturnal flâneur in “Man About Town” (1906), his send-up of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.” If Poe’s story had questioned the limits of urban vision, O. Henry takes his cue from Poe’s use of the word “type” to question the very existence of a man who spends his time bathing in the crowd. He wants to meet, the narrator says, “the character known as A Man About Town. He was more vague in my mind than a type should be.” So the narrator searches New York at night for his quarry: “By this time the 3126 electric lights on the Rialto were alight. People passed, but they held me not. . . . Diners, heimgangers, shop-girls, confidence men, panhandlers, actors, highwaymen, millionaires, and outlanders hurried, skipped, strolled, sneaked, swaggered, and scurried by me; but I took no note of them. I knew them all; I had read their hearts; they had served.” Having thus condensed the flâneur’s obligatory reading of the crowd, the narrator wonders if his literary prey is not part of the printing process: “He was a type, and to drop him would be an error—a typograph—but no! let us continue.”12

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Determined to “meet one face to face,” the narrator rushes forth, smack into the law of visual retribution: I left the hotel and walked down Broadway. The pursuit of my type gave a pleasant savor of life and interest to the air I breathed. I was glad to be in a city so great, so complex and diversified. . . . I strolled along with my heart expanding at the thought that I was a citizen of great Gotham, a sharer in its magnificence and pleasures, a partaker in its . . . .

Musing thus, the narrator is blindsided by a motor car and wakes up in the hospital, where a doctor hands him the morning newspaper by way of explanation. An article on his accident concludes: “—Bellevue Hospital, where it was said that his injuries were not serious. He appeared to be a typical Man About Town.”13 Like Poe, O. Henry plays with the conventions of the magazine story genre, and like Poe he concludes by revealing the mysterious urban other as a version of oneself. But here the self-identification is even stronger. In the broken visual circuitry of New York, he comes “face to face” with himself and the limits of his vision only by reading the morning paper; only through the typeset words can the fictitious narrator recognize himself as the urban type he sought. If the pedestrian flâneur had become dangerously outmoded, the elevated train created new legions of secure armchair observers who did not even have to read in order to look into the lives of their neighbors. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells attempts to stage-manage the relation between the theatrical lights and intimate sights of the nocturnal city, just as they are coming to consciousness. For in addition to singling out the “superb spectacle” of nocturnal illumination, A Hazard also prefigures the work of subsequent artists and writers who explore how the interiors of buildings, as if by stage lighting, become an intriguingly accessible part of the outdoor scene. Their night ride on the Third Avenue El affords Mr. and Mrs. March fascinating glimpses of the private lives of strangers, apartment dwellers unaware of their gaze: She now said that . . . the fleeting intimacy you formed with people in second- and third-floor interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect of good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said it was better than the theater, of which it reminded him, to see those people through their windows: a family party of workfolk at a late tea, some of the men in their shirt sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together. What suggestion! What drama! What infinite interest!14

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What makes a ride on the El “better than the theater” is its combination of motion and proximity. It’s almost an early form of the movies: the lighted windows flicker past in a tantalizing montage, while the dramatic-seeming tableaux have the advantage of being real, not staged. The proprieties of ordinary social life—not to mention the class barriers between spectators and spectacle—would never permit such access. Obligingly, the darkness and the speed of the train preserve the Marches’ own privacy, much as if they really were at the theater. The visual traffic flows only one way. Their analysis seems gender-coded: she connects the elevated train to an intimacy of relations and a “domestic intensity” missing from high society, while he stresses the more public and distanced analogy to a theatrical performance. Collectively, their metaphors enable the middle-class Marches to feel socially irreproachable about studying “those people,” the “workfolk,” in the nonprivacy of their own homes. “Fleeting intimacy” in the midst of “perfect repose,” emotional adventure without engagement: in 1890, the new combination of brightly lit interiors and elevated trains had produced a mobile theater of domestic life. The Marches’ cocooned encounter with the “real” life of the city reflects in microcosm Howells’s own attempt to maintain artistic control over threatening urban material in A Hazard—the rise of socialism, organized labor, and the nouveau riche. Howells takes pains to show that riding the train at night is an innocent pleasure for a woman; even his language hints at the eroticism of the nighttime city. It’s what one might see through those windows that give them such “suggestion” and “infinite interest!” The passage partially delivers on its underlying promise of a titillating sight by spying “a girl and her lover,” but Howells then chastely turns the pair back toward the public: “leaning over the window-sill together.” Howells self-consciously frames nighttime urban scenes as if they are already works of art, already staged and spotlit: “What drama!” An illusion of theatrical artifice contains the class differences and sexual mysteries that the nocturnal city might have exposed.

Night Windows While there may be a nearly infinite number of variations on the act of seeing in a city, the basic points of view and directions of sight are fairly few. We see into or out of public or private spaces. Complexities arise when the nature of the spaces—or how people regard their relation to them—becomes mixed. One can look, as on the elevated train, from public space into private space—a dynamic that suggests that the private is not so private after all, and hence justifiably open to inspection. Or one can look from a private space into another private space (which despite their presence on the El, is partly the impression that Howells’s characters seem to have). These

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Figure 6.1. John Sloan, Night Windows, 1910. Etching, 5 ¼ ⫻ 7 in. (13.3 ⫻ 17.8 cm). Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy of Kraushaar Galleries, New York

are ways of looking in and may carry something morally suspect about them. Here writers, artists, or photographers lead their audiences along with them, implicating them in their visual quests. Then there are the ways of looking out. One can in a public space look at other people or things in the same public arena. Theoretically irreproachable, this form of visual behavior might be summed up in the old adage “a cat may look at a king.” Or a woman may stare at a skyscraper. But such looking can also lead to visual confrontation. This public dynamic—the look passing from train riders to window-crowding tenement dwellers and back again, or from one rider to another—is quietly suppressed by Howells. Finally, there is looking from a private space into a public one, which carries with it privilege and possibly furtiveness. This way of seeing is closest to the theatrical. And in fact, this is mostly how Howells’s characters behave, treating the El as a front-row seat at a show put on for their benefit. In his etching Night Windows (1910), John Sloan brings to the fore the prurient interest implied by Howells, inviting viewers to reflect on the act of framing and consuming nocturnal sights. A half-undressed young woman stands at a lighted back window of a tenement, at the center of the scene; what looks like a disheveled bed appears through the half-curtained window next to her. At the top left edge of his print Sloan depicts the shadowy

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figure of a man on the roof of the neighboring building, smoking his pipe and looking toward the woman. Below the man on the rooftop, at another lighted window, a stouter woman with a child howling behind her hangs out laundry. One night window offers the man sexual fantasy, the other domestic drudgery. At first glance this seems a classic representation of the power of the male gaze: the Peeping Tom gains specular knowledge of a woman who can’t see him; in his lofty position he stands for the artist looking down on the city, boldly or surreptitiously taking his visual pleasure. Sloan himself spoke of keeping “night vigils at the back window” of his Twenty-third Street studio until “rewarded by motifs”—thus making voyeurism into something of an artistic religion. New York satisfied what he called “the peeper instinct,” since he could always find someone unaware of being watched.15 While voyeurism is a term casually applied to almost any situation where people take visual pleasure, in Night Windows we appear to get the real thing: surveillance by a concealed observer—concealed at least from his object— who gets a sexual thrill from what he sees. Sloan’s diary for December 12, 1910, mentions starting work that night on an etching of “a girl in deshabille at a window and a man on the roof smoking his pipe and taking in the charms while at a window below him his wife is busy hanging out his washed linen.”16 Though the voyeur may not know what her husband is up to, she is putting his underwear as much on display as that of the young woman undressing. The tables have been humorously turned, for the complacent peeper has no idea that his own “deshabille” is also up for visual consumption. Sloan’s joke on the voyeur underlines the fact that to be visible is to be vulnerable, while to remain unseen is to have power. But the audience of the picture is not exempt from the joke. By the time we see the voyeur we have already imitated him. The picture gradually leads us from its triple focal points—girl/man/wife—to consider the role of the viewer both in the picture and outside it. Of course, as a self-confessed voyeur, one who smoked a pipe, the artist implicates himself in the process. Sloan seems to want to highlight the time-honored role of the artist as accessory to the voyeuristic eye, while at the same time destabilizing the satisfaction that the artist and the viewer hope to get out of it. His picture works on several, roughly sequential levels. First, it calls attention to sexual curiosity, and especially a masculine desire for a narrative of sexual discovery (How much undressing will the girl do by the window? Will she turn out the light or discover our presence before she is naked?). Second, it challenges the visual power of the voyeur by exposing him to the gaze of others (an exposure rendered ignominiously symmetrical by the display of his underwear). Third, it undermines the distance between the artist and the viewer, implicating both in the compromising quest for voyeuristic power. And fourth, it projects the narrative outward toward the interaction

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between art and audience. The artist has constructed the scene in such a way that he won’t let us forget that he knows we are here, just as we know that he was there. Such nighttime urban scenes question the security of our distinctions between seer and seen, art and life. The impossibility of passivity raises a final question: Does the girl in deshabille want to be seen? Perhaps she is already an active partner in the drama. Some people make it their business to be seen. Sloan’s etching The Girl and the Beggar (1910), with its theme “best foot forward,” shows a bare-legged prostitute and a peg-legged mendicant vying for customers by displaying their wares on Twenty-third Street one winter’s night. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald apparently believed that they “had retained an almost theatrical innocence by preferring the role of the observed to that of the observer.”17 Perhaps Sloan’s “girl” holds on to her youthful innocence— in comparison with the matronly knowledge of the laundering wife and mother—precisely by letting herself be seen as if she were unconscious that anyone would notice or care about her “charms.” Despite Fitzgerald’s assertion, theatrical players are hardly any more innocent than their audiences; they, like prostitutes and many less professional lovers, understand sexuality as performance, in terms of the gestures that signify authenticity and emotion, innocence and experience. Meanwhile the audience pays to be fooled, pretending to be concealed, acting out the thrill of seeing without being seen. Howells and Sloan build their urban dramas on implied sexual narratives, self-consciously framed. But for Henry James, sexual identity and artistic control are more uncertain. A provocative passage in The American Scene (1907) describes his late-night tour of the Lower East Side and provides the grand finale to James’s assessment of New York, rhapsodically avowing that the city’s keynote is its pronounced although elusive sexuality. Parading his private sensation of a public space, James turns the act of looking into an act of creation; he imagines far more than he sees. James’s narrator experiences New York as a gala performance. He moves “by stages artfully inspired” through the East Side, until he arrives at “the splendid crown of the evening,” a terraced garden restaurant he describes as “a pavilion of light and sound” that “blazing into the stillness of the small hours, dazzled one with the show of its copious and various activity.” Stunned by the spectacle, he watches from “a recess like a privileged opera-box at a bal masqué,” wondering, “Who were all the people, and whence and whither and why, in the good New York small hours?” In the very act of appearing to yield to this outlandish city, James’s gazer guards his distance, as secure in his niche as the Marches were on the train. Conscious of his role as uptown slummer looking for “a new note,” he regrets that one place he visited has been “making eyes, so to speak, at the larger, the up-town public,” to the point where it “was the haunt, on certain evenings

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of the week, of yearning groups from Fifth Avenue sated with familiar horizons.” Figuring the fickle night crowd in terms of visual wooing, seduction, and emotional fatigue, James declines, like a jealous suitor, to reveal where in fact his discovery is: “Was it ‘on’ Third Avenue, on Second, on fabulous unattempted First? Nothing would induce me to cut down the romance of it . . . to a mere address.”18 Like Howells, James realizes that he is among the first to recognize the artistic potential of New York at night: “The whole vision was . . . rich . . . in its own queer marks, marks probably never yet reduced—inspiring thought!—to literary notation.” But whereas Howells and Sloan are entranced by humble scenes, the sophisticated Jamesian analyst delights in the risqué and aristocratic elegance “of a city where the very restaurants . . . flash back the likeness of Venetian palaces flaring with the old carnival.” The restaurant appears as “an abyss of mystery,” an enticingly decadent masquerade, where the revelers are uncertain of the identity, even the sex, of their partners. It is precisely this tantalizing enigma that attracts James’s spectator: The ambiguity is the element in which the whole thing swims for me— so nocturnal, so bacchanal, so hugely hatted and feathered and flounced, yet apparently so innocent, almost so patriarchal again, and matching, in its mixture, with nothing one had elsewhere known. It breathed its simple “New York! New York!” at every impulse of inquiry; so that I can only echo contentedly, with analysis for once quite agreeably baffled, “Remarkable, unspeakable New York!”19

For James the city is a fantastic entity, both female and male, worldly but respectable, wanton yet pure. Provocatively, New York’s Babylonian excess—“so hugely hatted and feathered and flounced”—can also seem “so innocent.” Like a transvestite with a biblical wardrobe, the city alternately becomes a prostitute, a virgin, and then “almost so patriarchal again.” It is this unique “mixture,” New York’s transsexual fluctuation between feminine sartorial enticement and masculine authority, that renders the city impenetrable as an object of knowledge. Even the Master cannot master this city: “for once quite agreeably baffled,” James happily declares the nocturnal scene “unspeakable.” But the word “unspeakable” is more than a final admission that the city exceeds the writer’s power to describe it. Rather than foreclosing the issue, it hints at a further complication: “unspeakable” has been used since Roman times as an adjective for homosexual love; Whitman had already applied it to New York, linking theatricality and unspeakability, as he tried to explain New York’s mystery. In his poem “Broadway” (1888), he describes the city as “Thou visor’d, vast, unspeakable show and lesson!”20 It seems that the aging James, grown slightly more relaxed about his homosexual impulses,

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carried Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with him as a sort of coded signal when he toured the city in 1903. What is unspeakable for James is the city’s sexual polymorphosis: the seductive and oceanic “ambiguity in which the whole thing swims for me.” The city’s sexual energy and attractiveness cannot be reduced to simple male or female categories, and he hints that the desires it arouses are not so simply satisfied either.21 As he writes about the city, James’s elaborate metaphors for New York gradually take on a Whitmanic amplitude, but always stress sexual overload, such as might be caused by an overdressed streetwalker—floozy or transvestite?—an image that James applies at some length to Midtown Manhattan. Stagy, indecipherable, perhaps masquerading in drag, the unspeakable city possesses a unique mixture that James can’t or won’t pin down. “So nocturnal, so bacchanal,” it projects a sexual allure in “its own queer marks” that the enthralled but discreet observer “contentedly” re-marks without decoding. The city’s love of excess is replicated in its very name: New York, New York.

The Feel of the Night The most haunting painter of nocturnal New York was Edward Hopper, tireless street prowler and elevated snooper. A man fascinated by sunlight, he painted the night streets only a handful of times, but his eerily inanimate scenes have been permanently burned on the culture’s retina. His long career ties the close-quarters voyeurism of Ash Can New York to the existential malaise of the postwar era. From the 1910s to the 1950s, Hopper pondered New York’s semideserted offices, apartments, and restaurants, registering from the far side of the windowpane cryptic signals of sexual tension, magnified by the dark city looming at the fringes of his canvas. Hopper’s ominous edges illustrate what W. Somerset Maugham said of urban night: “In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.”22 Night’s implied menace gave Hopper a means of creating suspense. Each canvas acts as a stage set awaiting an entrance, an exit, an insignificant action that might ease the heat or break the ice. Bare interiors starkly lit by electric light spotlight the invisible desperation of motionless people in their supposed leisure hours. Hopper used the vantage point of the nighttime elevated train to encourage viewers to fantasize about people never to be seen again—except in the picture frame, where they are frozen forever in the instant when their unknowability hovers on the edge of a giveaway act. In Hopper’s etching Night on the El Train (1918), a man and a woman turn toward each other at the end of the car. They seem oblivious to the artist, whose point of view is that of someone coming down the aisle toward them. With his sharp nose and straight mouth, the man, who gazes downward rather than at his

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Figure 6.2. Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Night on the El Train, 1918. Etching, Levin 56; Zigrosser 21. Plate: 7 ½ ⫻ 8 in. (190 ⫻ 203 mm). Purchased with the Thomas Skelton Harrison Fund, 1962. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York

companion, bears a startling resemblance to the equally pensive, cigarettesmoking nighthawk in Hopper’s most famous painting. Here, the leaning woman’s white shirtwaist makes a heart shape against the dark of the man’s suit and the train windows. But the echoing element, the man’s white hat, covers his lap as if to say “no dice.” For Hopper, urban nights and electric lights created a timeless, frozen zone of noncommunication. Thomas Carlyle once defined a symbol as “eternity looking through time.” Hopper’s figures carry so much symbolic weight because he makes a moment of urban time become an eternity through his meditation on the act of looking. Hopper knew Sloan, and in his own Night Windows (1928), Hopper paid homage to the veteran voyeur (color plate 23). From a position above the street, the viewer looks in to an upper-story apartment. Three windows glow; the middle one reveals, in a patch of interior light, the buttocks, bare legs, and bare back of a slip-clad woman who bends forward into her room, away from the window. Her head and feet are cut off by the heavy masonry of her apartment building’s walls. Her vulnerability—or is it availability?—to the implied male viewer is signaled by the open window on the left, whose thin curtain, echoing the curve of her torso, flutters out in the breeze. Meanwhile, the window on the right glares flamelike through a backlit red curtain. Hopper cut out the complicated visual layering, the seer-seen business that Sloan delighted in: the painting looks in the window, period. But if Hopper thrust his viewer straight into the voyeur’s seat on the El, he used the three windows—Sloan’s idea of a triple focal point—to play the lustful look against its larger implications.

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Hopper spoke appreciatively of how much life Sloan’s people gained from the architecture he set them in, and here Hopper’s whole building does the acting.23 The corner facade with its dark shadows and open windows swells out toward the viewer like the derriere of the bending woman. Hopper liked corners and intersections, the look of things coming together in an architectural sense when they might never do so on a human level. The central window and the provocative posterior beckon at the cusp of the curve, open to the night air, while an exterior ledge wide enough to support a bold criminal or lover accentuates the rounding of the corner, the broachable interior, and the soft fall of light from inside outward. Subtly, the dominant colors in the three windows read blue, white, and red. The red is a warm color, the blue is cool, and the central window, with its large rectangle of white light framed by a yellowy earth-toned window edge and door molding, brings these emotional and aesthetic possibilities together. The pink-slipped woman stands on a green rug, beside an orangish radiator and a violet-tinged bed or couch. Celebrating the all-American sport of looking at a gal, the painting is also an artist’s palette, mixing primaries into secondaries at the center, to see what kind of visual excitement they can make. The sexy pose is an excuse to draw the eye in toward a painted lady. You can have your elusive subject hot or cold, hellish red or heavenly blue, Hopper implies, but the canvas is flat and the curves are an illusion. As self-consciously as Sloan, he catches viewers in the act of falling for an artful dodge. Hopper, who loved plays and movies, threw the whole question of theatricality up in the air. It has been said of Hopper, who in his last canvas depicted himself and his wife as comedians taking a final bow on the stage of life, that he painted “characters in search of a play.”24 Aristotle thought that you needed a plot to have a play; character would then emerge as a function of how people responded to events. But in his night pictures, Hopper stands—or sits—his people up in front of us without a script. He cuts to the true bone of drama: people to look at. Spectators, never in short supply in the city, can do the rest. When Fitzgerald said that there were no second acts in American lives, he might have been thinking of people like those in Room in New York (1932), where a lost-looking couple while away an empty evening under a powerful electric light.25 Like Fitzgerald, Hopper was drawn to the self-dramatizing quality of American life. But far more of a Puritan, he evokes it only to cut it off, opening and dropping the curtain on his would-be actors well before the intermission. Room in New York sets the viewer above the street at apartment height, this time so close to the interior that the pillar and ledge setting off the window architecturally also frame the picture on the right and bottom sides. The framing is in fact what the picture is all about: it moves into the interior via the rectangles of light made by the blocks of stone outside on

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Figure 6.3. Edward Hopper, Room in New York, 1932. Oil on canvas, 29 9/32 ⫻ 36 5/8 ⫻ 1¼ in. (74.3 ⫻ 93 ⫻ 3.2 cm). Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska at Lincoln [UNL-F]. M. Hall Collection. Photo © Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery

the left that seem to merge with the series of framed pictures on the walls of the room, before being echoed again on the panels of the closed door on the back wall and finally by the book of sheet music on the piano at the far right. Arranged into paralysis, this is a still life with bulb-dried human fruit. The man hunched over his newspaper and the woman toying with the piano keys would find it hard to move had they wanted to, cramped as they are by their furniture: a round table is jammed between them, against which they are held by an overstuffed armchair on the male side and an upright piano on the female side. Meanwhile the tall door and the line of pictures lower over them, usurping all the air rights in the room. The woman twists away from the table and the man, who has that downward, introspective gaze so typical of male figures in Hopper. Whatever music might unite them is too feeble in its one-fingered performance to make headway against the relentless light, which pins everything to its spot. They might be illustrating Eliot’s lines from The Waste Land: “each in his prison / Thinking of the key.”26 Night can be a window, a way out as well as a way in. But unlike his admired Degas, Hopper pays no more attention to the glass than his people

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do to the view. This literal lack of reflection encourages the illusion that his subjects are on stage, exposed. The lit room in the dark city signals the possibility of some intimate revelation, some unposed private moment. Yet storyless and futureless, his figures just sit there, specimens of a life on the verge of extinction. For Hopper painted the vanishing world of low-rise masonry when the rest of the city was excited by high-rise steel and glass. The iconic buildings of Early Sunday Morning (1930) had been torn down by the time anyone was interested enough to locate them, yielding to the forces Hopper only cursorily addressed with his anonymous brown rectangle rising in the upper-right-hand corner of that work.27 Hopper’s paintings belong in museums because they are already museums themselves. The look they have, the look we give them, is archaeological, as if we are travelers come upon the remains of a civilization like our own, a parallel-universe Pompeii. We’re encouraged to muse on the last moments of people buried alive by paint in the extreme ordinariness of their nightly rituals. In Office at Night (1940) Hopper completes a trilogy of El views, progressing from the single woman, to the domestic couple, to the nuclear corporate team—a man and his secretary (color plate 24). The viewer again has the sense of being on the outside of the building looking in—this time at a buxom, tight-skirted woman who (provocatively? wistfully?) turns from a filing cabinet to face a man seated at a desk, reading. She has one hand in a half-open drawer that, like the half-open window and its wind-stirred shade, suggests sexual accessibility. An open door behind the woman leads to an inner office whose glass is frosted for privacy. Hopper recalled that the picture “was probably first suggested by many rides on the ‘L’ train in New York City after dark and glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind.”28 Vivid images or not, Hopper did several studies putting his two figures in different positions, toward and away from each other, drawer open and drawer closed, trying to figure out the best disposition of elements.29 But in all his sketches he kept the woman’s look and the same elevated viewpoint, reminiscent of Degas, but strangely so. Strange because of the improbabilities: either we see in from the actual El at the height of the upper window, taking no notice whatever of the wall or window frame, as the train passes one of the corner rooms Hopper loved; or we are standing in the position of a janitor on a stepladder changing the lightbulb in the near corner of the room. Either way, the angle suggests that the viewer has a privileged access to this scene. But what we see is no secret, just sexist capitalism at its most routine.30 Walls and windows fall away to show us the bare yet boring essentials: a man at his workstation, and a woman at hers (in the lower left corner her typewriter glints, completing her job description). She looks at him, but he does not look back. Despite their relative positions— higher/lower; standing/sitting—he’s the boss. Like the wind coming in the

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window, past the desk, and out the door, the power moves one way, from his side of the painting to hers. While he took pains to get the picture right, Hopper did not want to say what it said. As usual, the sexual tension is unrelieved by any clue as to what might happen next. Indeed, Hopper professed not to care: of Office at Night, he remarked, as if he were Whistler, “I hope it will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended.”31 Having set out the visual trap, the artist waits for the viewer to commit an interpretation. The teasing refusal to tell is probably the bedrock of Hopper’s appeal. But unlike Whistler, he was not trying to get people to admire plain paint in an art-for-art’s-sake way; Hopper all too carefully sets up the players before he invokes the Aesthetic credo of anec-don’t. While we could read the picture as Whistler would, as being an Arrangement of rectangles in brown and green, the curves of the figures, as well as their mere presence, won’t allow it. We end up trying to read instead what’s in the man’s hand, or what literally more colorful matter the woman has on her desk. Filing is what passes for memory in the business world, and working late is the way to get ahead. Office at Night asks us to forget past and future, and live in the petrified present: civilization and its discontents. If we turn from the El paintings to street-level etchings we get an even stronger sense of Hopper’s drive to repress a story before it can develop. For Hopper grasped how the secrets of the night were simultaneously pried open and clamped shut by the tireless ubiquity of electric light. As the light renders public everything it touches, it confers on it an unsought stage presence, indifferently bestowing significance in all directions. The etching process seems to want to tell us just this. The artist scratches a line on a copper plate that will eventually become a black ink mark on paper; in an urban night scene, any surface not scratched becomes an object bathed in electric light. Hopper learned how to make prints in 1915 with the help of expatriate Australian artist Martin Lewis, whose etchings he admired. Both men were interested in the erotic drama of the night streets, and both worked with strongly contrasting areas of light and dark to intensify the brooding emotional impact of what might have been ordinary evening occurrences: a trip to the corner store, a subway ride, a look at the newspaper on a park bench. A master etcher but ultimately a more conventional artist, Lewis limned his scenes in greater detail than Hopper, skillfully manipulating his dark and light areas to generate emotional intensity without losing any of the accuracy that makes his images so hauntingly real. But Hopper opted for starker stretches of black and white, and his bolder contrasts show how much power can be gained simply from leaving the subtleties aside. A look at what Lewis puts in helps us to see what Hopper leaves out. Much of the drama in Lewis’s night city happens in the glare of shop lights. In Night in New York (1932), for example, a young woman strides

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Figure 6.4. Martin Lewis, Night in New York, 1932

past a glowing drugstore window in a frilly summer dress that makes her look like the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Here Lewis was working directly off Hopper’s Drug Store (1927), but he takes a sidelong angle on the same corner facade that Hopper used and the same suspended jars of colored liquid that hang like pendulous breasts in the pharmacy window. Whereas Hopper’s nearly straight-on view gives no hint of human activity, emphasizing instead the sensation of approaching this ad-lit oasis in the night, Lewis sets a dallying couple in the shadows behind his frill-winged figure. Her eye is caught by something in the window; sexual adventure and drugstore accessories gently rub shoulders in the warm night air. Lewis loved street life and the juxtaposition of figures with an apparent goal in mind. We can sense him further exploring the stages of a girl’s night out in a series of etchings that stretch across the city and the years, such as Chance Meeting (1940) and Late Traveler (1949). But Hopper more often chose unusual vantage points on seemingly insignificant activities. At almost every juncture he reduces the contact and emotion that seem so direct in Lewis; he offers theatrical lighting without a play. A pair of etchings, Night in the Park and Night Shadows (both 1921), make the point clearly. A man reading a newspaper in the park under a lamppost, a man walking down the deserted street past the shadow of a tree or lamppost—these nonevents gain immense and disturbing import because of the stern contrast of dark

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Figure 6.5. Edward Hopper, Night Shadows, 1921. Etching plate, 6 7/8 ⫻ 8 3/16 in. (17.5 ⫻ 20.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Photo: Geoffrey Clements

and light, and especially because of the point of view. In Night in the Park the viewer seems to be silently approaching on foot, catching the solitary reader from behind, as if to mug or murder him. In Night Shadows, Hopper tips the picture plane, and has the viewer lean out a window and look down vertiginously from above, so that the corner building opposite leans inward, looming over the pedestrian it dwarfs in size. His exposure is further accentuated by the expanse of empty street that yawns before him as he heads toward the dark shadows. Hopper synthesized a group of influences here. In both etchings, the sharp corners, bold diagonals, and large areas of light suggest the example of Whistler, probably the greatest etcher since Rembrandt. In his “Venice Set” and “Amsterdam Set” of night etchings, Whistler wrestled with the ghost of his forebear while pursuing the motif of artificial light on city streets (and water) that had occupied him since youth, in his very first etching, Street at Saverne (1859). In Nocturne: Palaces (1879–1880), for instance, Whistler shines a powerful light on corner buildings on a Venetian canal. He floods the plate with illumination even as he uses the dark like a knife, to carve a strained sense of anticipation about the darkness that cuts between the two palaces. But there is also something strange in the way that, in Night Shadows, Hopper sends his two principal shadows—one from the man, one from something polelike at the bottom and treelike at the top—in different directions. It suggests an influence closer to Hopper’s own time. “In the night in which we live, in the carefully preserved obscurity which prevents man

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from rebelling, a beam from a lighthouse seeps in a circular path over the human and extra-human horizon: it is the light of Surrealism.”32 Hopper loved not only light but lighthouses, and there is something surreal, something tilted in the direction of Giorgio de Chirico’s multishadowed beacons, in the way Hopper’s nightwalker makes his mysterious journey to the hidden light. Wherever they come from, it’s Hopper’s shadows that make the impression, that make the light so scary. Hopper has often been said to have a film noir sensibility, but as these early works show, the influence worked the other way. By the heyday of film noir Hopper was, as Whistler had been, “in the air”; his works from the 1920s had helped create it.33 By leaving things out, Hopper shows us there is more to see than we suspected: a voyeurism of inanimate things. He takes us back to Whitman’s ability to hear and feel the stones of the city, its “dumb, beautiful ministers,” talk back to him. Ultimately, Hopper seems to have based his nocturnal art on principles expressed by his teacher Robert Henri, who propounded many impressionist principles to the Ash Can painters. Henri gave this advice to his students: “Low art is just telling things; as, There is the night. High art gives the feel of the night. The latter is nearer reality although the former is a copy.” Just as crucially, Henri concluded his lesson with a final line: “A painter should be interested not in the incident but in the essence of his subject.”34 For Hopper as for Henri, good art does not “tell.” It creates a world whose emotional reality is never in doubt; essence replaces incident. Hopper refuses to give the story of night, but “the feel of the night” blasts out of his pictures like air from a subway grate.

Nighthawks The theatrical and voyeuristic motifs that run through Hopper’s work come to the fore in his most famous nocturne, Nighthawks (1942) (color plate 25). The painting, Hopper once said, “seems to be the way I think of a night street.”35 As if to include both the artist and the viewer, Nighthawks appears at first to do something unusual for Hopper: depict people looking at people. Bleakly framed by the wide windows and bright lights of a latenight diner, a pensive couple at the counter seem to receive the stares of a three-part audience. The viewer is positioned as a passerby outside in the street, perhaps deciding whether to enter the diner, which looms ahead like a lighted stage. The lone customer, seated at the counter with his back to the viewer, represents the next step in the process of observation: he stands in for the artist and the viewer moving closer to scrutinize the couple. Finally, a counterman looks up from in front of them, as if to take an order, face to face. But the couple does not interact. No direct looks are exchanged here— or in almost any other picture Hopper painted. Cigarette in hand, the man

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elbows aside his cup of coffee and seems to stare into space; the counterman who may be asking about a refill on the coffee may equally be looking out the window down the street; and the solitary customer, who has his head slightly down turned and has what looks like a folded newspaper at his left elbow, might be pondering the depths of the water glass he holds in his right hand. The woman is the only one whose gaze we can follow, away from the men toward a folded matchbook she toys with—a prop that could signify impotence as easily as it could eros.36 For although their hands almost touch, the man and woman seem worlds apart from one another. Why are they at the diner instead of in bed or in each other’s arms? Is this seduction or alienation, fire or frost? With their sharply angular bodies and cool colors, the couple seem less organic, less possessed of the warmth of life than the curves of the diner, the stools, the cups, and the condiments, which rebel against the hard edges of the people using them. As Hopper’s preliminary drawings show, he took the same pains studying the sugar-shakers and saltshakers as he did the people’s poses.37 The seeming emotional distance between the woman and her companion is widened by the visual gap between the phallic cigar sign outside the diner and the mammalian pair of coffee urns inside. Like the matchbook and cigarette, they wanly imply a sexual heat that the figures’ body language chills. Hopper’s ironic play on Freudian sex symbols reproduces the stereotypical division of nocturnal space into external masculine and interior feminine realms. Posing urban intersection against human disconnection, Hopper said that the setting was “suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.”38 Outside in the night, the wall around two windows in a redbrick building (with a third window in shadow beside them) receive the light; their rectangles seem more companionable than the coffee-drinking couple and their fellow customer. If a room upstairs is waiting, it may be empty for a while longer. Nighthawks by definition don’t like to go to bed. What does it mean to be a nighthawk? The common definition is inoffensive: a person who likes to be active late at night, a night owl, a night bird. But nearly a century before Hopper, George Foster stressed the rapaciousness of night birds, “whose crimes and abominations make them shun the light of day—not merely because they fear detection, but because day is hateful to them.”39 Picking up on the sinister side of the avian raptors as well as the film noir atmosphere of the image, with its deep shadows and men whose eyes are hidden by the brims of their hats, critics have connected the painting to Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers,” which Hopper admired.40 But who can tell if the people in the diner are potential victims or hired guns preparing for a job? Like Poe’s men of the crowd, unable to be alone, the nighthawks do not so much hunt during the night as hunt the night itself, chasing it down until it subsides in the dawn.

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The stillness of the scene heightens its psychological tension, though it’s unclear whether that tension has to do with sex or danger, terrifying boredom or existential despair. An early study had the man and woman looking at each other, but Hopper wanted to frustrate any sexual narrative he proposed. Hence, he even uses scenery from earlier productions to heighten the generic quality of the experience. The painter repeated the brick facade on the upper left of Nighthawks from earlier paintings, such as Early Sunday Morning and Drug Store.41 Like most of Hopper’s women, the lady in red bears traces of Hopper’s usual model, his wife Jo, while the men seem recycled too: there’s the hawk-nosed suitor from Night on the El Train, sharing with the other customer and the counterman the Hopper male hunch. The man with his back to us could be a gangster or cop, but in either case he’s built like the artist, who modeled for the figure. We watch him watch, patiently, for he may as well be watching paint dry. The go-nowhere story is reinforced by architectural barriers within the painting. The curves of the counter separate the lone diner, the couple, and the counterman. Behind the glass and low outer wall of the restaurant, the nighthawks look almost as if they were mannequins in a shop window or taxidermic specimens in the plate-glass cage of a natural history diorama. All the “characters” are framed by mullions and separated from the “audience” in the street. In fact, the counterman is trapped behind a counter that runs behind as well as in front of him, making a squashed triangle that echoes the diner shape. What looks like a swinging kitchen door with a little window either opens illogically into the public area, behind the stools, or it doesn’t open at all, since it’s jammed up against the counter. And there’s not much room for a real door to the restaurant—it would have to be at the narrowest point, just off canvas. But it is this just-trapped stasis of the picture that makes it seem like the close-up electric equivalent of a Whistler nocturne.42 For all its sharpedged drama, the inertia and silence of the scene link it to Whistler’s misty repose. Immobility and reflection are the order of the night: “Nocturne in Red and Green—Old Greenwich Village.” Like Whistler, Hopper kept the source of his illumination offstage; both the restaurant light fixtures and the streetlight casting the shadows across the street are invisible. By the 1940s, conventional night views of New York sparkled like dance hall mirrors, but Hopper shows nary a bulb. Nighthawks is a brown-out, war-years document; any one in it may be shipped out tomorrow or have gotten bad news this morning. Like Whistler, Hopper fought a rearguard action against the empire of light, in favor of the dark’s right to survive, maybe no longer on equal terms, but at least as a relic of Whitman’s “magnetic nourishing night.” There is no atmosphere here in the Whistlerian sense, but Hopper had figured out how to make his air thick with a beautiful vagueness in a theatrical rather than meteorological way. Cézanne once commented that

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atmosphere does not exist for the painter, meaning that all he had to work with was paint on a flat surface, and here Hopper triumphantly turns flatness of surface and affect into something deep and dark as the fog on Battersea Reach. Without losing the impact, he translates Whistler’s expatriate poetry into plain Manhattan prose.43 Hopper combined at least two other sources that tie the painting to the nocturnal tradition. At the beginning of August 1888, Vincent van Gogh wrote that he was painting the interior view of a local café de nuit “where nighthawks [rodeurs de nuit] can find asylum.”44 Later, he painted the outdoor café terrace on location, at night. Thanks to plate glass, Hopper could paint both at once. Hopper’s red-green color scheme and the tired stasis of his figures echo those in van Gogh’s interior view, Night Café (1888). But viewers approach the diner just as they approach the café in van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night: Place du Forum in Arles (1888). Of all van Gogh’s outdoor Provençal paintings, this is the most urban, the least given over to the energy of nature; it too features plenty of empty seats, a waiter in white, a couple seated together, flanking shops and doorways, and a line of sight so clear and an artificial light so strong as to make outdoors and indoors interchangeable. Van Gogh used the blue-circled stars above for contrast and companionship, whereas Hopper called on his trademark shaded windows for the same purpose. What counts most, however, is the simple appeal of the powerfully lighted space opening up not more than ten paces in front of the walker in the street. A man who was acquainted with the night as deeply as van Gogh was, a long-term frequenter of its passion and despair, would have loomed in Hopper’s mind as he sought to represent the soul of the night street from the point of view of someone out alone on the prowl, walking to indulge or shake off some inner darkness. Hopper’s own comments on the painting set up a distinction between a conscious but vague intention and a more precise unconscious one that contradicts the first: “Nighthawks seems to be the way I think of a night street. I didn’t see it as particularly lonely. I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”45 If Hopper felt he was “unconsciously” depicting the city’s loneliness, he was well aware that he was painting an urban scene charged with Freudian resonances. Hopper knew the works of Freud and Jung, and even did a caricature of himself as a boy holding books by both.46 It’s something of a miracle that the obviousness of Hopper’s imagery does not swamp the more profound mystery of the painted surfaces. “So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious,” he once said, “that it seems to me most of all of the important qualities are put there unconsciously.”47 In Nighthawks the artist seems, like the woman with the matchbook, to be playing with fire, opening up a dreamscape whose erotic elements, such as the cigar sign outside, the viewer may chose to kindle into a sexual narrative

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Figure 6.6. Vincent van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night (Place du Forum in Arles), 1888. Oil on canvas, 32 ⫻ 25 ¾ in. (81 ⫻ 65.5 cm). Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, The Netherlands [cat. 232]. Photo: Eric Lessing/Art Resource, New York

flame. Or is this one of the times, as Freud is said to have remarked, when “a cigar is only a cigar”? Even if we break the image/symbol connection and forget the cigar, we can still analyze the brand name. A French critic has suggested that the sign for Phillies is meant to suggest “fillies,” bringing the equestrian countryside into the city—which may also lead us to spirited

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young females in general, hot to trot.48 This is only a short step from filles, another name for prostitutes in French. In any case, the cigar is a cheap one, attractively priced. Accessibility is one of the things that makes Hopper so popular and yet so “deep”—“the whole answer,” he once said, “is there on the canvas.”49 And the apparent availability of his meanings, like his women, seduces the attention. We feel that we are going to get somewhere, we want to know more. “A woman is only a woman,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in “The Betrothed,” “but a good cigar is a Smoke.” The woman may be a prostitute, but the cigar-bearing picture ignites our interest and helps us muse; it draws smoothly and burns steadily. It is, artistically speaking, “a smoke.” Yet Hopper would have quarreled with Kipling. His female nighthawk is no ordinary woman. Like the woman undressing in Sloan’s Night Windows, she is the focal point of the scene, her red dress, red hair, and fair bare skin standing out in comparison to the dark-suited men set against a dark background, and the counterman in white set against the bright, light walls of the diner. The woman occupies a liminal space, her figure outlined against both the darkness outside and the brightness within. Without her, the picture doesn’t work. She is like the famously historyless figure in Whistler’s Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow (1876) (figure 2.7), “placed there because the black was wanted at that spot.”50 Hopper wanted red, not black, for psychosexual as well as formal reasons. Whether she is available or not, whether she is a woman of the night streets or a girlfriend suited to the more “homey” interior of the diner, she seems to be the object of all the men’s attention. But despite her central role in the implicit drama of sexual tension, Hopper has positioned her potential observers in such a way as to suggest a series of broken visual links that underline the emotional distance between them. For it’s impossible to be sure that any of the men are looking at her. So the viewers do the work, constructing scenarios for a cast of characters who won’t budge. Like the door at the back of the diner, with its promising but opaque window in the center, the painting seems nailed shut. And there’s no door to the diner itself. Hopper saw narrative satisfaction as a mortal sin; in praising Hemingway’s “The Killers” he wrote, “Of the concessions to popular prejudices, the side stepping of truth, and the ingenious mechanism of trick ending there is no taint in this story.”51 Trick or not, Hopper did not like endings—that’s why he became a painter. Canvases travel in time, but time on the canvas stays put. For Hopper the point is to trick the ending so that it never comes. Stripping away what to him was superfluous local color, the crowds, skyscrapers, and traffic—a process that ironically cemented his version of “New York” firmly on the front page of Manhattan’s book of stereotypes—Hopper also stripped his figures of any

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reason to move and any clue as to their intention. As he said of Second Story Sunlight (1960), which he described as an attempt to paint a certain kind of light, “Any psychological idea will have to be supplied by the viewer.”52 And so he makes the picture into a mirror for late-night Gothamites. From our viewpoint in the deserted street outside, the artist and his audience must become, like the counterman and the customer, patient nighthawks waiting to see what the next act will never bring. But all through the night one small part of the painting speaks. Although Sloan and Stella refused to copy ads verbatim in their works, by the midtwentieth century art and advertising had cannibalized each other so often that there was no real point in holding out. In deciding to give “PHILLIES”—“Only 5¢”—perpetual free billboard space, Hopper received in return the seal of authenticity that bits of real economic life confer. After all, Manet had long ago included a Bass beer bottle, with its distinctive red triangle, in Bar at the Follies Bergères. Maybe Manet’s female bartender was for sale too; maybe one nighthawk or another will do something for a price. Maybe the spectator approaching in the street is, like the spectator seen in the mirror over Manet’s bar, on the way to buy something. For Hopper, getting his viewer to see as advertisers wanted them to see was not a farfetched goal. The literal truth of an ad, down to the trademark lettering, would make his painted world and characters as incomplete, as full of unsatisfied longings, as the world of his spectators. Hopper understood the human hollow, the visual void, that advertising creates in order not to fulfill. An ever-renewable source of fantasy, the light of advertising lends warmth; we can connect with the ad, if not each other. We believe it despite our skepticism. That may be one reason why Nighthawks has become a ubiquitous emblem of American life. Its status as an instantly recognizable decor used in art, ballet, film, and photography—even a Christmas card featuring Santa and his reindeer at the counter—indicates how vitally its teasing, eloquent absences appeal to the psyche. Its static drama deflects on to city surfaces—the streets, the shops, the signs, the counters, and the cigars and cigarettes—the late-night emotions that people are unable to speak for themselves. The mute meanings simply smolder, a would-be passion play that never catches fire. Perhaps Hopper, the man who claimed that his loftiest artistic ambition was “to paint sunlight on the side of a house,” had something equally basic in mind when it came to rendering the night.53 He paints a half-lit cigar on the side of a building. This cigar is not a pipe, surrealistic or voyeuristic, René Magritte or John Sloan. It aims to satisfy the masses, to give the night a pensive, self-sustaining puff. Accessible, theatrical, slow burning, and long lasting, Nighthawks and its five-cent Philly seem intended to prove the truth of an old adage: “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.”54

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Balcony Seats at a Murder I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen. —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 55

Weegee also liked a cigar; he chewed on one constantly; it was as much a part of his face as the Speed-Graphic camera he held against it. Manly props, belonging to a world of aggressive sight—not voyeurism but violence, the voyeurism of violence, the frisson of being manly enough to look at a stiff. Weegee found his forbidden fruits in public, often lying face down in the street; but their pleasure depended on his being the first one to take a bite. In the 1930s and 1940s, the perfection of the flashbulb and fast film enabled him to bring Jacob Riis’s nocturnal lowlife a few steps closer to the rest of us. While Riis had to struggle to place his photos in front of the public, Weegee’s aim was to see his night’s work in the papers the next morning. For him, night was an exploitable frontier, the fertile soil from which he could harvest a crop of corpses, evidence of his boldness and food for the sensation-hungry urbanite. Born Arthur Fellig, he was nicknamed after the Ouija board, since he seemed so prescient, often getting to a crime before the cops, sometimes even before it happened. Weegee collaborated with his camera so that he and the public could lock eyes over an image and communicate with the freshly dead. “Weegee and his Love—his Camera” reads the legend to the frontispiece portrait in his photo collection, Naked City (1945). A loner married to his job, sleeping in his clothes next to a police radio, Weegee tacitly accepted the dadaist coupling of man and mechanism: Picabia’s mechanical portraits and Duchamp’s erotics of the machine. Weegee presents his “Love” without irony, as a normal, human passion, certain his audience will find his photos just as satisfying as he does. The foreword to Naked City by William McCleery sustains the idea by giving the photographer a second girlfriend, New York: “Loving the city, Weegee has been able to live with her in the utmost intimacy. When he goes to bed in his room across the street from police headquarters, the city murmurs to him from the policeapproved shortwave radio beside his bed. Even in slumber he is responsive to her.”56 For all his absorption in the way private dramas burst out in public spaces, in the form of arrests, fires, crashes, and murders, Weegee had none of Sloan’s or Hopper’s interest in looking into apartment windows. His attitude was like that of the police: “From midnight to one o’clock, I listened to calls to the station houses about peeping Toms on the rooftops and fire escapes of nurses’ dormitories. The cops laughed those off . . . let the boys have their fun.”57 Weegee’s title suggests that he used his lens to strip bare the behavior and emotions of New Yorkers, but it also alludes to the erotic appeal of

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Figure 6.7. Scott Hyde, Third Avenue Elevated Station, Third Avenue at Sixty-seventh Street, 1950. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

looking at anything proposed as naked—a city, a street, or even a sidewalk, never mind naked violence, naked suffering, and naked truth. Emerging from the Depression-era style of social documentary, Weegee got credit for humanitarian impulses that only thinly veil the real excitement here: the magnetic sight of something awful or outlandish happening to other people. The enduring attraction of Weegee stems from the vicarious pleasure his transgressions give—in the name of news and sympathy they violate decorum and, in public places, batten on to intimate details of what were, until now, private lives. Weegee encourages us not to turn away discretely but to linger, with a thrill, over the misery or mortality that has befallen strangers and not us. Pointed at the bodies of others, the camera brings us the prickly pleasure of someone else’s pain. There’s an entrancing night scene from this period photographed by Scott Hyde, Third Avenue Elevated Station (1950), with wet, shimmering pavements, round-fendered cars reflecting the light, misty halos around the lampposts, and a knowing sign in the background that comments on the

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picture’s debt to the nocturne tradition: “Beauty Salon,” it reads. It’s all that Weegee is not. Weegee junked the aesthetics of the pictorialists; he deglamorized the night, cheapened its charm, using his flash to blast away shadows and eliminate subtle gradations of tone. In fact, in Weegee’s world of black and white, it’s often hard to tell if it even is night. His light reaches, like Riis’s magnesium flares, into every corner. In his crime and accident scenes, detail litters the street like an old newspaper: gum spots, cigarette butts, awnings, railings, moldings, trash, and above all signs, letters, and words, rendered both trivial and oracular by the disasters occurring beneath them. A murdered man lies below a target shape painted in the O of a gang’s name, royals. Another corpse lies near the number twenty-five in a shop window; Weegee tells us he got twenty-five dollars for the shot, as if he were the hit man himself. And so, with high contrast, little depth, flattened forms, and no darkness, Weegee reglamorized the night as a place of danger and bizarre coincidence, the Grim Reaper working from a script by O. Henry.58 Riis did not have the equipment to photograph outdoors at night; Steichen, Stieglitz, and Lewis Hine had other interests than ephemeral calamity. It is as if one had to wait for Weegee to get the first photos of the nocturnal war zone; he is the Matthew Brady of the New York night. Bodies, blood, and guns lie where they fell, in the civilian war of blue (the cops) and gray (the gangsters). But there are no gray areas in Weegee’s photos. Things are black and white, or more accurately, alive and dead, though it is sometimes hard to tell the difference. Weegee opens Naked City with a series of shots of people sleeping outdoors in the summer—we see the soles of their shoes, their outflung arms, their heads thrown toward us flat on the pavement. They resemble Riis’s sleepers and Weegee’s own corpses. There’s even one man who bridges the gap, stretched on the sidewalk in front of a funeral parlor. Then, too, the living have the pallor of the dead. When in his early years Weegee took photos on the streets of the Lower East Side, he found that his clients liked high contrast and “nice white, chalky faces.”59 For immigrants, whiteness had its appeal. But bleached out by the flash, the flesh of his subjects seems like it has been soaking in the river for a few days; at its best it has that artificially lit whiteness we find in Hopper’s women, as in Night Windows and Room in New York. In their number and variety, Weegee’s sleepers recall those in Whitman’s poem “The Sleepers,” the archetypal rendering of all New York’s unconscious bodies. But for Whitman darkness heals all wounds, while with Weegee darkness seems a precondition to inflicting them. There’s one exception, “Heat Spell,” showing children sleeping on a fire escape, dating from 1941. Counting up the arms and legs, as in one of Riis’s flophouses, we discover at least eight kids lost in dreamland, with the central, oldest one cuddling a kitten to her breast. While there is some garden-variety voyeurism in Weegee’s fire escape shots, this one included, the unusual warmth of the picture in relation to the rest of his oeuvre seems beneficently to literalize the

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Figure 6.8. Weegee, Murder on the Roof, 1941. Getty Images/International Center of Photography, Hulton Archive, New York

children’s location. They are safely escaped from immolation in this picture, and hence not being burned to a crisp in another. It was Weegee’s genius to make ordinary crime seem both exceptional and pervasive. He realized that there was plenty to reveal if you went to a place that was also a time, night, and that what you brought back would seem special to those who stayed home with the covers pulled up tight. And so, if O. Henry killed off the refined literary flâneur, Weegee resurrected the figure in vulgar tabloid form. The harsh, smug tone of Weegee’s commentary, combining moral righteousness and intermittent sentimentalism, is

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Figure 6.9. Weegee, Heat Spell (Children on the Fire Escape), 1941. Getty Images/International Center of Photography, Hulton Archive, New York

at one with his intrusive lens, elbowing its way to the front of the crowd, and pronouncing its verdict on the innocence or scumminess of a victim. If we compare Weegee to his great contemporaries in London and Paris, Bill Brandt and Georges Brassai, he makes the former look static and stuffy, and the latter seem overly artistic and contrived. For the impromptu quality of Weegee’s photo-arrests makes them seem all the more real. While Brandt and Brassai chronicled the night of their cities in unforgettable ways, they went looking for good material; they walked the streets as Hopper did, thinking about settings, composition, and character. Weegee cruised in his car or dozed at home beside his camera, in both places ready to heed the directions to a crime or fire scene given by the police call radio that he was the first civilian permitted to own. If Weegee’s job necessitated a certain yielding to photographic fate and the whimsical timing of drunk drivers, arsonists, and hit men, he sought control in other ways. The strength of his flash opened the night to him,

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but flashbulbs bring about a new fluidity in visual power relations. You don’t see what you will get, and the instability of the relation between seer and seen makes it difficult to predict whether it’s better to be within the image or outside it, in front of or behind the lens. Anticipating resistance, Weegee seems to feel he has to make his subjects look bad—or sad, or silly, or strange—for him to look good. Back when he was the violin-playing Fellig, he recalled, “I loved playing on the emotions of the audience as they watched silent movies.” Looking at people looking, he was, even before Hollywood bought the rights to his title Naked City, appointing himself to a directorial role, preparing to shoot film as well as score it: “I suppose that my fiddle-playing was a subconscious kind of training for my future photography.”60 Taking the world as he found it, he turned to his real interest: making his audience react. As a result of how they were published, first in newspapers and then interspersed with running commentary in Naked City, Weegee’s photographs don’t really have titles, only captions that tell us how to look. It’s as if he can’t trust the image to speak for itself. In the 1942 photo that shows cops covering up a body underneath a movie marquee that advertises the Irene Dunne film The Joy of Living, Weegee can’t bear to let the simple irony stand or let the sign’s relevance to a secondary plot get away. “The driver of the car was arrested, but he put up such a terrific battle . . . cops had to put handcuffs on him.”61 Weegee wants us to see what a terrific struggle the photographer has been through; he wants us to see how boldly he and the cops have obeyed the sign for the B feature—Don’t Turn Them Lose. On the one hand, Weegee is a master of ironic art-reality interplay, the guy who snaps uncanny, real-life coincidences. On the other, he’s a control freak who scripts all comment from within the image. Like producer Mark Hellinger introducing the film that bought the rights to Weegee’s title, Naked City, he’s unable to resist a self-promoting voice-over. What Weegee wants is arrested motion; even better than an arrest is a body taken into custody by death. He picks the angle, and they lie still. The essence of Weegee is a stagy combination of life and death, looking at those who cannot look back. His caption “Balcony Seats at a Murder” says it all: nocturnal urban theater at its finest, a good view of a bad thing. In the photo, over twenty people crane out tenement windows to glimpse the feet of a corpse lying in the doorway of an Italian café in Little Italy. Weegee comments on how detectives found these same people “deaf . . . dumb . . . and blind” when they were questioned about the murder. They emulate the corpse so they won’t end up like him. A group of men stand beside the corpse; in a doorway over their heads appear the letters “OK”— as if to say, we at least are still vertical. As theatricality and voyeurism blur in Weegee’s grainy prints, spectators gain power over actors simply by being peripheral—by just a few yards—to the news. You want to be seen,

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Figure 6.10. Weegee, Joy of Living, 1942. Getty Images/International Center of Photography, Hulton Archive, New York

but not as the guest of honor at your own funeral. Weegee plays up the theatricality of his naked city by including a crowd whenever he can. In “Murder on the Roof” (1941), ten grown-ups and a kid lean over the wall of their rooftop to see detectives go through the pockets of the guy shot on the next roof, under the “Royals” sign. Observers get close, closer, and then closest; the center of the target painted in the O of “Royals”

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Figure 6.11. Weegee, Balcony Seats at a Murder, c. 1940s. Getty Images/International Center of Photography, Hulton Archive, New York

looks like an eye—or maybe a camera lens, or a gun barrel—trainedon the victim’s body. This dwelling on spectatorship recalls Hopper. But the work of Hopper says “something might happen,” while the work of Weegee says, for all his purported foresight, “something has already happened”—an accident

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Figure 6.12. Weegee, Dead Gunman, 1942. Getty Images/International Center of Photography, Hulton Archive, New York

or a crime, a fire or a crash. Hopper often creates life from absence—an open window or a half-drawn shade. Weegee works the other way around; people are flash frozen into their own watchful rigor mortis, distanced from the corpses only by their capacity to stand upright and look at something. For Weegee, life is all about looking—at himself, at others, and especially, at others looking at others. If he was ever troubled by the intrusive or exploitative sides of his job, as opposed to just fatigued—“I couldn’t take it,” he says of one rough night—he keeps it hidden.62 For him, for his audience in the picture and outside it, looking, staring, and snapping a picture are as instinctive as a blink or a breath. Curiosity may kill cats, but the Weegee stare helps New Yorkers live. Seeing is not simply believing; it’s as vital as breathing. It’s the proof that you are breathing. When you cease to look, you are dead, and others look at you. Weegee’s crowds legitimate his own presence and our own curiosity. One result is that he makes death, and any supposed spontaneous reaction to it, look as staged as life. He tries to work his way close enough to see the body divested of everything but its mortality, connecting his subjects and viewers through their shared ephemerality. We feel this most strongly when he pushes past the crowd to put the viewer in the front row of the theater.

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In “Dead Gunman” (1942) we stand where the shooter stood, gun within reach, pointing toward the victim’s body. Weegee’s desire for our collusion in this killing could not be much stronger; he does everything but put the weapon in our hands. Face down on the sidewalk “the deceased,” as the cops say, has hardly ceased bleeding, but the manhole cover just behind him reminds us where he is headed. Because Weegee’s subjects are corpses, criminals, and visually un-innocent bystanders, he can regard their presence in the vicinity of sudden spectacular misfortune as transformative: it turns them into public property, prime suspects—or a public nuisance. In Weegee’s own words, “I don’t mind photographing gangsters littering up the gutters. To me, it’s in the nature of a slum clearance project and I say, ‘Good riddance!’”63 As if claiming the reformist mantle of Riis, Weegee announces the social benefits of his—–well, not sensationalism, but “love for the city and her children,” as McCleery hastens to put it in the foreword to Naked City. McCleery’s conclusion makes the Riisian pitch even clearer: Weegee’s portrait of New York enables us, he says, “to see his city and believe it, and love it—and yet want to make it better. You don’t want those kids to go on sleeping on that fire escape forever, do you?”64 But unlike Riis, Weegee deliberately sought out the body of the city: his snapshots of the sleeping, the staring, the wounded, the murdered, and the bereaved have little to do with exposing the quiet domestic wretchedness of poor people hidden from the public eye, and everything to do with further exposing the awkward or intimate postures of people whom summer heat or sudden disaster has thrown on to the streets, the roofs, the fire escapes. If Riis had an angry, paternalistic compassion for the poor, Weegee was simply fascinated by the sight of how people looked after lightning had struck. Riis championed better housing, but Weegee wanted the papers to pay him more per shot, complaining that he only got ten bucks from a murder because it was “a cheap murder, with not many bullets.”65 The way Weegee tries to intertwine the Riisian crusade with criminal cleanup and turn both to his own advantage returns us to the question of what motivates nocturnal image-makers in the first place. In Naked City, Weegee systematically sets out to show his readers how he had made a career of watching people watching things that moved—fires, movies, Frank Sinatra—and things that didn’t—sleepers and corpses. The viewers, like the spectacles they fixate on, are essential yet interchangeable. If Weegee had made Casablanca, the last line would have been “round up the usual witnesses.” His chapter titles, such as “Fires” and “Murders,” indicate the plural, generic quality of the events and their onlookers. One double-page spread shows several individual shots of people staring at an unidentified urban object; another catches a crowd, afternoon and evening, watching a fire burn from the same spot. The composition of the crowd has changed,

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Figure 6.13. Weegee, I Cried When I Took This Picture (Fire in Harlem), 1942. Getty Images/International Center of Photography, Hulton Archive, New York

but two things are constant. One is the Empire State Building, whose unmoving presence in the background Weegee calls attention to, and the other is what the building stands for: the phallo-scopic power of the photographer. “They are watching me take their picture . . . and also a fire,” his caption reads.66 Photo and photographer first, calamity second. As God created man, and Hopper created the deserted street, Weegee creates the rubbernecking crowd—in his own image. The crime scene, the bad accident, the collective gawk we associate with misfortune in Manhattan—this is his self-portrait in a convex lens. Normally Weegee presents himself as a hard-boiled journeyman, a cynical observer of urban distress carried to its fatal denouement. Still, he says, “there are some events that almost break my heart to photograph, especially family tragedies.”67 The photo sometimes called “Fire in Harlem” (1942) is one of his best-known images. But the caption in Naked City has become an alternate title. It refers only to Weegee—“I Cried When I Took This Picture”—and not to the grieving women who have just lost two family members. The mother and daughter in the photo stand in for the other daughter and her baby who are perishing in the fire. A fireman’s hat with the number two appears just over the mother’s head. It is perhaps the most famous of Weegee’s uncanny details, one that siphons off the tragedy, leading us to divide our attention between the subject’s anguish and the photographer’s luck. In Weegee we get a modern urban version of Fortune’s Wheel: your fall is my rise. Almost the saddest thing about the picture is Weegee’s need to horn in on their grief, to put his tears in front of theirs. Weegee knew enough about

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his own compulsions to realize that what the public wanted was itself, safely filtered through someone else’s pain. Here the news is not the fatal fire that the crying women watch but the crying photographer—and by implication his audience—reacting to the futility of the tearful watch they keep. Walter Benjamin remarked how photography could aestheticize poverty, making the mute suffering of people and things into beautiful images that would allow us to forget where the poverty came from.68 Weegee refused to aestheticize anything, but he emotionalized everything; he wants us to forget about the victims so we can concentrate on our own harrowing roles, his and ours, as witnesses. In 1939 the poet Muriel Rukeyser conveyed New York’s crude, indifferent lighting of its citizens in terms that we recognize from Weegee’s photographs. “This is the cripples’ hour on Seventh Avenue” she says of the grotesque street life at 2:00 a.m., “light dramatized in puddles, the animal glare / that makes indignity, makes the brute.”69 Weegee is one of those nocturnal misfits, prowling the frontier of the night; like one of Foster’s night birds, he’s a genuine nighthawk looking for carrion. It is the “animal glare” of his predatory flash that “makes indignity, makes the brute” in his crime scenes, but fifty years later a lot of the brutish indignity seems to belong to the photographer. Near the end of Naked City, Weegee includes a page and a photo devoted to a chance meeting with Alfred Stieglitz. It’s a way of establishing his high-art credentials, incorporating the patriarch of American photography within his own mass-produced pages. Weegee finds him, he tells us, wandering lonely about town, an old and forgotten man who has never heard of “Weegee the famous,” as Fellig took to calling himself in his glory days. The still-courtly Stieglitz invites him back to his room for a chat, where Weegee takes his picture. It’s an Oedipal shooting of the father figure, the now-feeble king of the old night killed by the new prince of darkness. Yet it’s Stieglitz who retains his dignity in the face of Weegee’s insecurity, his thoughtful look still penetrating even if his artist’s hands now have fallen helplessly on his lap. When Stieglitz suffers an attack of angina, Weegee leaves in a rush. For all his brashness, this is one death he doesn’t dare witness. Stieglitz helped create night photography; Weegee almost bumped it off. The darkness of night disappears in Weegee, pushed to the borders of the negative so that traditional signs of the night can circulate more freely—sleeping and smooching, danger and dying, crowds gathered to look at something unusual suddenly brought into the light. He breaches social and aesthetic decorum so that he can reaffirm the conventions: the naked city is a rough place, after all. Yet if the flashlit night frontier is wild, it’s heavily populated with photographic game. Weegee found that uncovering a hitherto-hidden supply of nocturnal woe created a demand for its image that leads to a greater supply. By the time Weegee came along to reiterate

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the danger of darkness, it had been superseded by the danger of light. Stieglitz wanted to show how beautiful the night city could be; Weegee tried to prove how wrong he was. Diane Arbus, whose eye for the bizarre owes something to Weegee, once said, “Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it’s very thrilling for me to see darkness again.”70 Arbus joins those who, throughout light’s ascendancy, want something less in the way of illumination. But while there’s a lot of black in Weegee’s contrasty vision, there’s not much we can’t see. There’s very little “actual physical darkness” in his pictures—his flash and garrulousness have taken care of that—and only a questionable amount of heart. In a paradox that Joseph Conrad would have understood, his flashsoaked naked city is “a cruel devourer of the world’s light.”71

Darkness Invisible Lenox Avenue by daylight runs to dive in the Park but faster . . . faster . . . after dark. —Langston Hughes, Dive72

“If you’re white you’re right” ran the pragmatic saying, while Weegee established the photographic corollary, “If you have light you’re right.” But what of the person who has neither whiteness nor light? In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the nameless African American narrator searches for himself. For Milton’s Satan, even darkness was visible, and hell no hiding place from God. Ellison’s hero, however, tries desperately to cast the spotlight on himself, without success. Only when he discovers that the city is a theater does he find his true identity, by playing a part on the stage of the urban night. Becoming an actor in the climactic drama of a Harlem riot, he wrests personal revelation from a fall into the pitch black of a coal cellar. His situation starkly reveals the limits of light, for like Heart of Darkness, Invisible Man shows the desperate need for illumination in the world’s mightiest city. The invisible man is a gifted speaker, and the novel is structured as a series of theatrical set pieces in which he often unwittingly stars, from its opening with a blindfolded “battle royal” in a boxing ring, through the brawl in the Golden Day bordello, political speeches on tenement stoops and in hired halls, and his friend Tod Clifton’s funeral oration. Yet throughout the book, as he moves from high school and college in the rural South

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to a public role as an activist for a Communist Party–style organization called “The Brotherhood” in the urban North, he finds himself directed by others, playing on someone else’s stage. He has unwittingly embraced the terms of the classic poem “We Wear the Mask” (1896) by Paul Laurence Dunbar: “We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.” Worse than being forced to wear the mask is the invisible man’s inability to recognize that he is doing so. Without realizing it, thinking he is working for the good of his race, the novel’s narrator has been jumping through hoops held by others; although intelligent, he lacks the sense to see where his own interest lies. A racially exploited version of Poe’s Man of the Crowd, he has been kept running so that he will have no chance to know himself. Instead of blending in with the crowd, Ellison’s archetypal man must find a way to stand out from it. Poe’s Man of the Crowd could not be read, but Ellison’s hero spends the novel trying to read himself. Only in a climactic Harlem riot—during a blues-ridden northern night that revises the ironically styled “golden day” of the Old South—does the invisible man break away from formal dramatic settings to a new stage in his development. But Invisible Man begins at the end, with a prologue that finds the narrator finally illuminated, in a literal as well as symbolic fashion, after his many adventures on the way to self-realization. He meditates on light, trying to separate himself in a quite physical way from the darkness that the oppression of his race confers on him: “Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.”73 For this, the invisible man needs no ordinary hundred-watt bulb. He must be drenched in light, and has equipped his basement hideaway somewhere near Harlem with bulbs from floor to ceiling: That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. . . . Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. (7)

Ellison takes pains to separate the invisible man’s hyperillumination from that of downtown. New York’s radiance sheds no glory on it, no glow on him: My hole is warm and full of light, Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s

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dream night. . . . Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization—pardon me, our whole culture. (6)

The invisible man possesses a Conradian sense of his culture—it’s not worthy of being called a civilization—and its lack of genuine illumination. Like imperial London, New York is “one of the dark places of the earth.” The commercial, vertical, twinkling and blinking of Manhattan’s photographic dreamworld cannot, in its blindness to the blindness that race creates, equal in brightness the truth that emanates from the walls of this fugitive’s underground room. Ellison’s meditation gives a special twist to the history and meaning of artificial light, returning us to the encounter with nocturnal modernity with which this book began. Modernist writers such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald were, Ellison felt, too concerned with technique to give adequate attention to the larger moral dimensions of technology and race in American culture.74 His book argues for a more engaged, avant-gardist effort that will deliberately “traverse” modernization and the electrical world to find for his African American spokesman a modern, liberated identity in which he can come to light for himself. African Americans, Ellison wrote in 1958, “were denied anything like participation in the European cultures which flowered as a result of the transformation of civilization under the growth of technology. But now it is precisely technology which promises them release from the brutalizing effects of over three hundred years of racism and European domination. . . . One thing seems clear, certain possibilities of culture are achievable only through the presence of industrial techniques.”75 It is electricity that enables the invisible man to reach these possibilities. He makes light his own, first on almost a literal level. As the critic John S. Wright has argued, Ellison seeks to reveal African Americans not as primitives but as “hypermodern, self-fabricated creations.”76 In having the bulbloving narrator call himself a “thinker-tinker” who is “kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin” (7), Ellison was apparently referring to Louis Latimer, the “Black Edison” who in 1881 developed and patented the carbon filament electric lightbulb. Showing that technology can be an African American environment, Ellison “blackens” technology, taking it then to the metaphoric level as his hero bathes in the light of self-consciousness in the same way that the modernist flâneurs of Poe and Baudelaire had bathed in the crowd. But there remains a high-tension opposition between the invisible man’s bulbs and the fabled city lights downtown. He rejects the spectacle of light as a mystification that imposes the white/light racist narrative on all who see it, for, he says, he has been “boomeranged” by history “so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness” (6). Even on “a photographer’s dream night” this is mere outer illumination, fantasy advertising for the white city, not the spotlit scrutiny that dawning self-awareness demands.

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In contrast even to Langston Hughes, who uses Harlem’s neon lights in expressive ways—as signs literalized in a poem (“Neon Signs”) or signaling the romance of night (“Juke Box Love Song”)—Ellison appropriates his unphotographed, hidden lights to construct a still-unfolding identity, the 1,369 bulbs apparently representing an autobiographical moment, inverting two digits of the year Ellison came to New York: 1936. In Invisible Man, the tide of self-searching does not turn until the narrator is repeatedly mistaken on the street for a man named Rinehart. Each time the mistaken context—a street deal, a flirting woman, and a grateful church parishioner—reveals a new identity: “Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend. Could he himself be both rind and heart?” (486–87). Rinehart seems partially based on the character of Toly the Creeper in Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven.77 But he is more than a street-smart hustler; in his multiple personalities he is an eye-opening role model for the modern world: “I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home” (487). So he decides, “I’d have to do a Rinehart” (496). But to script his own play, the invisible man must recognize that the Brotherhood has been using him, that he is invisible to them as he has been to himself. I am exploited and therefore I am, he reasons. “Well, I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen” (496). This insight is the first step toward true progress—a step toward the stage of identity. As he explains in the prologue, “I myself . . . did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (7). On the street by Central Park he looks into himself; in the summer night he experiences a profound revelation: And now all past humiliations became precious parts of my experience, and for the first time, leaning against that stone wall in the sweltering night, I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, I felt memories welling up within me. . . . They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me. (496)

Accepting his past, he gains power to fight blindness. He will put on a show, feign, deceive, invent, and pretend, all the while keeping his own counsel and going his own way. Without knowing it he’d been wearing masks made by others, but now he will wear his own. Yet before the invisible man can go very far with his new role, a riot breaks out in Harlem. It is a night that will collapse time and end it; an urban Revelation is nigh. Ellison sends his protagonist uptown into a race riot whose events suggest a biblical Judgment Day. Four men, like the four

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horsemen of the Apocalypse, steal a safe as the cops who “thrust flaming pistols before them” like avenging angels, fire at them. The safe—an image of the locked consciousness of black America—rolls off to hit the third rail of the streetcar line, sending up “a curtain of sparks that lit up the block like a blue dream” (523–24). The riot scenes, based on the Harlem riots of 1943 that Ellison had reported on for the New York Post, answer Hughes’s famous question in “Harlem” (1951): “What happens to a dream deferred?” Does it “dry up / like a raisin in sun”—the daytime dessication of hope that the narrator has tried to forestall—“Or”—by implication, at night, “does it explode?”78 The “blue-tinted” phantasmagoric night of upheaval that Ellison describes refers to the faces of the rioters, the uniforms of the police, and the way in which the “black and blue” state of Harlem’s residents has burst into a transformative, deformative blues of sound and action: Up the street there sounded the crashing of huge sheets of glass and through the blue mysteriousness of the dark the walks shimmered like shattered mirrors. All the street’s signs were dead, all the day sounds had lost their stable meaning. Somewhere a burglar alarm went off, a meaningless blangy sound, followed by the joyful shouts of looters. (525)

Signs dead, stable meanings lost, the apocalyptic city crashes to pieces around him. Going east across 125th Street, he sees in the moonlight how “the shattered glass glittered in the street like the water of a flooded river upon the surface of which I ran as in a dream” (525). Crossing the glassy river to the other side of life, the narrator is pulled up short: “Ahead of me the body hung, white, naked, and horribly feminine from a lamppost. I felt myself spin around with horror.” He sees seven bodies in all, seven seals for his personal apocalypse, spinning, “all hanging before a gutted storefront.” But they turn out to be mannequins—“ ‘Dummies!’ I said aloud. Hairless, bald and sterilely feminine” (543). The shock to the narrator comes from the sickening fear of seeing violence against blacks reproduced with the lynching of white women; he momentarily fears his white girlfriend Sybil is among them. Inverting the lamppost lynching of black men during the 1863 Draft Riots, the scene seems descended from a photo in Weegee’s Naked City, taken after the Harlem riots of 1943: a white man dumps battered, dismembered nude female mannequins, apparent victims of the riot, into a chute leading to the store’s basement, while Weegee’s caption reads, “The flower of ‘America’s pure white womanhood, is saved from a fate worse than . . . Death.’ ” Typically, Weegee claims that he saw the riot coming—one more example of how the white world stage-manages the show uptown. Without catching anyone in the act of rioting, Weegee includes in Naked City a picture of police with

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Figure 6.14. Weegee, Riot in Harlem, Mannequins, 1943. In Naked City (1945). Used with the permission of the International Center of Photography, New York

nightsticks hopping off the back of a truck: “Then the hoodlum element takes over,” he comments, “looting and destroying . . . The cops arrive in ‘sanitation’ trucks . . . to clean up.” On the following page, we see a young black man who clutches his head and stomach being led into a police station, while facing him Weegee sets a man at a masquerade ball wearing a striped prison outfit. “Harlem forgets its wounds quickly,” Weegee remarks blithely, “on the surface anyway.”79 Weegee’s casual image of the riots is quite different from a painted interpretation by the African American artist William H. Johnson of the same 1943 riots, in which six people were killed and police brutality alleged. Johnson ironically plays the romance of his title, Moon Over Harlem (1944), against the street-level violence. The posterlike painting uses its muchsimplified figures and buildings to clarify a narrative that Ellison makes disorientingly nightmarish (color plate 26). Six light-skinned police take control, leading or dragging away four darker-skinned civilians: an older

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man wearing a tie and a top hat; two younger men, one standing beneath a lamppost, and one prostrate in the street; and in the center three cops holding a woman upside down, one leg and one breast exposed. Blood, bottles, and hats litter the pavement around the arrested people, while in the background the indifferent moon sits in the sky above a schematic city skyline. Ellison himself worked as a photographer while writing Invisible Man, and spoke in his 1981 introduction of how “details of old photographs . . . fell into place” as he wrote (xiii–xiv). Revisiting Weegee’s images, he questions white claims to power, knowledge, and even omniscience. With apparently sympathetic cynicism, Weegee foresees, photographs, and analyses the riot, while the invisible man, caught up in events and utterly surprised by the turn they take, cannot shed enough light on his own psyche to obtain an accurate reading, never mind dissect the motivations of others. Only because he is so invisible, his own situation so little understood, can Weegee and the white world presume to speak for him when they are merely looking through him. But in the riot, the invisible man is forced from transparent spectatorship into action. Even his invisibility is momentarily shaken. On to the stage of the night, surrounded by his men, enters “Ras the Exhorter become Ras the Destroyer upon a great black horse.” A Selassien foil for the narrator, Ras is an impressive orator who has been struggling to win the allegiance of the same people in the street who seem swayed by the narrator’s rhetoric on behalf of the Brotherhood. In the riot, Ras rides the wave of violence toward revenge not only on whites but also on the narrator. For Ellison, the hot-blooded back-to-Africa movement is just as frightening as the chilling manipulations of the Brotherhood. Ras, “dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain,” is “a figure more out of a dream than out of Harlem, than out of even this Harlem night, yet real, alive, alarming” (544). His men see the narrator: “It’s the brother,” one of them cries, not permitting him to escape the identity others have forged for him. Ras throws a spear at the narrator, who dodges so that it pierces one of the hanging white dummies instead, symbolically killing some of the white-influenced aspects of his thinking. “Ignore his lying tongue,” Ras shouted. “Hang him up to teach the black people a lesson, and theer be no more traitors. No more Uncle Toms. Hang him up theer with them blahsted dummies!” (545)

A final time the narrator is to be pushed up on a stage by someone else, to be hung up as a lesson for the good of others. Coming to the sudden understanding “that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others,” the narrator grabs the spear and throws it back, pinning Ras’s jaws shut (547).

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FPO

Figure 6.15. Morgan and Marvin Smith, A Street-corner Orator, 125th Street, c. 1938. © Morgan and Marvin Smith. Morgan and Marvin Smith Collection, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Ellison’s conception of Ras may have been stimulated by the photographic work of Morgan and Marvin Smith, well-known African American twin brothers who covered Harlem events and photographed Harlem nightlife over several decades from the 1930s through the 1960s.80 Their picture of A Street-corner Orator (c. 1938) uncannily suggests details of Ras’s part in the novel. Chalked on the makeshift platform from which a man addresses the crowd on a Harlem summer night appear to be the letters “ras d killer.” A second-story sign over a drugstore opposite has an arrow directing people to a business on Lenox Avenue; like the spear that the invisible man tosses, the arrow aims straight at the orator’s mouth. From the Smith brothers as from Weegee, Ellison the photographer likely incorporated visual ideas that would serve Ellison the writer as literary symbols—the lynched dummies, the idea of an orator/killer whose mouth will be muted by the instrument of his own verbal violence, and maybe even the rescue, down a chute, “from a fate worse than death.”

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For as he runs to escape lynching by Ras’s men and then to flee white vigilantes, the narrator falls into an open manhole. It’s a trick ending, in a way—the only way for the puppet to get free of his strings and off the stage that racial politics have thrust him on to without regard for his own visibility as a human being. He ends up in a coal cellar, a sudden, paradoxically enlightening descent into a dark hell for this hero of epic resilience but equally epic problems. The whites who stare after him cannot see him; turned into the cliché of formless darkness, a “Nigger in the coalpile” (553), he sets about discovering his identity on his own terms. First, he goes through the briefcase he has carried throughout the book, and with the aid of matches burns one by one the documents that have organized his life up until now: diplomas, letters of introduction, and his secret party name. Burning his masks, he begins to understand the value of light, both symbolic and literal, to discover his true form. Like the “dark night piece” parodied by rationalists of the Enlightenment back in the eighteenth century (figure I.3), the invisible man demands an immense amount of candlepower and perseverance from those who would see him clearly. He begins and ends his book by describing himself as a hibernator, “Jack-the-Bear”—who having bided time in his lair, now readies himself to reemerge on the surface. But what new darkness will he enter when he comes out of his light-flooded hole? Like the lights of New York, his burning intelligence is searching for something that seems reluctant to materialize. Still, he suggests that his readers might, having heard his story, be ready to see something of themselves in him. “Who knows,” he says in a Whitmanesque final sentence, “but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (568). The nighttime riot and revelation reveal a self until then lost in American life and culture. Despite the novel’s opening disclaimer, “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe” (3), the invisible man has learned that “the true darkness lies within my own mind” (566), and like Poe’s Dupin, he solves the crime of his everyday social invisibility at night, secluded from the world. As he works his way into light, modernity, and self-consciousness, the invisible man represents all selves in art and life who want to be seen: “Look at me!” he yells (494). As in Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933), as in Hopper’s Nighthawks and van Gogh’s Café de Nuit, Ellison’s narrator takes refuge in the light, using it as a shield, however flimsy, against existential darkness. But he is exceptional in his racial specificity and readiness to face the light alone, solo, offstage and underground, under his own spotlight, where an inward, inner theater produces truth: “The truth is the light and light is the truth” (6–7). As does Conrad, Ellison collapses familiar light/dark oppositions of race and illumination, but he is not content with that. Having shown how darkness can lead to light and having traversed city lights, he rejects light as spectacle, light as colonizer, light as lovely, Lethean cover-up. He insists, finally, on

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light as a process, a form of dialogue between light and dark, black and white, self and other, a way of understanding and communicating, a way to say “I” and still “speak for you.” For all that Invisible Man teaches about vision and blindness in the modern city, and about the ways in which racial and personal identities can be, sometimes forcibly, enacted and performed, the novel understands the light of nocturnal New York in a very simple way. The empire of light is a hoax, the stage of the night an empty diversion peopled by ghosts. Having survived the Apocalypse and gained personal Revelation, the narrator grasps the world in metaphysical terms that take us back to Hawthorne’s “Night Walks” or even to Plato’s cave. We walk in megawatted darkness, and need to study our own blackness before we can see ourselves or others can see us. When the invisible man says, “Light confirms my reality,” and writes African Americans into the script of technologically advanced grapplers with the urban night, he utters a statement of belief and hope that also sums up the city’s universal delusion, its desperate desire to be seen, its hunger for light, its mythic need to be consumed as an essential image of modernity. We who look are the “you” that Ellison addresses. Through the invisible man, New York itself speaks.

Then See It! Back into the city! Nowhere The subtle! Everywhere the electric! —William Carlos Williams, The Wanderer 81

Electricity kills the subtle mysteries of the city night—and then resurrects them in new forms. Then these too bleach out, darken, dazzle, and redazzle, until art and life stare at each other in dazed confrontation. By the 1940s, not only had the distant view of the city at night come to seem too romantic, too taken with the painful beauty of its own impressions; the streets and sidewalks also taunted the imagination. They blazed with myriad spotlit performances whose meaning refused to be read. Nocturnal New York, prime material for art, would no longer cooperate. This is the implicit argument of William Carlos Williams’s savage poem “The Last Turn,” written in 1944, two years after Nighthawks, near the close of Weegee’s shooting spree, a year after the Harlem riots, and a year before Ellison would begin Invisible Man. The bright lights of Manhattan were intermittently “browned out” during World War II, to save energy and render the city less vulnerable to aerial attack. The brownout may have seemed to some as marking

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Figure 6.16. James W. Kerr (1897–1994), Times Square Dim-Out, 1944. Oil on canvas, 18 ⫻ 20 in. (45.7 ⫻ 50.8 cm). Museum of the City of New York [77.16.3]

a temporary decline of the U.S. empire—a perhaps welcome return to the shores of darkness and its nocturnes. James W. Kerr’s painting Times Square Dim-Out (1944) shows the usual crowds, the usual attractive young women seeing and being seen, on the sidewalks under the movie marquees. But now the ceiling of light hovers at first-floor level. In a theatrical night world rescaled to human size, facial signs appear to have become more important than neon ones—though the thrills of the night, in the form of “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,” lurk in dark letters at the top of the canvas. And yet even amid the dimouts, the city frequently glittered in the darkness, as contemporary photographs attest.82 Drawn from New Jersey into close-up contact with the midtown uproar, Williams sought to make sense of the unrelenting sex, violence, and artistic provocation of the nighttime city. As he reconsidered his earlier ways of conceiving the city, Williams recapitulated a century of nocturnal image-making. He showed what had come of Thoreau’s search for poetry in the night’s terra incognita, and where Poe’s quest to know the Man of the Crowd had led his successors.

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In “The Last Turn,” Williams combines the elements of his earlier poems on nocturnal New York—the lights, the beloved, the dream-shattering city—by boldly literalizing the symbolic desire to immobilize the unattainable city-woman of his dreams. Instead of describing an unreachable fantasy city glowing on the horizon, Williams begins with a graphic account of a woman killed in a car crash: Then see it! in distressing detail—from behind a red light at 53rd and 8th of a November evening, the jazz of the cross lights echoing the crazy weave of the breaking mind: splash of a half purple, half naked woman’s body whose jeweled guts the cars drag up and down—83

As if he were taking to extremes Bishop’s “From the Country to the City,” Williams insists on the dangerous immediacy of nocturnal experience where the automobile is a deadly weapon as well as an aesthetic device, where the drive along the harlequin’s torso turns into a smashup at its head. Here life rips apart the artistic frame that tries to exploit it for aesthetic purposes. “Then see it!” Williams assaults the notion of a “safe” theatrical spectacle by pushing the viewer to confront “in distressing detail” the horrors that the darkness, distance, and sparkling lights usually conceal. It is as if Williams must commit sexual violence to shatter his poetic illusions. The seductive lure of the distant city yields, close-up, to the deathly nakedness of the scarlet woman, bejeweled whore of the American Babylon. And yet even then the evanescent woman-city cannot be immobilized—even after death her body is dragged “up and down” by passing cars. Art, for Williams, cannot be divorced from the crude facts from which it emerges, but even then he filters the crude facts through an artistic veil of music and tapestry. The moving lights of traffic create a jazz rhythm whose “crazy weave” simulates the fabric of a mind and body torn by the shock of the city, until the appallingly “jeweled” flesh spills out like the city’s glittering lights toward the observer. In his “breaking mind” the viewer emulates the victim, brain torn open by the sight of the woman whom the cars have turned inside out, her interior made exterior and splashed on the streets. The world of dream and skyscraper fantasy is made flesh before our eyes. In the next lines, Williams extends the vulnerability and carnage to the inanimate material of the city itself: “No house but has its brains / blown off by the dark!” (lines 10–11). Like a shotgun, the masculine violence of the

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night splatters both inner and outer landscapes across the page of the city. By then, there is, says Williams, Nothing recognizable, the whole one jittering direction made of all directions spelling the inexplicable. (lines 12–14)

The urban electrical sublime returns with a vengeance, full of light and fury, signifying nothing. As he moves from the graphic opening lines to an illegible text written by the night, Williams retraces the visual history of New York’s nocturnal representations, from Jacob Riis’s flare-lit slum photographs at the turn of the century to the postwar abstract expressionist vision of Manhattan as pure motion, gesture, and color. At first, Williams evokes the rawness of New York imagery in the 1940s. His “half / naked” combination of sensationalism and lurid detail emulates the brutal, flash-lit intensity of Weegee’s corpses and their strewn-about accessories. If Weegee’s photos inevitably focus with harsh or humorous irony on the human side of the city, Williams’s metaphors insist on the omnipresence of art in the midst of the actual. Yet as the poem’s focus dissolves, its “jittering” palimpsest of lights recalls Joseph Stella’s riotous lights at Coney Island or, even more closely, the calligraphic paintings of Mark Tobey, the most obsessive painter of the city’s swirling lights in the 1940s and 1950s.84 Although his “white writing” style allies him with Jackson Pollock and the New York School, Tobey usually started from specific urban locales, using lines of light to build a spectacular Babel whose hyperillumination flares into abstraction. This is what he captured in his painting Broadway (1935), where the buildings, streets, and even people around Times Square are outlined in a zigzag geometry of light from signs, becoming signs themselves, and in Electric Night and City Radiance (both 1944), where the whole city has burst into a blazing, barely legible palimpsest. Completed in the same year as “The Last Turn,” these paintings provide a visual equivalent for the poem’s mysterious spelling, a confused and dazzling script of white light that assaults the viewer as if it were electrified graffiti. But in what “jittering direction made of all / directions” do the signs point? Is there life or meaning beyond them? “Spelling the inexplicable,” Williams seems to textualize the physical brutality of the city while simultaneously claiming that it cannot be translated or contained by art. The poem’s final lines insist that harsh reality cannot be separated from the poet’s endeavor to make it something more: pigment upon flesh and flesh the pigment the genius of a world,

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Figure 6.17. Mark Tobey (1890–1976), City Radiance, 1944. Tempera, 18 ¾ ⫻ 13 ½ in. (47.6 ⫻ 34.3 cm). Private collection

against which rages the fury of our concepts, artless but supreme. (lines 15–18)

The nocturnal world that Howells first recorded had yet to be painted; but now, Williams recognizes, everything is pigment and paint, everything is

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aestheticized, even flesh itself. The “fury of our concepts” that Williams seems to identify as an artistic drive, reveals the pervasive, omnivorous violence of art, which parallels the violence of the car crash. The scene recalls a Weegee photo in which two men stand over a woman who lies in the street, grimacing in pain. “Accident or crime” runs the caption. Like the photographer, the poet capitalizes on the crash he sets up artistically. He ritually disembowels and sacrifices the woman on the altar of art. Her skin pigment, her blood, become his paint, and her flesh his genius. This deromanticized night not only reveals the crude, fundamental materiality of both life and art, it also permits the strong-stomached poet to reaestheticize it by artfully sketching the nocturnal violence that for city dwellers is no mere illustration. What the “The Last Turn” brings into the open is the lethal, unresolved tension between the seductive spectacle of city lights and the struggles for aesthetic and sexual control that these lights generate. There is no stopping the traffic of compelling images that writers and artists, like cars, drag up and down. The “last turn” the car takes, the last turn the pedestrian makes, is off the cliff of life into the maw of death, which leads straight into the artistic mill. The poet’s last turn is on to a road not taken, the impossible turn from art back to life. But even when the stage collapses, New York’s nocturnal performance must go on. Once the seductive, voyeuristic, or shocking image grabs us, we yield to the dark allure of a self-conscious art that shamelessly keeps on exploiting the abuses of power, sexuality, and metaphor that it so compulsively exposes. Explosive, enticing, and often cruel, the disquieting charms of nocturnal New York prove impossible to ignore. They create an appetite for their promised rewards that their image stimulates even further. In “America, America” (1954), Delmore Schwartz imagined an archetypal modern poet, successor to Whitman, who would have to be an insatiable nocturnal visionary, a poet “of the lights, the stars”: “This is the city self, looking from window to lighted window,” Schwartz proclaimed, “It is the city consciousness / Which sees and says: more: more and more: always more.”85 The “city self ” finds, like the invisible man, that there can never be enough light to explore Babylon, to extend its empires, to project its fantasies further and brighter. What has happened to the nocturne? The river of light flows the wrong way. A boat against the current, the nocturne is borne forward ceaselessly into the future, where it tenaciously reminds us that there was once a darkness in our past. So we haunt the spotlit, glaring urban night, nighthawks hovering in search of visual prey. We can hear the cops saying, “Move along, folks, show’s over.” But for those who stage the night and for those who hunger for “more: more and more: always more,” New York’s show is always only just beginning.

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EPILOGUE O insomniac Manhattan nights! So stirred up with lively lights. —Leopold Senghor, New York 1 I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it. —Groucho Marx2

Night Now Night goes on, lights go on. Since the 1950s, it has mostly been business as usual in nocturnal Manhattan: ever-brighter lights, sharper edges, and stranger colors. More beauty and more ugliness revealed, more profit, more longing, and more fear generated, as artistic and economic colonizers of the night try to wring ever-greater returns from night’s territory. Whatever appeal the actual city has lost in a suburbanizing world, it has gained in the representational realm. As an aesthetic icon, the place to set a story, paint a picture, film a movie, go to a stage show, or plaster on a postcard, the night city has triumphed. The metropolis at night functions as a perpetual-motion mechanism of repulsion and attraction, simultaneously a house of horrors and a field of fantasy. The land of night now seems to contain more and more of everything except, of course, darkness—and what darkness used to bring: peace, solitude, and repose. In his poem “The Oven Bird,” Robert Frost wrote of a warbler whose late-summer song seems to ask where the season went, and why. Collectively, the makers and lovers of nocturnes appear to have been echoing him: “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.” Yet if night’s diminution as a space of darkness dismays some, it excites others. It is still the hand of darkness that in a sense turns on the lights. Through the pressure of its invisible presence, darkness continues to shape the light and how we use it. For those alert to new opportunities, Frost’s question might be more aptly rephrased as, “What to make of a transformed thing.” In “New York Love Song (Part I Lower East Side)” (1994), the poet Lydia Tomkiw writes compellingly of the city’s perennially dangerous

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attraction and what it means to be hooked on the lights: “Give me this forever,” the poet says, the memory of the desperate ride back into Manhattan In a renegade limo, the city gleaming in front of us like Some obscene neon fishing lure.3

The desire to deal with the latest manifestations of ever-lit night merges with the ongoing challenge of finding artistic forms and images through which to express them. Like each viewer, each artistic style and -ism finds its own version of nocturnal New York, as techniques proliferate and the megawatt nocturnal image becomes no longer the exception but the rule. In the past half-century, the ideas and motifs addressed in this book have persisted and evolved. With almost infinite variety and invention, the nighttime art and literature of postmodern Manhattan continue to rework, recycle, and renovate the interwoven strands of the nocturnal tapestry begun back in gaslit Babylon. The moral condemnation of the city as a sinful Babylon may have lost some of its edge to merge with quality-of-life issues, and more pioneers and settlers may be living on night’s frontier, in a 24-7 flurry of aroundthe-clock activity, occupations, and amusements. But a visit to the seamy side of the street can still bring dire consequences, as Foster warned 150 years ago. The moral and physical hazards of the (less and less) dark city, its novel beauties, latest conquests, naked fantasies, and exhibitionist love of a good show—these themes have tenaciously recurred since 1950, and still engage us as the culture struggles to understand city lights in a new millennium. To take just one example, skyscraper fantasy has been reimagined far more explicitly for a self-consciously voyeuristic age. In Madelon Vriesendorp’s Flagrant délit, from the cover drawing for Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978), the Empire State and Chrysler buildings are discovered lying in bed with each other. The outraged RCA Building has just burst in, shining a spotlight on a suggestively curvy Chrysler Building. The other skyscrapers of the city, each with a staring human head, peer in the window to watch. Caught in the act of eroticizing tall buildings, the skyscraperpeople represent the picture’s viewers—all are captured in flagrant délit enjoying not only the bodies of the lovers but the thrill of exposing their sexual being. The beams converge on the spires of the couple in the bed as well as on a bedside lamp styled to emulate the Statue of Liberty’s hand and torch. The old symbol of freedom becomes the new symbol of surveillance. Night’s romance has been turned into a vigilante raid. With the artificially lit nightscape becoming an ever-larger part of ever-more lives, the city’s dreams and denizens can seem to pursue us like hungry predators. As Jean Garrigue concludes the poem “Bleecker Street” (1970), “And night comes round the corner after you. . . .”4

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Figure E.1. Madelon Vriesendorp, Flagrant délit, 1978. In Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (1978). Office of Metropolitan Architecture

But nowadays the beast of night may stalk in guises somewhat different from those familiar to Bishop or Hopper, Whitman or Williams. Rather than trace the intricate or obvious transformations of each motif addressed in earlier chapters, these last pages meditate on where New York nights have been heading in recent decades, in image and actuality. My conclusion ponders one of the more astonishing developments in human history: the need to protect the night. For night, once the greatest predator of all, now comes around the corner as a pale ghost of its former self, an endangered species licking its wounds and looking for help.

Whose Night? In New York you can buy things so late at night. —E. B. White, The Lure of New York5

In contemporary New York, night is a store that is always open. The urban night is an emporium, a bazaar, a place where the man of the crowd can shop while others sell, a place of getting and spending. Doug Safranek’s

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Figure E.2. Douglas Safranek (b. 1956), Still Open, 1994. Egg tempera on panel, 4 5/8 ⫻ 4 in. (11.7 ⫻ 10.1 cm). Museum of the City of New York [95.6]

painting Still Open (1994) provides a retail version of John Sloan’s The City from Greenwich Village. From Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the viewer looks out over a midground of dark apartment buildings toward the high horizon, lit by the distant sparkle of Manhattan towers and bridges. But in the lower foreground is an all-night market, around which cluster many figures drawn by more immediate forces: the warm light and the need for something the store might offer. If the night is a vendor’s counter, it is also a commodity in itself, to be held, bought, sold, or stolen. Back in the 1960s, Black Muslim author Amiri Baraka claimed the night as an ally in the struggle against racism, in his “State/Meant” (1965): “We are black magicians, black art / s we make in

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black labs of the heart.” Opposing “black art” against deathly whiteness, he wrote: The day will not save them and we own the night.6

The desire for black ownership of the night builds on the age-old escape to night of the oppressed—and the cultural weight of the black skin/black night connection. But American capitalism has had its own ideas of possession. In the 1980s, an ad campaign for beer featured pictures of the New York skyline over the slogan, “The night belongs to Michelob.” A while later, ads for Camel Lites cigarettes punningly ordered consumers to “Light up the Night.” By the end of the century, the forces of commodification had turned the black ownership of the night into a marketing concept. Black magic, the media argued, was better employed on sexual objects and looking cool. “Control the Night” read a subway ad for Seagram’s Extra Dry Gin in 2002. On the poster an African American couple faced each other in silhouette, cocktail glasses in hand. Capitalism sought to co-opt politics, tempting blacks back toward the sexuality compartment of 1920s, now as consumers as well as entertainers. When Baraka wrote that “we own / the night,” he could hardly have imagined how the ironies would proliferate, how possessing a piece of the night would help the white light spread. At the center of night’s buying and selling lies Times Square. In the past century, it has been both the brightest star and darkest pit of New York’s night. After half a century of radiance, its luster began to dim in the late 1950s, and in the 1960s and 1970s it gradually acquired the reputation as a center for sleaze and crime, the former “Crossroads of the World” becoming the wildest outpost on night’s frontier. In Robert Frank’s photograph Times Square (1959), six guys in jackets and ties, four of them standing, cram into a convertible Rolls-Royce that zooms out of a haze of blazing signs toward the viewer. The image suggests the glamour of night, speed, and excitement—but also oppressive, reckless masculinity and wealth, male power ostentatiously looking for a good time and ready to pay for it. These men enjoy the spotlight, and you pity the women or men they are looking to pick up. For many people, Martin Scorcese’s film Taxi Driver (1976) became the definitive statement of Times Square’s descent into unrepentant raunchiness, violently transcending John Schlesinger’s more restrained Midnight Cowboy (1969). But John Rechy’s docu-novel City of Night (1963) described much earlier the lurid and lonely world of hustling. Moreover, it recognized the risky but irresistible attraction of a place that had become “a magnet for all the lonesome exiles jammed into this city.” A stranger to New York, the

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Figure E.3. Robert Frank, Times Square, 1959

book’s narrator finds that he too must frequent this “electric island floating on a larger island of lonesome parts and lonesome apartment houses and knifepointed buildings stretching Up.” In Rechy’s world, an “army of youngmen” work the streets, unable or unwilling to kick the Times Square habit: From the thundering underground—the maze of the New York subways— the world pours into Times Square. Like lost souls emerging from the purgatory of the trains . . . the newyork faces push into the air: spilling into 42nd Street and Broadway. . . . And the world of that street bursts like a rocket into a shattered phosphorescent world. Giant signs—Bigger! Than! Life!—blink off and on. And a great hungry sign groping luridly at the darkness screams: f*a*s*c*i*n*a*t*i*o*n

As Rechy implied, Times Square was an amusement park with its pants down, where street life explodes like fireworks. A libidinally unzipped version of Coney Island, it was perhaps less ironic than inevitable that it should be transformed into a night-city theme park.7 For as a renowned concatenation of sights and sites, as the highest-profile “brand name” in nightlife, Times Square was too valuable not to “renew.” Cleaning up Babylon on Broadway, developers, municipal authorities,

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businesses, and consumers scoured the dark heart of Sin City. Plans for the redevelopment of Times Square were laid in the early 1980s. It was targeted, along with Bryant Park and Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, as emblematic of the city’s decline in prosperity and self-respect. But it took until the mid-1990s for the changes to gather momentum and the new construction to remake the face of the area in a shiny corporateculture, mass-consumption way, featuring chain stores and suburban-style food and lodging.8 By then the X-rated movie houses and porno parlors had yielded to cartoon figures and toy stores. The Disneyfication of Times Square, amid a supersigned bonfire of commodities, reburnished the Great White Way’s reputation as an unending festival of display and consumption. If the era’s mood had little tolerance for homosexuals, the homeless, the poor, or the addicted—groups that were hardest hit in the cleanup—it did make a stab at preserving, at least superficially, the glitzy character of the area. In 1985 the Municipal Art Society helped create a ruling, put into effect in 1987, that developers had to preserve the world-famous signage by making sure that the base of new office buildings would be covered with eye-assaulting advertising. In so doing they ensured a great light show, but also took a decisive step in turning the night city into a museum. With electric signs no longer an essential form of economic communication—the brands and shows are already known from media that travel farther than a flashing light—what counts is status, the fact of having one’s product blazoned at the center of light. An image from the bad old days has emerged as a postscript to the lost world of vice: Andy Freeberg’s black-and-white photograph Endless Lust (1983). It depicts a lone man, bent against the storm, trudging down the middle of a snow-filled Forty-second Street. Over him a movie marquee blares a Weegee-esque prophecy: “Endless Lust.” An ironic comment on the death of the Times Square sex industry, frozen out, whited out by the good guys, the photo also hints that what the newly old Times Square represented will never really die. But many wish it would. Simultaneous with the makeover was another movement, in which artists and activists made repossession of the night a priority from a feminist and anticommercial point of view. They made clear how the night city put women and violence on stage together for spectacle and profit, and they sought to expose the mechanisms of exploitation, even as they found a perversely attractive beauty lurking within it. Mix feminism with myth, and a contested history of night’s ownership emerges: the night was once a woman’s world and it now belongs to men. “In the symbols and myths of most peoples the night is chaos, the realm of dreams,” writes the historian of night Wolfgang Schivelbusch. “The night is feminine, just as the day is masculine, and like everything feminine, it holds both repose and terror.”9 Since the 1970s, American women have mounted a campaign to “Take Back the Night,” an annual event whose conceptual impact carries

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Figure E.4. Andy Freeberg, Endless Lust, 1983. Courtesy of the photographer

over into the making of oppositional nocturnal imagery—by men as well as women.10 In the artistic realm, the idea of “taking back the night” covers a broad range of styles and politics, from those focused on sexual violence and exploitation to those building a more general opposition to the status quo. In Times Square, one could cite three different approaches toward siting a woman’s place in the night. In 1977 Alex Katz’s huge billboard painting, 240 feet long, featured a friezelike series of women’s faces, portrayed in his characteristically flat, posterish style. Wordless and calm in a frenetic, hyperverbal environment, the women exuded an intelligence and classical self-possession at odds with their commercial-style aggrandizement and the general tenor of sexploitation in the neighborhood. A few years later, in 1982, the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer also employed one of the media of Times Square as a way to challenge its ethos. She used the central Spectacolor Board on the prow of the former Times Building, just above the headline “zipper,” to display in massive, animated letters some of her deadpan “Truisms” such as “Private property created crime“ and “Men don’t protect you anymore.” Declaimed from the pulpit of the almighty dollar’s showiest church, Holzer’s art-texts had a particular context-enhanced impact; they entered public space as real players in the nocturnal arena of commercialized light. Open to many interpretations, the phrases pushed people to probe, directly or indirectly, a range of issues extending

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from the unequal distribution of wealth to the fact that most of the homeless are women. A third response came from artist Jane Dickson, who chose to live in the Times Square area in the 1980s, during its raunchiest period. As a result, she said, “I knew what it felt like to be afraid of the city, the dark, the unknown. I knew something about isolation, I understood neon and night and parts of Times Square.”11 Her work deserves attention because it further pursues questions about staging, voyeurism, and violence raised in the 1940s and 1950s. Looking out her window on to the porn shops and prostitutes, the junkies, hustlers, and cops, she watched the harsh light bear down on lurid situations where those who want to be seen come into close proximity with those who don’t. Like a Hopper thrust deeper into the city’s moral mire, Dickson put her characters on a lonely night stage, full of neon and menace. They are often backlit so that their faces and intentions remain in shadow. One series of paintings, Cops in Headlights, shows policemen silhouetted by car headlights, hands reaching for weapons, running toward an unseen object somewhere in the direction of the viewer. She hung another series, her window-size “Witness” paintings, above eye level to require viewers to look up, conscious of being watched by tense, shadowy figures silhouetted in the frames. Viewers find themselves in the position of criminals or victims, placed under surveillance because of their implied location: out in the street in the middle of the night. Emotionally hot where Katz and Holzer were cool, Dickson aimed toward a figurative exposure of the masculine presence in the night—an approach she made literal in Chippendales (1993), where she highlights male strippers. Dickson’s most iconic image is Peep Land (1984), showing a man lighting a cigarette on the sidewalk outside a peep joint (color plate 27). The doorway is shaped like a giant keyhole, and in the rounded top part a single eye, surrounded in lightbulbs like a movie marquee, looks out. The store’s proprietors no doubt meant the eye to be that of the customer, getting a surreptitious peak through a slot at a naked woman. But there is something feminine about the eye, which stares out not only at the man on the sidewalk with his postorgasmic butt but at the viewer too. When we look, the artist and the stripper look back. “I was interested,” Dickson said later about pictures made inside the peep-shop doors, “in being a spy in these places where a woman’s only role is to be the naked object. . . . I chose to draw what I observed in oilstick on sandpaper; the creamy sensuousness of the oil on the abrasive surface echoed the seductive/repulsive push-pull of the experience.”12 Dickson moved out of Times Square in the early 1990s, just as the renovation hit its stride.13 But there were plenty of other places in the city demanding attention for their association, for better or worse, with perceived forces of darkness. In the 1970s and 1980s, some artist-activists of the

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Figure E.5. Jane Dickson, Witness (J. A.), 1991. Oil and Roll-A-Tex on canvas, 70 ⫻ 35 in. (177.8 ⫻ 88.9 cm). Used by kind permission of the artist

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downtown scene began working directly in the streets at night to confront or reveal night’s dark secrets. In 1982, Richard Hambleton painted over four hundred black silhouettes on walls of parking areas, vacant lots, and deserted streets. Potential predators, victims, or spies, these lurking forms continued the exploration of urban fear that Hambleton had begun in the late 1970s, with the murder-scene-style white outlines of apparently fallen bodies, adorned with blood red paint, that he spread over sidewalks in cities across the United States. More engagingly, during the 1980s Keith Haring animated the subway’s eternal night by drawing cartoonish white outlines—the same kind of outlines that appear so menacing on a sidewalk—on the black paper covering unrenewed ads along station platforms. Hopping off a train in the night, Haring would do his artwork in a matter of minutes, sometimes getting arrested in the process. His trademark figures—barking dogs, crawling babies, and gesticulating humanoids—often commented, in a Weegee-like play with existing signs, on sexual, racial, or class tensions in the city. His pictures humorously subverted the anger and angst that the ads tried to promote. One spoofs Giacomo Balla’s famous sizzling Street Light (figure I.8) by outlining an electrified creature in a Statue of Liberty pose who holds aloft a lightbulb that seems far calmer than he is. Another, a full-fledged manger scene, showed babies crawling beneath wise men, shepherds, shimmering angels, and a central, radiant baby who is showered with white rain from a star overhead. Haring, who died of AIDS in 1990, brought the oldest of night scenes, the nativity, up-to-date with his subway rendition of highvoltage angels in America. In all his drawings, Haring made his concern for the value, joy, and promise of human life as plain as black and white. Haring’s work inevitably reminds us of its source, one unmistakable way of taking back the night. Arguably the most vital—and most visible— nocturnal urban art form of the past few decades, spray-painted graffiti enlivened or defaced not just the subway’s endless night but also buildings, bridges, walls, and fixtures all over New York. Occasionally representational and always confrontational, graffiti emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as the quintessential artistic response to the nighttime—stealthy, dangerous, illegal, brazen—and also male, macho, and aggressive. Born in part from the merging of civic and commercial space, graffiti fought back in the name of the disenfranchised by appropriating for “the people” the ever-sparser areas that ads and signs, business and “the authorities” had not yet colonized. In the early 1960s, songwriter Paul Simon memorably told a generation that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls / and tenement halls” of the dark city. Graffiti artists set up their own city of cryptic messages and prophecies, spray painting their monikers and motifs on every available surface. Done furtively at night for daytime display, the “tagging” functioned alternately as vandalism, inconvenience, eyesore, outrage, political

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Figure E.6. Keith Haring (1958–1990), Subway Drawing, 1980s. © Estate of Keith Haring

statement, and personal brag. Occasionally, it produced eye-popping art, especially when a whole subway train was commandeered as a canvas. Yet a problem with any “taking back the night” is its tug-of-war quality; it assumes that night can or should be owned. “It’s my night.” “No, it’s mine.” “But I had it first.” “Who says?” As darkness fades and the competition gets fiercer, there no longer seems to be enough night to go around. If night requires liberation from the socioeconomic thrall of the status quo, with its sexual violence and light-crazed commodification, we will also need to liberate the night from our presumptions of its menace or willing servitude. We can learn something about meeting night on its own terms, some of them quite somber, from the Night Without Light organized by the Visual Aids advocacy group. Beginning in 1990, New York’s buildings and bridges dimmed their lights on December 1, World AIDS Day, in recognition of all those infected with the AIDS virus, living and dead (color plate 28). Once a nonsensical redundancy, the idea of a night without light now served as a beacon, a way of recognizing that in the end it is the night, not us, that will do the taking back.

Fairyland Still? The Aerial View The nocturne lives. “Night in the city looks pretty to me,” in the words of singer Joni Mitchell. Literary and visual images of the nighttime city that

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Figure E.7. Alex Katz, New Year’s Eve, 1990. Oil on canvas, 9 ⫻ 8 in. (22.9 ⫻ 20.3 cm). Art © Alex Katz. Licensed by VAGA, New York

capture its beauty, wonder, mystery, and allure, not to mention the restorative properties of its temporary stillness, continue to charm and entice us. Sustained by the idea that night can transform the city to reveal a fragile beauty we cannot do without, writers and artists have found new ways to recapture the imperiled magic of the night. In opposition to the endless lust for light, the nocturne proposes a yearning for a deeper emotional life as expressed through scenes that ponder the city’s metamorphosis into something unabashedly lovely and inspiring.14 Among the many works that testify to the nocturne’s continuing vitality are the serene photographs of buildings in New York Nocturnes (1982) by Peter Fink and the eerie pictures of shadows in Lynn Saville’s Acquainted with the Night (1997); the monumentally sized but minimalist nocturnal views of painter Alex Katz, such as Wet Evening (1986) and New Year’s Eve (1990)

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that mix Whistler’s atmospheric feeling with Hopper’s sense of vacancy; and Mark Strand’s “Night Piece (After Dickens)” (1978), a classic poetic statement of the New Yorker’s longing, looming behind almost every nocturne, to reinhabit the imagined peace of centuries past: “every sound is merged, / this moonlight night, into a distant humming, as if / the city, finally, were singing itself to sleep.”15 Even in the city, with the help of the moon and the stars, the night’s stillness recalls nature’s womb. From Esther Bubley’s fairy-dusted photo Bow Bridge, Central Park (c. 1950), to June Jordan’s comparison of Madison Avenue after midnight to dark woods (“Towards a City That Sings” [1977]), to Yvonne Jacquette’s East River at Night (1978) and Oil Tanker Near Battery Park (Dusk) (1981), earth and water connect the city as a living, breathing organism to a timeless flux in which darkness, death, and the sexual struggle against death have major parts to play. The vigorous survival of the nocturne in the ultralit, unsleeping city reminds us how much nostalgia and night have come to share the same territory. In the mid-1990s, there was a spate of New York nostalgia novels that had great popular success: E. L. Doctorow’s Waterworks (1994), Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1994), and Steven Milhauser’s Martin Dressler, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1996, all set around the turn of the twentieth century. They relied heavily on the notion of the night city as a gateway to the past—a trope developed literally in Time and Again (1970), Jack Finney’s perennially popular novel about a man who walks into Central Park after dark and walks out again transported into the previous century. But nocturnal art can also use the past to propel us forward into a better future. Consider the warmth of Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach story-quilt (quilt 1988; illustrated book 1992), another comment on the night’s transforming power (color plate 29). Because it deals with childhood, Tar Beach gives extra resonance to Whistler’s remark that in the night city, “fairy-land is before us.” Tar Beach confronts the nostalgia implicit in almost all nocturnes: the return to a personal and collective past, perhaps an imagined or improved past, where there was a different balance of dark and light, a finer perception of what our city might have become.16 The quilt shows four adults playing cards on a summer rooftop, the tar beach of the title, while two children lie in the foreground on a blanket looking up at the night sky. A little girl flies through the starry sky, over a bridge, in the background. On the top and bottom of the quilt, words tell the story, which begins, “I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge. I could see our tiny rooftop, with Mommy and Daddy and Mr. and Mrs. Honey, our next-door neighbors, still playing cards as if nothing was going on, and BeBe, my baby brother, lying real still on the mattress, just like I told him to, his eyes like huge floodlights tracking me through the sky.” The narrator is eight-year-old Cassie Louise Lightwood, who recalls, “Lying on the roof in the night, with

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stars and skyscraper buildings all around me, made me feel rich, like I owned all that I could see. The bridge was my most prized possession,” because her father had helped build it before she was born. The girl uses her powers to fight for her father, who is not allowed to join the construction union if “he’s colored or a half-breed Indian, like they say.” She flies over the Union building to give it to him and end his struggle to find work. As she tells her brother, “Anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can’t get to any other way. The next thing you know, you’re flying among the stars.”17 Ringgold’s book and quilt make tangible some of the unseen yet valuable links between night, art, nostalgia, dreams, and social action. The flight toward nocturnal healing is a necessary illusion, a part of the American self. Nocturnal homesickness returns to haunt us with possibilities that take us out of ourselves; it can put people on the road to connection, not isolation, even if they meet in art, not life. As Emily Dickinson observed, So soft upon the Scene The Act of evening fell We felt how neighborly a Thing Was the Invisible.18

Significantly, Ringgold achieves her artistic effects through the use of her heroine’s aerial view. The artist’s vantage point is sustained by the magic of the imagination—a flight of fancy that has increasingly been taken literally by some of the boldest and most thoughtful nocturnal explorers. For centuries people have tried to take the measure of a city by viewing it from a height, often a distant hill. But in the twentieth century, a new visual and psychic space opened up with the experience of seeing the sparkling city from far above, first from an astoundingly tall building. Then, with the skyline having become almost too familiar to provoke awe, the visual and conceptual battlefield between night lights and dark realities shifted to a still-grander arena: the night city seen from an airplane, or even, as part of a creeping glow, from outer space. The challenge for artists and writers has been to capture the dazzling, revelatory view of the city from above while not forgetting what it means to deal with it up close. Four observers—George Segal, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Yvonne Jacquette—suggest how the aerial view has taken nocturnal imagery into new places whose unprecedented sights strain against the gravity of familiar terrain.19 In the sculptor George Segal’s installation The Aerial View (1970), a white plaster observer mutely contemplates the simulated sparkle of a black panel raised vertically and studded with tiny lights. The light board represents Greater New York City and the East River, seen from a vantage point

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Figure E.8. George Segal, The Aerial View, 1970. Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki

somewhere over Brooklyn, with the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Williamsburg bridges spanning the dark water in front of the ambiguously placed observer. Finding that neither a plane seat, a high window, nor an observation deck would realistically offer the scene he wanted to show, Segal delocalized his viewer: a man who wears a raincoat that seems to flutter back in a highaltitude breeze. The three-dimensional solidity of the spectator clashes with the flatness of Segal’s “city,” even as the fake lights look more “real” to the eye than the plaster figure. Segal presents the work as a perceptual and philosophical problem: What should one make of all this darkness and glitter? The city—a black board—is patently not the city, and yet art’s illusion makes it so, just as the viewer, plaster or flesh and blood, is and is not an Olympian arbiter who can rule on the worth of what lies before him. Is this person enchanted by the city’s having “pulled down the stars to our will,” as Ezra Pound put it, or is he distressed and silenced by the thought of how much human fuel is needed to burn all these lights? Or standing and

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looking at the city from a high place, does he find himself in the position of Jesus, tempted by earthly rewards? Segal, who shortly thereafter imagined an Abraham-and-Isaac memorial for the fallen Kent State students, may well have had some sort of biblically inflected admonition in mind. While he leaves it to the viewer to evaluate the attitude and location of the spectator, the work itself argues for the importance of the contemplative act. As what Segal called an “extraordinary in the ordinary” part of urban consciousness, this amazing spectacle routinely helps to define both city and self.20 But it is a man’s view, not a woman’s. Segal’s installation, conceived approaching the city in a car, looks more out than down; the city is tipped up to meet his gaze. Segal’s rapt detachment was impossible for Elizabeth Bishop, who carried the downward gaze of female skyscraper fantasists on to an airplane. Her poem “Night City [from the plane]” (1976) shows that even in maintaining literal distance from the city, Bishop could not prevent herself from feeling the heat of its physical and moral hell, a scorching landscape of pain and woe. She could not help but imagine walking this infernally glamorous terrain. Bishop represents the shimmering city far below her as an untraversable bed of coals: No foot could endure it, shoes are too thin. Broken glass, broken bottles, heaps of them burn.

The Dantesque city is a vast guilt-disposal system, a psychological sanitation unit: “The city burns tears,” she says in one stanza, and in the next, “The city burns guilt.” Far from heavenly, the aerial view suggests Milton’s fiery lake full of fallen angels, the guilty rich who undergo industrial, urban torments: A pool of bitumen one tycoon wept by himself, a blackened moon. Another cried a skyscraper up. Look! Incandescent, its wires drip.

Fittingly, the New York–type punishments of this urban hell head upward rather than down, becoming a moon, a skyscraper; here, even “the sky is dead.” New York is, finally, a morally charred landscape whose passions

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have consumed its humanity. Only something unfeeling and inhuman could land and live in this world. Bishop’s last stanza qualifies her horror with the admission that if this hell-world is not for us, it may belong to something we have made: (Still, there are creatures, careful ones, overhead. They set down their feet, they walk green, red; green, red.)21

The creatures may be planes landing or traffic lights turning. Green and red, stop and go, the aerial or earthly traffic continues to arrive in hell. Bishop throws the night passenger out of the flying machine and into the fire. The same impulse to touch down on the untouchable runway appears in Adrienne Rich’s aerial encounter with New York. In “North American Time” (1983), Rich ponders the clash between the stirring vision and the life behind it, between what one sees and what one knows. At first the poet feels herself inspired like a Miltonic combatant: Sometimes, gliding at night in a plane over New York City I have felt like some messenger called to enter, called to engage this field of light and darkness. A grandiose idea, born of flying.

Yet she prevents herself from falling for its beauty, its perhaps self-aggrandizing nobility: But underneath the grandiose idea is the thought that what I must engage after the plane has ranged onto the tarmac after climbing my old stairs, sitting down at my old window is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.22

The Miltonic “field of light and darkness,” like Bishop’s fiery incinerator of guilt, seems too awful to land in, even if one is angelically “like some messenger / called to enter.” But Rich distrusts the emotional surge that the plane provides. The painful, cosmically scaled sublimity of the sight cannot stand up to the personal or political battles that the poet dutifully “must engage.” If the night airplane breeds epic ideas, the night apartment with “my old stairs . . . my old window” offers no elevation or vision, only silence.

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Other, energized views of the plane’s descent are possible. June Jordan’s “Towards a City That Sings” (1977) begins Into the topaz the crystalline signals of Manhattan the nightplane lowers my body scintillate with longing to lie positive beside the electric waters of your flesh.23

Talking to a person, the city, or both, Jordan captures the exhilaration of swooping down into the nighttime city. But for Rich, to look downward to darkness or light is, finally, to look in the wrong direction. It is not that one shouldn’t look up at skyscrapers, but that one should look past them at the oldest dwellers of the night: the stars and the moon. In the last section of her poem, Rich exchanges the illusion and disillusion of plane and landing for the poetic encouragement and fertility of a traditional symbol of woman and night: The almost full moon rises timelessly speaking of change out of the Bronx, the Harlem River the drowned towns of the Quabbin the pilfered burial mounds the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds and I start to speak again.24

You can define an aerial view with metaphoric wings or words, Rich proposes, but ultimately you have to frame it with the actions of your own life. Looking down on us, the rising moon shows the poet how to live with the beauty and the burden of the aerial view. If Segal’s work still belongs to an earth-bound tradition, and Bishop and Rich cannot resist imagining the trying texture of the world below them, Yvonne Jacquette has since the 1970s steadily fought the bounds of gravity. Perhaps the most dedicated maker of nocturnal artworks since Whistler, Jacquette has made the aerial view of the nighttime city her constant study, and like him she has found in Japanese prints with their play of flatness and depth a means to explore the surface patterns and deep structure of the night’s thought-provoking beauty.25 In addition to many Times Square scenes, her works include sites such as Flatiron Intersection (1975), in which the viewer looks vertiginously over several lanes of mostly vacant roadway, with the corner of the Flatiron Building just poking its nose in on the side; East River View at Night (1978) (color plate 30), which uses the pattern of headlights and taillights on the highway to hem the tapestry of the dark river, beneath

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a stitching of bridge-cable lights; Herald Square Composite II (1993) in which vehicles and buildings overlap in reflective, fragmented space; and Mixed Heights and Harbor from World Trade Center II (1998) and Vertiginous: World Financial Area (1999), whose titles reveal their pictorial gambits. Despite her fascination with city lights, Jacquette is not afraid of the dark, devoting large zones of many pictures to what some might see as urban emptiness—streets without traffic, blank walls, the backgrounds of giant signs, open water lapping at the edge of the shore and canvas. Never flashy, even in Times Square, she weaves her careful, controlled brushstrokes into a textured darkness that shimmers whether or not artificial light plays across it. The beams of Jacquette’s car headlights often seem to wiggle like antennae, while scrupulously woven stretches of dark water undulate or sparkle impassively, the whole surface begging for metaphors but impossible to pin down. Jacquette’s work supports the idea that the downward view has been particularly attractive to women as a way to organize and control their perceptions of the urban environment. The preference for distance or pattern does not bypass the difficulties and hazards of life below. But it does provide another angle, and a way to get a grip on something that otherwise might grip you. Jacquette, who as an art student was fascinated by the cluttered nocturnal mystery of Samuel Palmer and the mystic nocturnes of Ryder, maintains in her own work a studied neutrality that has been read as both an affirmation of modernity and a meticulous catalog of its horrors. Megabillboards and nuclear power plants look as lovely as glinting rivers and filigrees of distant lights; grit and grime are as invisible as acts of love or compassion. In her series of “wing paintings,” composite views that rearrange spaces and patterns, land and water, Jacquette benefits from the picturesque detachment inherent in the aerial view. The poet May Swenson wrote in 1963, with telling accuracy, that Distance and a certain light makes anything artistic— it doesn’t matter what. From an airplane, all that rigid splatter of the Bronx becomes organic, logical as web or beehive.26

Linking older and newer perspectives, Swenson uses for the aerial view the same organic metaphor—the beehive—as did the skyscraper watchers of the 1930s. From a distance the city seems naturalized, domesticated, even cozy. But as Swenson recognizes, transforming distance into art requires a special catalyst. The function of the night for Jacquette is to cast that “certain light” over the metropolitan landscape, to make it eloquently organic in

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ways that tell us about our vexed relationship to it. Although aided by cameras and film, Jacquette sifts the vision as Whistler did, through memory and rigorous formal analysis, handling the flung-down quality of American settlement by balancing dispersion and seeming randomness against a structure that gradually emerges from the subject. There’s something about a spread-out topography at night that has fruitfully challenged the modern American artist. Seen from above, on a sidewalk instead of from a plane, the abstract qualities of surface shapes gesture toward abstract expressionism. “I remember walking at night in Chelsea with Bill [de Kooning] during the depression,” recalled Jacquette’s friend, the poet Edwin Denby, “and his pointing out to me on the pavement the dispersed compositions—spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflections of neon-light.”27 In Night Wing: Metropolitan Area Composite II (1993), Jacquette knits up this dispersion, making a rich tapestry of the printed circuitry that the sprawling multistate megalopolis now resembles. With its seeming hodgepodge of straight and curved patches, its lines and splashes of light and dark, what’s below seems to be a rumpled blanket, a crazy quilt reminding us of Ringgold’s Tar Beach, an abstract pattern begging for but resisting interpretation. Yet the “night wing” of the plane in the upper-left corner that gives scale and locates the viewer also casts a dark shadow on the promise of the night. Disrupted by the somber wing shape, the quiltiness and its implied connection to welcoming beds only accentuates the precariousness and fatigue of night air travel. And these days, these nights, the night wing seems as ominous as it does arty, its outline the sign of surveillance, the forecast of a possible attack in which the viewer may figure as terrorist or victim. Noncommital, Jacquette seems ultimately drawn by the open-ended theater of the plane ride. Her careful rendering of the spectacle below, fascinated with the starry plenitude of artificial lights and seemingly tolerant of civilization’s relentless advance, nevertheless devotes great care to open dark areas. The abstractions that emerge suggest that exploring the aerial view is another way of returning to the natural world. Her fiber-optic weavings lend the blanket of night a new pattern of nocturnal mystery.

The City of Dreadful Light As we rise above it, row after row Of lights reveal the incredible size Of our loss. —Tom Disch, In Praise of New York28 Nobody sees the stars now. —Henry David Thoreau, The Moon29

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Figure E.9. Yvonne Jacquette (b. 1934), Night Wing: Metropolitan Area Composite II, 1993. Oil on canvas, 80 ¾ ⫻ 56 5/8 in. (205.1 ⫻ 144.1 cm). North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest). © Yvonne Jacquette. Used by kind permission of the artist and the DC Moore Gallery, New York

The view from the plane reminds us of two unsettling facts about night now. First, the age-old peril of night has an intensity and immensity carried by the plane itself. E. B. White first brought this to the attention of New Yorkers back in 1946, in an ode to the enchantment of Manhattan summer nights: Another hot night I stop off at the Goldman Band concert in the Mall in Central Park. . . . In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the underside, translating them into a new language. Overhead a plane passes dreamily, its running lights winking. On the bench directly in front of me, a boy sits with his arm around his girl.

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White lets the airborne menace pass, then turns to home in on it: the unforgettable fact that “the city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy. . . .” Worse, the city beckons with a fatal attraction: “Of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.”30 White was thinking about the atomic bomb’s effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the previous year, and he knew what sustained aerial bombardment had done to the cities of Europe. But for many New Yorkers the import of his words did not sink in for another fifty-five years, until the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. Two images of the World Trade Center proleptically link its fate to the nocturnal artistic tradition. Richard Haas’s Burning Pier (1985), mentioned in the ntroduction, looks across the Hudson toward a blazing pier whose flames seem to lap at the base of the twin towers, as if this were the fiery execution of a saint or heretic (color plate 3). Robert Sefcik’s photographic Nightview of Lower Manhattan (1981) works with metaphoric fire: rivers of light flow down the avenues like lava from the World Trade Center towers that dominate the far horizon. Here the reference is to Vesuvius, whose eruption Joseph Wright rendered still more spectacular by painting it at night so that the lava would glow in the darkness. Spouts of light, Sefcik’s towers discharge an eerily threatening beauty toward the viewer. But of course the World Trade Center disaster happened on a bright sunny morning. Poe’s Dupin was right after all—night is not always the location of the direst crimes. In Lower Manhattan, projected pillars of light have memorialized the towers and the loss of life, but W. H. Auden saw that what civilization has done in light’s name makes such symbolism suspect. In “September 1, 1939,” he regarded modernity as “lost in a haunted wood, / Children afraid of the night / Who have never been happy or good.” Against the wages of human darkness, light is an ironic rejoinder—although still perhaps the only one we have: dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.31

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Figure E.10. Robert Sefcik, Nightview of Lower Manhattan, 1981. Museum of the City of New York [81.165.36]

The second thing that nocturnal plane flights and aerial views reveal is how large the landscape of light has grown, and how many more human lights we can see than stars. When we rise above the city, as Tom Disch says, “the size of our loss” becomes staggeringly visible. Night’s other great peril is the loss of night itself. Night has always had its disappointments. In The Bell Jar (1963), Sylvia Plath’s narrator, alienated by midtown’s feeble opportunities for literary fame or sexual initiation, complains, “The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.”32 But this is local carping compared to the idea of night’s not working out on a universal scale.

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For in addition to the new physical perspective of the aerial view, the last fifty years have given us one hitherto-unthinkable idea: the night may be mortal. The century that saw once-almighty nature corralled into national parks seems to have brought night to bay with the hounds of light, nipping at it from all directions, closing in for the kill. Light pollution has produced its own version of global warming—what might be called “global brightening.” As with the world’s oceans, the tide of light is rising to flood level. In Collapse: How Societies Chose to Fail or Survive (2005), scientist Jared Diamond uses a composite satellite photo of earth at night to illustrate through pinpoints of light the sites of the greatest drain on the earth’s resources. Those who wish to steer by the stars or sleep when the sun goes down, now must get themselves into the middle of the ocean or a distant mountaintop. If once we shaped our sense of ourselves by staring up into the cosmos, now there is only a reddish glow that prevents us from seeing past our own reflection. In cities, 99 percent of the stars visible from earth are lost to view.33 The imminent erasure of actual night from what Rich called night’s “field of light and darkness” is summed up in the title of a film by François Truffaut. The English title is Day for Night, and it refers to the moviemaker’s use of filters to make a scene shot in the daytime look as if it were shot at night. But the French term for this process, and Truffaut’s own title, is La Nuit Americaine. It is a space in which the mere semblance of night will do. Historians have begun calling the twentieth century “the American century” for obvious political and economic reasons. We could also call it the century of American night, in which the age-old polarity of light and dark, among the most fundamental oppositions in Western thought, was collapsed into an all-encompassing glare. In “The Return” (1993), the poet Laurie Sheck writes of a city where “windows harden and multiply, vertical and bright.” “Here,” she says, “the sky is reddish brown at nightfall / beneath what we still think of as stars.”34 It has become harder to be as optimistic as Thoreau that night is a selfrenewing, ever-reliable resource: “Night surely repossesses herself of her realms, as if her dynasty were uninterrupted or she had underlain the day. . . . The human slumbers. There is less of man in the world.”35 A hundred and fifty years later, there is more of man in the world. Maybe not more people abroad at night than during the day, but those who are, and even those who sleep, so dramatically turn night into day that night’s repossession of her realms, as Thoreau puts it, is tenuous at best. Meanwhile, although light pollution prevents us from seeing the stars, the metaphoric “dark side” of the city apparently remains untouched. Edward Sorel’s drawing Contemporary Streetlights (1982) presents a terrified man walking his vicious dog along blindingly lit streets, anxiety and aggression reinforcing each other. Sorel’s caption reads, “Contemporary streetlights cast a cold pallor on ominous streets.”36

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Figure E.11. Edward Sorel, Contemporary Streetlights Cast a Cold Pallor on Ominous Streets, 1982. Used by kind permission of the artist

It is no longer a scientific or biblical dream to say that today we may be reaching the end of night. At the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, Consolidated Edison advertised its block-long, 130,000-light diorama of New York as the “The City of Light—Where Night Never Comes.” It is a great irony that gaslit Babylon should in the fullness of time and technology have become the New Jerusalem after all, at least in one key respect: the Bible’s book of Revelation promises of the Heavenly City that “there shall be no

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night there” (Rev. 22:5). In the 1990s, Adrienne Rich recalled the New York of her youth: long sweet summer evening on the tarred roof: leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with stars the Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousands every known constellation flinging out fiery threads .................................................. —you knew your way among them, knew you were part of them until, neck aching, you sat straight up and saw: it was New York, the dream site the lost city the city of dreadful light.37

Rich describes stars that can’t be seen now, and a relation to them that can’t be had now. Her verbal play on James Thomson’s nightmare poem The City of Dreadful Night conflates the starry city of youth with the present city that we can sit up and see all around us: the city of dreadful light. A modern-day Thoreau, Bill McKibben, writes that the disappearance of the stars is not merely emotional. “We’ve all but lost the night—twelve hours in twenty-four the information the planet provides goes unseen, not because it’s dark but because it’s light.” For McKibben, the telling point is how much potential knowledge about nature, the cosmos, and ourselves the light suppresses: “It rarely occurs to us how much intelligence about the world a light erases. . . . The ancients erred in thinking earth stood at the center of things. But we err, far more grievously, when, night after night, despite all our telescopes and spacecraft, we forget that anything else even exists.”38 With the light-checkered patterns of the nocturnal cityscape becoming integrated into the American sense of self, we may simply need to admit what the naturalist Henry Beston called a “dislike of night itself.” Writing back in the 1920s, he noted that “today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of the night, who have never even seen night.”39 When we do see the dark, as in the blackouts of 1965, 1975, or 2003, the fragility of power comes home in a literal way, as does our dependency on a lighted night. We seem to have arrived at the point where we need to catalog night’s virtues, to recognize how far the resonances of the night reach into the day as well as how the deeds of the day extend into and alter the character of the night. The prevalence of artificial light has changed both the rhythms of our lives and the rhythms of nature. It has launched a chain of physiological, psychological, behavioral, and environmental effects that scientists and historians have traced—from earlier puberty and an increased risk of cancer to a relentlessly rushed and commodified sexuality, or from the first gaslit

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factories to the all-night industries and back offices of the planet.40 But the value of the dark world of imagination and fantasy, rest, love, recovery, and self-discovery still awaits. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote of “Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.”41 Some momentum for change may be gathering, for it is a sign of the times that night now has its own defense organizations.42 “Give Back the Night” might be their collective motto. In New York City, a group named after the moon goddess Selene (Sensible and Efficient Lighting to Enhance the Nighttime Environment) encourages careful management of light resources. A 2004 New York Times editorial called for sensible light pollution laws in the city, remarking that “the night sky belongs to all of us, no matter how infrequently or how casually we look its way. Light pollution is the easiest kind of pollution to control. It may take a few years, but it will seem as though we turned up the stars without any loss of light here on earth.”43 In the same year, New York City held a competition for a new sky-andenergy friendly streetlight, and residents are waiting to see what glimpses of the heavens that will bring.44 Complementing on a fundamental level the movement defending the right to die, the various movements asserting a right to darkness seek to reconnect the human species to the full range of natural experience. Although the gifts of darkness seem ever-more elusive beneath the lights, ever-more remote above the skylines, night’s resilient aura still lures us into contemplation of something larger than ourselves. In The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Holden Caulfield wonders, Are the stars just there, or is there somebody who makes them? In New York, for over a century now, the answer has depended on the direction in which you are looking—and perhaps on the philosophical or religious reflection that not all light looks on the living. The picture that concludes this book’s long stroll through the city night was taken in December 1952 by an unknown United Press photographer. Called Manhattan Skyline Seen from Calvary Cemetery, Queens, it has about everything you could hope for or dread in the night, or in a nocturne: light, darkness, peace, death, and formal beauty. And drama. Foremost there is the theatrical contrast between the land of the dead and the land of the living. Close to the viewer, the multitude of graves reflects the glare of a highway lamp, forming a band of light that echoes the glowing skyline on the horizon. A dark zone, first of monuments, then of industrial buildings and water towers, separates the two lands of light on opposite sides of the invisible Lethean river. The shapes subtly alter as the eye moves into the image, the square foreground gravestones yielding to vertical midground monuments that prepare us for the resurrection-like apparition of the skyline, with the Empire State Building leading the cast

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Figure E.12. Anonymous, Manhattan Skyline Seen from Calvary Cemetery, Queens, 1952. Bettmann/Corbis

of improbably slender and soaring spires. An unearthly glow emanates from the distant city, and it seems hard to believe that Manhattan is not the starry heaven to which all these dead souls have gone. But there’s something about the upright graves that suggests rows of spectators. Whether consigned to a necropolis or flown to the New Jerusalem, they appear to share with all New Yorkers, good and bad, the pleasure of pausing to watch the nighttime show. Just as I am finishing these pages, the radio announces one minute to midnight. I look up. Outside my apartment window a full moon has risen over Manhattan; it shines brightly through the clouds that race past it. Recognition, joy, companionship, deep satisfaction, and wonder arrive with the sight of it. Walking home earlier I searched the clear sky for stars and found that only the planet Jupiter was strong enough to twinkle through the city’s glow. When Thoreau commented in the 1850s that “nobody sees the stars now,” he could hardly have imagined that our culture’s figurative blindness to the value of night would become literally true. Yet the one has led to the other; first we wouldn’t see, and now we can’t see. But the moon gives hope and proof of another realm beyond the world of Edison. If the moon were “only another streetlight,” as poets and painters have sometimes

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claimed, it would not have the power to make magic in New York. The dialogue between the moon’s natural beauty and the city’s artificial lights, both set against the “darkness visible” of urban night, is still close to the heart of any New York nocturne. If we are lucky, we will continue to share e. e. cummings’s vision: “in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems.”45 The future of New York at night—its actuality, its images, its brilliance, depth, and density—depends on us. Can we live with a darkness beyond our own? As Auden wrote in “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939), the great interpreter of dreams cared passionately about the darkness that gave dreams life: “He would have us remember most of all / To be enthusiastic over the night.”46 Auden had just become, like so many others at the brink of World War II, a new New Yorker. He spoke for Freud, for his adoptive city, and for all those who would come to know nocturnal Manhattan’s dreamscape of darkness and light. We should cherish the night, he said, Not only for the sense of wonder It alone has to offer, but also Because it needs our love: for with sad eyes Its delectable creatures look up and beg Us dumbly to ask them to follow; They are exiles who long for the future That lies in our power.

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NOTES

Introduction

The Dream Site

1. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1937; repr., New York: New Directions, 1961), 82. Copyright © 1937 by Djuna Barnes. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 2. See Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 324–25, and “Walking by Night,” in H. D. Thoreau: A Writer’s Journal, ed. Laurence Stapleton (New York: Dover, 1960), 41–80. 3. Henry David Thoreau, “Night and Moonlight” (1854), in Excursions, ed. Leo Marx (1863; repr., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1975), 307–8. 4. Until recently, histories of urban culture have said little about how artificial lighting transformed city life, or how images of the night have evolved. A milestone was reached with the publication of Andreas Blühm and Louise Lippincott, Light! The Industrial Age, 1750 –1900: Art and Science, Technology and Society (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2000). Focusing mostly on European culture, Blühm and Lippincott explore the dynamic relationship between the evolution of lighting technology and artistic practice at the start of the modern era. On night and European modernity, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s pioneering Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (New York: Berg, 1988), followed by Joachim Schlör’s Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840 –1930, trans. Pierre Imhof and Dafydd Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). Foregrounding developments in lighting technology as a way of understanding social adaptations to it, historian David Nye has investigated the cultural impact of electricity in the United States in Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) and American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). My approach in New York Nocturne is closest in spirit to the historically informed but aesthetically oriented analysis of Light! while my subject matter overlaps occasionally with that of Nye, as I examine images of America’s most electrified city. 5. Though musicologists have analyzed night pieces and nocturnes by individual composers, ranging from Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Claude Debussy and John Cage, and studied the origins of the nocturne’s popularity in the work of Field and Frédéric Chopin, apparently the larger history of this immense genre remains to be written. The same is true regarding “night music” in or of New York, though the various histories of jazz could

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6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

be seen as a step in that direction. In film the case is otherwise: from its fantasy frontispiece to its final image of a night shoot in Greenwich Village, James Sanders’s Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (New York: Knopf, 2003) offers the perfect starting place for study of the cinematic nocturne. Comparisons between works of art and literature, the “sister arts,” go back to classical times. Ut pictura poesis—“as the painting, so the poem” said Horace. Often critics compare works said to present similar subjects, themes, use of structural elements, or overall style, perhaps tied to a historical period (such as realist, impressionist, or cubist). But critics may also pursue a historically based inquiry into the changing terms on which the comparisons are made (use of time and space, degree of abstraction, etc.), or stress a dialectical and even adversary relationship between image and text evident in hierarchies of representation that usually give priority to verbal signs. While an awareness of these issues informs this book, my intent is to focus less on the tensions involved in “sisterliness” than on what the works, individually and collectively, tell us about the night and the task of representing it. Among the essential texts in this field are Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and a lucid overview, Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Joseph Gibaldi, and Estella Lauter, eds., Teaching Literature and Other Arts (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990). Throughout this book, “New York” should be taken, as it was until the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1897, to mean Manhattan, unless otherwise specified. Brendhan Behan, Brendhan Behan’s New York (1954), cited in Mike Marqusee and Bill Harris, eds., New York: An Anthology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 15. Nye, Electrifying America, 383. For an anecdotal social history of nocturnal New York, see Mark Caldwell, New York Night: The Mystique and its History (New York: Scribner, 2005); for glimpses of the nocturnal city at a particular moment, see Bill Harris, New York at Night (New York: Bramhall House, 1985), and “A Night in the Life of New York,” special issue, New York Magazine, April 30, 1990. Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), 90. Adrienne Rich, “The Dream Site,” in An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988–1991 (New York: Norton, 1991), 16. See Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 81 (my translation); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 20. Harvey, Postmodernity, 25. “An art of cities”: Harvey quotes Malcolm Bradbury and J. McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890 –1930 (London: Penguin, 1976), 96. For a look at how postmodern writing about New York constitutes a “new modern,” see Peter Brooker, New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, the New Modern (London: Longman, 1996). Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 217. See also Linda Nead,

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16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Nead rightly insists that while gaslit modernity formed “a series of processes and representations” (8) in particular historical circumstances, it was nonetheless conditioned by evolving ideas about the past and future as well as the present (4–8). Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 192. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1972), 55. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 18–21. In Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), T. J. Clark, like Harvey and Berman, conceives modernity as an amalgam of capitalism and contingency, with this more somber formulation of the artist’s response: “modernism is caught interminably between horror and elation at the forces driving it” (8). By “image,” I mean the look and representation as well as the perceived character of the city. Robert Springer, Berlin Becomes a Metropolis (1868), cited in Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 287. “Night” is a vast and open-ended topic. Among the many works that consider nighttime activities, thoughts, sensations, dreams, and artistic treatments thereof, see A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: Norton, 2005); Christopher Dewdney, Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004); A. Alvarez, Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams (New York: Norton, 1994); Kevin Coyne, A Day in the Night of America (New York: Random House, 1992); Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987); Joyce Carol Oates, ed., Night Walks: A Bedside Companion (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1982); H. J. Deverson, ed., Journey into Night: An Anthology (New York: Norton, 1967). Various histories of lighting will be cited throughout this book; in addition to the sources noted above, see also Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Mark H. Rose, Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); William T. O’Dea, The Social History of Lighting (London: Routledge and Paul, 1958). In “Luxury and Control: The Urbanity of Street Lighting in NineteenthCentury Cities” (Journal of Urban History 14, no. 1 [November 1987]), Mark J. Bouman notes that night lighting “developed under particular conditions— cities with nighttime economic activity, elites with plenty of leisure time, a social order regulated both by police and by the development of manners, and a greatly changed worldview with respect to human ability to master the rhythms of nature” (30). For an overview of night lighting, see also Alvarez, Night, 3–22. Two exceptions would be the Argand lamp, developed in France in 1783, used mostly indoors, which burned brighter that other oil lamps because of its hollow wick, and the reflector lamp, or réverbère, which spread existing light further, rather than increasing the power of its source. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 88, 86. For consideration of gaslight’s effect on social life in London, see 81, 109.

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25. “Une grande capitale ne devrait jamais dormir!” Gérard de Nerval, Les nuits d’octobre, in Oeuvres, ed. Albert Béguin and Jean Richer (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 136. Nerval was complaining that Paris was not as well lit as London. 26. See Blühm and Lippincott, Light! 27. 27. On the dangers of gas, see Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 33–40. 28. The Jacksonville Times-Union reported in 1895 that “if ever there was a time the city needed fewer policemen than have been necessary in the past, that time is now, since the brilliant illumination of the city by electric lights. Thieves hate light, and thugs despise it”; cited in Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 37. 29. Reported in London, 1912. See Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 66. 30. Bouman, “Luxury and Control,” 14–15. 31. Charles Dickens, “Vauxhall-Gardens by Day,” in Sketches by Boz (1836; repr., New York: Penguin, 1996), 137. 32. “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” (1885), in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1892; repr., New York: Dover, 1967), 144. 33. See Catherine B. Scallen, “Rembrandt’s Nocturne Prints,” On Paper 1 (January– February 1997): 13–17. 34. Rembrandt was unusual in that his etchings of biblical subjects seem more concerned with darkness than light; see also Descent from the Cross by Torchlight (1654). 35. On the history of night painting in the Western tradition, see Christoph Vitali, Erika Billeter, and Hubertus Gassner, Die Nacht (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1998); Everett Austin Jr., Night Scenes, exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, February 15–March 7, 1940. The illustrations in José M. Parramon’s Painting Nightscapes with Artificial Light (Barcelona: Lema, 2000) provide a good impromptu survey. 36. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 49. 37. Ibid., 10. 38. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 6. 39. See Nicholas Taylor, “The Awful Sublimity of the Victorian City: Its Aesthetic and Architectural Origins,” in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian City: Images and Realities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 2:431–47; Nye, American Technological Sublime, xi–16. 40. Burke, Enquiry, 47. 41. “Le gaz a remplacé le soleil.” See Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 15. 42. Edmondo de Amicis, Studies of Paris, trans. W. W. Cady (1878; repr., New York: Putnam, 1882), 33. 43. Blühm and Lippincott, Light! 182. 44. See Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 110–12, 118, 128. For an image of the International Electricity Exhibition of 1881, see ibid., 133. In the 1880s, experimental arc lighting was installed in central Paris, including the Avenue de L’Opéra, Place de la Concorde, Place du Carousel, and the Blvd. des Italiens. Arc light resembles sunlight in that the eye responds to its intensity with retinal cones, rather than retinal rods, as with gaslight and in darkness. 45. Blühm and Lippincott, Light!, 210–11. 46. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, 263: “ô rafraîchissantes ténèbres! . . . vous êtes la délivrance d’une angoisse! . . . [D]ans les labyrinthes pierreux d’une capitale . . . vous êtes le feu d’artifice de la déesse Liberté!”

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47. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Mémoires de la vie littéraire, I:835; cited in T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 34. Théophile Gautier compared Haussmann’s driving of avenues into the “dark labyrinth of narrow streets” to the way that “the American pioneer fells trees. In its own way, it also opens up new territory”; cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 186. 48. The diarist Edmond de Goncourt noted in his journal in 1860, “Our Paris, the Paris where we were born . . . is passing away. Social life is going through a great evolution. . . . I see women, children, households, families in this café. The interior is passing away. Life turns back to become public.” Goncourt, Mémoires, I:835; cited in Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 34. For an overview of the psychological effect that the remaking of Paris had on artists and residents, see Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 23–78. 49. de Amicis, Studies of Paris, 36. 50. Historian Louis Chevalier sees gas lighting as central to the city’s history: Paris of the 1840s and 1850s “flourishes in the light of the gas lamps, illuminated by this light and as if drunk on it.” Louis Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (Paris, 1980), 22; cited in Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 47. 51. Blühm and Lippincott, Light! 19. 52. Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry, April 1842, in Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1957), 212. 53. See Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary; see also the Oxford English Dictionary: “a composition . . . of a quiet, meditative character.” 54. The Oxford English Dictionary cites uses by playwrights Ben Jonson (1608) and John Webster (1612). 55. Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 255. Copyright 1969 by Henry Hold and Company. Copyright 1936 by Robert Frost, copyright 1964 by Leslee Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. 56. Amy Lowell, “New York at Night,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and Joseph M. Bachelor (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 228. 57. William Carlos Williams, “The Great Figure,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 174. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 58. See Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing, Modern Art, and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 203–8. 59. Elizabeth Bishop, “Love Lies Sleeping,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 16. 60. No one is more aware than I of all that had to be omitted from this book for reasons of space, cost, and narrative clarity. Having had to pass by Allen Ginsberg’s poem about being mugged and Elliott Erwitt’s photo of Marilyn Monroe’s skirt blowing up over a subway grate, having had to cut sections on the dark night of the subway and the bright street life of midtown, having had to forgo discussion of images by William Klein, Louis Faurer, Reginald Marsh,

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George Tooker, Louis Lozowick, and so many others, having had to reduce to a few paragraphs extensive research on London and Paris—I can only say: much remains to be done! 61. Regarding the representation of working-class/ethnic life, it is important to remember that until the twentieth century, members of poor or minority groups had limited opportunities to express their own experiences. As I will show, however, there was from the start plenty said and suggested about these groups in nocturnal urban scenes. Chapter One

Gaslit Babylon

1. George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 69. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. 2. Five Points is the area around the five-pointed intersection of present-day Baxter, Park, and Worth streets (formerly Orange, Cross, and Anthony streets; see John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: A Essay in Graphic History (1953; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 3. For the best midcentury guide to the city, see E. Porter Belden, New York, Past, Present, Future (New York: Putnam, 1849). 4. See map in Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York,188. 5. On the size and growth of New York, see Stuart Blumin’s introduction to Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 3–11. 6. George G. Foster, New York in Slices (New York, 1849), 63; cited in Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 9. 7. The United States was felt to have small cities until about 1840; apparently the tide began turning in the Knickerbocker magazine around 1835. See Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 70–71. In 1849, in New York in Slices, Foster declares New York equal to Paris and London, the new “metropolis of Dandies” (see Brand, The Spectator and the City, 74, 77). Already in 1832 Englishwoman Frances Trollope, in Domestic Manners of the Americans, found New York’s houses and furnishings the equal of those in London and Paris. See Phillip Lopate, ed., Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (New York: Library of America, 1998), 17–18. For a richly textured account of spectatorship and urban space in midcentury New York, see Wyn Kelley, Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–70, 94–116. 8. See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 692, 695. 9. Anonymous, review of The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, by Ned Buntline, United States Democratic Review 22, no. 118 (April 1848): 381. 10. Nathaniel Parker Willis, The Rag Bag: A Collection of Ephemera (New York: Charles Scribner, 1855), 47; cited in Brand, The Spectator and the City, 76–77. 11. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 82, lines 403–4. Subsequent references, by line number, are noted parenthetically in the text. 12. Early gas lighting centered on lower Manhattan. Limited gas lighting on streets and in homes was introduced in 1824–1825, when the first gas company was formed. By 1827, there were 120 gas lampposts lighting Broadway from the

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13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

Battery to Grand Street; gas became a public utility in the early 1860s (Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 145). Lopate, Writing New York, 94 (my italics). See Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 458. Louis Bader, “Gas Illumination in New York City, 1823–1863,” (PhD diss., New York University, 1970), 265; cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (New York: Berg, 1988), 112. Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; repr., New York: International Publishing, 1985), 86. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. See illustrations in Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 147, 148, 171 (lampposts);ibid., 187 (Köllner). Cited in Ric Burns and James Sanders, New York: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1999), 175. See also Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 668. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 192. See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), 69. Flâneur comes from the French verb, flâner, “to stroll, to prowl.” For two lucid histories of the flâneur, see Brand, The Spectator and the City, 1–63; James V. Werner, American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–63. Brand shows that the flâneur has an AngloAmerican history and cultural significance that exceeds even the distinctive role allotted him in France by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. On the English flâneur, see Deborah Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1–80. For Benjamin’s assessment, see “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 155–200. Brand, The Spectator and the City, 9, 37–38. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 688–89. See ibid., 698, 695. The photographic metaphor was often applied loosely. In Open-Air Musings, for example, Willis writes, “And here I must break off my Dageurreotype of yesterday’s idling” (cited in Lopate, Writing New York, 82). See Blumin, New York by Gas-Light, 11–17. See, for example, James McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1872); Helen Campbell, Darkness and Daylight (1897). Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Night Sketches,” in Twice-Told Tales (Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, IX) (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 428. Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Imhof and Dafydd Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 56. Hawthorne, “Night Sketches,” 429. Cited in Jorge Luis Borges, “Nathaniel Hawthorne” (1949), in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice Told Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1987), 405. Philip Hone, cited in John Mack Faragher, Mary Jo Buhle, Daniel Czitrom, and Susan H. Armitage, Out of Many: A History of the American People (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 383. Burns and Sanders, New York, 93.

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33. Walt Whitman, “Life Illustrated” (1856); cited in Mike Marqusee, ed., New York: An Illustrated Anthology (Topsfield, MA: Salem House, 1988), 99. 34. For an overview of New York’s riots during the nineteenth century, see Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Vintage, 1992), 339–56. On nineteenth-century nocturnal turbulence in general, see Mark Caldwell, New York Night: The Mystique and Its History (New York: Scribner, 2005), 79–211. 35. For a full account of the riots, see Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 761–65. See pictures in Burns and Sanders, New York, 92; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 764; Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 200. See also Caldwell, New York Night, 138–47. 36. Ned Buntline, cited in Richard Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 155. 37. See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York City, 1860–1865 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 93–105. 38. Melville conflates the two riots, dotting his poem with allusions to Macbeth. See William Sharpe, “New York’s Civil War: Melville, Whitman, and the Urban Battlefield,” special issue, Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani (1999): 351–63. See also Kelley, Melville’s City, 234–38. 39. See William P. Chappel, City Watchman on Elizabeth Street, 1809, reproduced in Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 115. 40. The papers included the Sun and the Herald; see also Brand, The Spectator and the City, 89. 41. These are all scenes illustrated in popular engravings. See Sante, Low Life, 352ff.: Great Riot at the Astor Place Opera, by Currier and Ives (1849), and The Communist Rally in Tompkins Square Park (1877). See also Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 301: Sacking Brooks’s Clothing Store, Harper’s Weekly, August 1, 1863; ibid., 226: New York by Gas-Light—“Hooking a Victim,” by Serrell and Perkins (c. 1850). 42. Such outcries did not cease until, through the combined efforts of police chief Theodore Roosevelt and slum reformer Jacob Riis, the police lodging houses were closed in 1896. The original, pestilent Tombs building lingered until 1902. 43. See Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 159. Pierre combines conventional pastoral depictions with urban subversive styles; see also Kelley, Melville’s City, 145–61. 44. Day Book (New York), September 7, 1852. 45. Herman Melville, “First Night of Their Arrival in the City,” in Pierre, or The Ambiguities (repr., New York: Signet, 1964), 264. 46. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), 8:689, 701–2, 709–10. 47. Burns and Sanders, New York, 14. 48. Ned Buntline, “Prefatorial to the Second Part,” in The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life, Part II (New York: Berford and Co., 1848), 3. 49. Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1868); cited in Burns and Sanders, New York, 145–46. See also Daniel Czitrom, “The Secrets of the Great City”; in Burns and Sanders, New York, 210 –15. Czitrom sums up the genre succinctly: “The new guidebooks promised to reveal dark secrets while providing a kind of prophylactic against the depravity they described” (210). Among the many guidebooks Czitrom cites as descending from Foster are:

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50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

Edward Winslow Martin, The Secrets of the Great City (1868); Edward Crapsey, The Nether Side of New York (1872); Helen Campbell, Darkness and Daylight, or Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1899). Tracing Foster’s influence in another direction, David Reynolds argues that Foster’s “realistic” New York by Gas-Light and New York in Slices pointed toward Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Beneath the American Renaissance, 208). See also Stuart M. Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception, Depiction, and Analysis in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York City,” Journal of Urban History 11 (1984): 9–38. Inspired by Talmage, the Reverend Charles Parkhurst made his own investigation in 1892, following a private detective through bars, opium dens, mixedrace dance houses, strip joints, and brothels. On Talmage and Parkhurst, see Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1168–69. Hawthorne, “Night Sketches,” 427, 429. Ibid., 429. Cited in Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 24. Hawthorne, “Night Sketches,” 431–32. “Illustrations of Mercantile Life” (unsigned), Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 17 (1847): 324. Compare to Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 130: “The great source whence the ranks of prostitution are replenished is young women from the country.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 3. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1987), 562. With his meditation on the poetry of night Thoreau wanted, perhaps, to create his own night piece, a nocturnal prose poem. See Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 324–26. See also William Howarth, “Successor to Walden? Thoreau’s Moonlight—An Intended Course of Lectures,” Proof 2 (1972): 89–115. Henry David Thoreau, “Night and Moonlight” (1854), in Excursions (1863), ed. Leo Marx (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1975), 308. Thoreau, “Night and Moonlight,” 309. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 307–8. Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 346. Compare to Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 86: it was a standard pattern of imagery among reformers to “tear away veils” or “lift up masks”; he cites Foster’s New York Naked (1850). Henry David Thoreau, The Moon, ed. F. H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 11. Thoreau, “Night and Moonlight,” 316. On the role of the feminine observer in the nineteenth century, see Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, 81–135. See also Linda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 62–73; Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 34–50; Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 50–90.

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68. The attraction was such that the dance hall survived fire, rebuilding, and relocation, and even the death of its owner: in 1860, the Illustrated News ran a picture captioned “Ball-Room of Mr. Pete Williams, deceased, as present conducted by Mr. Pritties.” In a bare room, a white fiddler and banjo player supply the music for ragged, racially mixed couples who step out in a contra dance. See Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 272. 69. Hawthorne, “Night Sketches,” 431. 70. See Brand, The Spectator and the City, 26. 71. See Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 219, 459. The genre continued in Ferdinand Longchamp’s Asmodeus in New York (1868). 72. Dickens’s revulsion at the Halting Devil’s work in New York signals not only his disgust with the American press but also his increasing dissatisfaction with the detachment and moral duplicity of the urban sketch genre. See William Sharpe, “A Pig upon the Town: Charles Dickens in New York,” NineteenthCentury Prose 23, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 12–24. 73. For text and illustrations, see Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, 20. 74. Hawthorne, “Night Sketches,” 431. 75. Alfred Tennyson, “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” (1886), in Poems and Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 526. 76. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” in The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Norton, 2004), 236. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. 77. A possible source for the story is William Maginn, “The Night Walker,” Blackwood’s Magazine, November 1823. Poe was a fan of the magazine. 78. For Walter Benjamin, the “manic behavior” of the old man indicates how the increased tempo of modern life was rendering detached composure impossible (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 172). 79. Poe says the same in his story “The Imp of the Perverse”; see Brand, The Spectator and the City, 87. Brand’s insightful reading of “The Man of the Crowd” parallels my own on some points (79–89); for conflicting interpretations, see Werner, American Flaneur, 24–25, 136–43. 80. Charles Dickens, “Night Walks” (1860), in The Uncommercial Traveller (Centennial Edition) (London: Heron Books, 1969), 149–50. 81. Charles Baudelaire, “Préface des Histoires extraordinaires de E. A. Poe,” 1856: “une vaste barbarie éclairée au gaz.” Translated as “Edgar Allan Poe, His Life and Works,” in Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 70. 82. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rôget,” in Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Washington Square Press, 1951), 152. 83. Poe, Selected Writings, 243. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. Poe himself did not like gaslight indoors: “its harsh and unsteady light offends”; The Philosophy of Furniture, cited in Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 157. 84. Herman Melville, letter to his publisher Evert Duyckinck, Correspondence, in The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 14:122. 85. Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers,” in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: His Original Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1976), 104, lines 1–5. Subsequent references, by line number, are noted parenthetically in the text. All the ellipses in the quotations are Whitman’s.

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86. “One More Unfortunate”—the title comes from the opening line of Thomas Hood’s poem “The Bridge of Sighs” (1844), mourning a drowned woman who threw herself into the Thames. 87. Emily Dickinson, “The Poets Light But Lamps” (no. 883), in Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 214. Chapter Two

The Nocturne

1. Nicholas Temperley, “John Field and the First Nocturne,” Music and Letters 56, no. 3–4 (July–October 1975): 335–40. See also Franz Liszt, “On Field’s Nocturnes” (1859), in Field’s 18 Nocturnes for the Piano (New York: Schirmer, 1902). In its earliest, Latin use, a “nocturn” is one of the divisions of the office of matins, a postmidnight prayer, part of the breviary, recited by priests every day. John Donne wrote a poem called “A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucy’s Day” in 1631, but his usage was exceptional, and “nocturne” entered English as a musical and later a poetic form via Field, Chopin, and their turning of the French adjective nocturne into a noun. 2. The three-part structure (sky, land, and water—or light, dark, and light) of Whistler’s nocturnes could be seen to emulate the tripartite ABA structure (slow/fast/slow) of Chopin’s nocturnes. See Franz Lizst, Frederick Chopin (1863), 88–99; Joseph Huneker, Chopin: The Man and His Music (New York: Dover, 1966), 141–51; Jim Samson, The Music of Chopin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 81–97. 3. On Friedrich and the nocturnal tradition, see Sabine Rewald, “Moonwatchers,” in Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 9–22. 4. For a brief overview of nocturnal styles and themes, see Night Lights: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American Nocturne Paintings, introductory essay by Heather Hallenberg, 1985, an exhibition catalog, Taft Museum, Cincinnati; Valerie Ann Leeds, Dreams and Dramas: Moonlight and Twilight in American Art, 2003, an exhibition catalog, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York. 5. Compare to Henry David Thoreau, The Moon, ed. F. H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 36: “The moon is a mediator. She is a lightgiver that does not dazzle me. I can look her in the face. I am sobered by her light and bethink myself.” 6. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 2–3. 7. See Andreas Blühm and Louise Lippincott, Light! The Industrial Age, 1750– 1900: Art and Science, Technology and Society (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2000), 25: “between 1820 and 1850 there were more autonomous night scenes painted than in any other given period.” They conclude that “the nocturne expresses the modern urbanized observer’s nostalgic sense of a lost past.” The fashion for tropical moonlight views (by Louis Remy Mignot, Martin Heade, and Frederic Edwin Church, for example) may also have been prompted by similar conditions. See Katherine Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 170–71. My point in this chapter is that “the nocturne,” especially as developed by Whistler, is not only “nostalgic” but also forward-looking, even revolutionary.

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8. Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel (Leipzig, 1910–1915), 10:255; trans. and cited in Rewald, “Moonwatchers,” 21. 9. See Weston Naef, “‘New Eyes’’: Luminism and Photography,” in American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875, ed. John Wilmerding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 279–87. 10. Thoreau, The Moon, 37. 11. See Naef, “New Eyes,” 282, 287. 12. Girodet is also the first artist on record to have painted by artificial light, an Argand oil lamp, with his Pygmalion (1813–1819). See Blühm and Lippincott, Light! 108. 13. For more on the history of night painting, especially its fanciful and erotic side, see Christoph Vitali, Erika Billeter, and Hubertus Gassner, Die Nacht (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1998). 14. Matthew Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 99. 15. Dwight Culler, ed., Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 110–11, lines 1–7. Subsequent references, by line number, are noted parenthetically in the text. 16. Thoreau, The Moon, 35. 17. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom-House,” in The Scarlet Letter (1850; repr., New York: Norton, 2005), 29 (all quotations). 18. Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869; repr., New York: New American Library, 1980), 158. 19. Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; repr., New York: International Publishing, 1985), 226. 20. William Cowper, The Task (1785), I:764–66, 749. 21. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Let’s Murder the Moonshine” (1909), in Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 51; O. Henry, “Tobin’s Palm,” in The Complete Works of O. Henry (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 7. The moon held its own for a while in its early encounters with electric light. An engraving titled Central Park Winter (1865) shows a largely pastoral moonlit scene with the ice lit secondarily by an arc lamp set up in the middle of a skating pond. See John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: A Essay in Graphic History (1953; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 295. 22. Claude McKay, “Moon Song,” in Complete Poems, ed. William J. Maxwell (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 150. 23. Charles Reznikoff, “Winter Sketches” (1933), in The Poetry Anthology 1912– 1977, ed. Daryl Hine and Joseph Parisi (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 138. 24. Cited in Theodore Reff, Degas: The Artist’s Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 220. 25. See Ron Johnson, “Whistler’s Musical Modes: Numinous Nocturnes,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 8 (April 1981): 175–76. 26. Boyce’s The Thames by Night from the Adelphi (exhibited 1866) and his Night Sketch of the Thames near Hungerford Bridge (c. 1860–1862), along with Hunt’s View from a Window in Cheyne Walk (1853), are close in form and feeling to Whistler’s work. Boyce had a studio overlooking the Thames, and Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited him there. On the Thames as well as Whistler’s influences and milieu, see Allan Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) 72, 120, passim; Hilary Taylor, James McNeill Whistler (London:

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27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

Studio Vista, 1978), 53–76; John House, “The Impressionist Vision of London,” in Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and F. S. Schwarzbach (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 78–90. See Richard Dorwent, “Whistler and British Art,” in James McNeill Whistler, ed. Richard Dorwent and Margaret F. Macdonald (London: The Tate Gallery, 1994), 24. Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso may have first been painted as a daytime picture—another, daytime version of the scene exists (Morning after the Revolution, Valparaiso, 1866, Hunterian Art Gallery)—and then repainted as a nocturne in the early 1870s. See Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret MacDonald, and Robin Spencer, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler. 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980),. text vol.: 44–45. See Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance, 171–72; Johnson, “Numinous Nocturnes,” 170. The London fog itself may have had something to do with Whistler’s innovations. One Victorian wrote, “There is something startling in the appearance of a vast city wrapt in a kind of darkness which seems neither to belong to the day nor the night . . . the whole river looks like one huge bed of dense stagnant smoke, through which no human eye can penetrate”; Thomas Miller, Christmas supplement, Illustrated London News (1849): 419. Edgar Degas, letter, November 19, 1872; cited in David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art (New York: Norton, 1984), 123. At the time the picture was titled Harmony in Blue-Green—Moonlight. Edward Poynter, letter to James McNeill Whistler, October 10, 1871, Hunterian Collection, Glasgow; cited in Robin Spencer, Whistler: A Retrospective (New York: Wings Books, 1989), 101. See David Piper, Artists’ London (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1982), 12, 93. Whistler may have derived his first musical title, Symphony in White, No. 3 (1867), from Théophile Gautier’s poem “Symphonie en blanc majeur” (1852), or from a review of 1863 in which the art critic Paul Mantz referred to “The White Girl” (a painting Whistler later retitled Symphony in White, No. 1), as a “symphonie du blanc” (See Young, MacDonald, and Spencer, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, 19, 35). Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in The Renaissance (1873); reprinted in Harold Bloom, ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: New American Library, 1975), 55. See Johnson, “Numinous Nocturnes,” 173: “The advantage of considering oneself a composer is that composers are not expected to be recorders of nature, teachers of moral lessons, or story-tellers. Consequently, most of the goals Whistler sought in painting were unquestioned in music.” James McNeill Whistler, letter to Frederick Leyland, November 1872, Pennell Collection, Library of Congress; cited in Spencer, Whistler, 102. The letter was first published in Val Princep, “A Collector’s Correspondence,” Art Journal 12 (1892): 249–52. Spencer suggests that Leyland’s fondness for playing Chopin gave him the idea for the name. James McNeill Whistler, at the Whistler-Ruskin trial; as reported in the Globe, November 26, 1878. R. Tyrwhitt, Our Sketching Club (1874), 300; cited in the Oxford English Dictionary. On how Whistler stage-managed his career to maximum effect—and

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40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

controversy—see David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2004). For a view of the nocturnes that stresses “the rhetoric of intangibility” surrounding Whistler’s methods, see John Siewert, “Rhetoric and Reputation in Whistler’s Nocturnes,” in After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting, ed. Linda Merrill (Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 2003), 64–73. Whistler, at the Whistler-Ruskin trial, as reported in the Globe, November 26, 1878. James McNeill Whistler, “The Red Rag,” in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1892; repr., New York: Dover, 1967), 126. Ibid., 127. See T. R. Way, “Memories of James McNeill Whistler” (1912); cited in Spencer, Whistler, 106–7. Whistler, The Gentle Art, 10. Edmund Burke, An Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), 58. James McNeill Whistler, “Mr. Whistler’s Ten ‘O Clock,” in The Gentle Art, 144. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. See Théophile Gautier, “Une Journée à Londres,” in Caprices et Zig-Zags (1842), 106, 111. For analysis, see House, “Impressionist Vision,” 84; Johnson, “Numinous Nocturnes,” 174–75. Johnson also sees Whistler borrowing from Baudelaire’s description of Constantin Guys’ working methods. See Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1964), 11. The aesthetic of veiling was not in itself original, but Whistler applied to urban sites a sensibility that had generally been limited to romantic scenery. In Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871; repr., Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1981), the mountaineer Edward Whymper, who was also a superb engraver, writes of a moment during his 1861 attempt on the Matterhorn: “By and by the moon, as it rose, brought the hills again into sight, and by a judicious repression of detail rendered the view yet more magnificent” (50). Daily Telegraph, n.d.; cited in Whistler, The Gentle Art, 310. See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), 86, 291–94. Benjamin Silliman, A Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland . . . in the Years 1805 and 1806 (Boston, 1812), 1:211; cited in Curry, Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, 78. Burke, Enquiry, 113. Whistler’s reverie-inducing work draws attention to the changing notion of the sublime in American landscape painting. In the early nineteenth century, some artists and theorists began to move from the Burkean, literary/gothic concept of the sublime that emphasizes the power of nature and external objects to the “Kantian” contemplative sublime that focuses on the impression made on the viewer by scenes of quiet, seemingly boundless space. Immanuel Kant contended that “sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging subject.” See Earl Powell, “Luminism and the American Sublime,” in American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850 –1875, ed. John Wilmerding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 70–71; Barbara Novak, “Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice,” in Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 18–33.

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55. William C. Brownell, “Whistler in Painting and Etching,” Scribner’s Magazine, August 1879; cited in Spencer, Whistler , 148–49. 56. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), chap. 10, 103. 57. Letter 79, Fors Clavigera, July 2, 1877. Regarding himself as a gentleman, Whistler set his prices in guineas (a pound and a shilling) instead of the pounds used by tradesmen. 58. On the trial and its issues, see Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). On the controversial painting itself, hovering “on a threshold between description and subtle dissolution,” see the fine analysis in John Siewert, “Suspended Spectacle: Whistler’s Falling Rocket and the Nocturnal Subject,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 69 (1995): 36–48. For a discussion of the Cremorne fireworks series, see Curry, Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, 71–89. 59. Edward Poynter, letter to James McNeill Whistler, October 10, 1871, Hunterian Collection, Glasgow; cited in Spencer, Whistler, 101. 60. Whistler’s press-clipping book (Hunterian Collection) preserves many of these, such as a two-column exchange on the subject in Mayfair, June 25, 1878. The difficulty in telling which end was up was confirmed in the catalog to the Whistler exhibition at the Freer Gallery in 1984: Nocturne: Silver and Opal— Chelsea appeared printed upside down. 61. See Curry, Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, 86. 62. Similarly, Nocturne: Black and Gold: The Fire Wheel (1872–1877), though it gives more details of the platform, crowd, and context, emphasizes both reflection and intense light/dark contrast. 63. Curry sees Whistler as a flâneur at Cremorne (Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, 80), but the paintings’ lack of concern for the details of social interaction and dress would seem to set Whistler, dandy though he was in life, far from the model of Baudelaire or Guys. 64. Merrill, A Pot of Paint, 167. On the precarious respectability of the Cremorne crowds, see Linda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 109–46. 65. As Burke noted (Enquiry, 82), fireworks and sudden powerful lights piercing the darkness are sublime, in the struggle between the power of the gloom and that of light; see also ibid., 80: “Darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light.” 66. Whistler, The Gentle Art, 5. 67. Ibid., 15. 68. See David Craven, “Ruskin vs. Whistler: The Case Against Capitalist Art,” Art Journal 37, no. 2 (Winter 1977–1978): 139–43. 69. See John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1843), vol. 1, sec. 1, chap. 1. Whistler made his remark at the Whistler-Ruskin trial. See Merrill, A Pot of Paint, 144. 70. Whistler, The Gentle Art, 155. 71. “Art is what you can get away with” has been attributed to Marshall McLuhan, Andy Warhol, and Margaret Atwood, among others. 72. See Merrill, After Whistler, 113–15. 73. Cited in Whistler, The Gentle Art, 10–11. 74. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), in The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington (New York: Viking, 1946), 384.

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75. Recounted in Don C. Seitz, Whistler Stories (New York: Harper, 1913), 27. 76. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (1889), in The Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 232. 77. Arthur Symons, London: A Book of Aspects (1909), 2, 32. On Whistler’s influence in depicting the Thames, see House, “Impressionist Vision,” 78–90. 78. “Enchanted with London and likewise with Whistler,” Monet wrote after a visit in 1877 (cited in Piper, Artist’s London, 116), though his serious Thames painting was done later, from 1899 to 1901. The sustained effort of the nocturnes may also have influenced Monet’s decision to work in series (haystacks, cathedrals, and water lilies). 79. See Mark Haworth Booth, ed., The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839–1900 (New York: Aperture, 1984), 184. In Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Imhof and Dafydd Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), Joachim Schlör reproduces an illustration of pedestrians gazing up in awe at new electric lights on Milbank in 1879 (65); it’s revealing that for his revolutionary photographs Martin preferred instead a distant, misty Whistlerian approach. 80. In “Whistler and the English Poets of the 1890’s” (Modern Language Quarterly 18 [1957]: 251–61), Robert L. Peters demonstrates Whistler’s influence on a broad range of poets and themes. 81. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 371. 82. Free verse can also be found in Henley’s first major poem, In Hospital (1888), which has a section called “Nocturne,” and in London Voluntaries (1892), which has a section about night on the Thames. 83. Lionel Johnson, quoted in William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 204. 84. Ezra Pound, cited in Donald Holden, Whistler: Landscapes and Seascapes (New York: Watson-Gupthill, 1969), 84. 85. “Manifesto of Futurist Dramatists” (1911); cited in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 101. 86. T. E. Hulme, “Above the Dock,” in The Imagist Poem, ed. William Pratt (New York: Dutton, 1963), 43. 87. Richard Aldington, “Evening,” in The Imagist Poem, ed. William Pratt (New York: Dutton, 1963), 77. 88. Arthur Kreymborg, “Nocturne,” from Mushrooms (1916); cited in David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1976), 529. 89. Skipworth Cannell, “Nocturnes,” in Des Imagistes (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1914), 37. 90. “Un peu de blond, un peu de bleu, un peu de blanc . . . / Un peu de son, des parfums doux et du très lent.” See William Sharpe, “The Nocturne in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,” in Modernity and Revolution in Late Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Barbara T. Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 108–25. Among the many authors of a poem called “Nocturne” are Albert Glatigny (1864), Charles Cros (1869), Paul Bourget (1872), Jules Laforgue (1880), Kahn (1886), Jean Moréas (1895), and Albert Samain (c. 1893). Redon’s Nocturne and his etchings of night also owe much to the Symbolist poets. 91. Camille Mauclair, De Watteau à Whistler (Paris: Charpentier, 1905), 245–50.

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92. See Vincent van Gogh, Lettres á son frère Théo, ed. Georges Philippart (Paris: Grasset, 1937), 253, 255. 93. Van Gogh also pursued ideas suggested by his friend Louis Anquetin’s Rue— Cinq Heures du soir (1887), as he worked on his Café at Night in Arles (1888). 94. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 84, 475. See Jean Schwind, “Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and Whitman: A Study in Source,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 1–15. Whitman’s From Noon to Starry Night was translated and published in France in 1888. Van Gogh’s companion piece, Wheatfield with Cypress (1889), would represent the noonday part of Whitman’s poem. 95. See Whitman, Complete Poems, 497, 437, 389. 96. Vincent van Gogh, Lettres, 259 (September 8, 1888): “Souvent il me semble que la nuit est bien plus vivante et richement colorée que la journée.” 97. See Blum and Lippincott, Light! 202, 206. Van Gogh’s painting Gaugin’s Chair (1888) contrasts a lit candle on the chair to the more radiant gas flame in a wall bracket behind it. 98. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890; repr., New York: New American Library, 1983), 66–67. 99. On the early artistic representations of New York’s modernity in the decades before and after 1900, see Wanda Corn, “The New New York,” Art in America (July–August 1973): 58–65, and The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 160–75. 100. O. Henry, “Tobin’s Palm,” 7. 101. On Whistler’s vast influence in the United States, see Merrill, After Whistler, esp. Merrill, “Whistler in America,”10–31. See also William Sharpe, “What’s Out There? Frederic Remington’s Art of Darkness,” in Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, ed. Nancy K. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 26–37. 102. Aharles G. D. Roberts, “A New York Nocturne,” Scribner’s Magazine 24, no. 4 (October 1898): 469. 103. M. G. Van Rensselaer, “Picturesque New York” (1878); reprinted in Frank Oppel, ed., Gaslight New York Revisited (Secaucus, NJ: Castle, 1989), 315, 325. 104. James B. Carrington, “New York at Night,” Scribner’s Magazine 27 (March 1900): 326–36; “The Streets of New York at Night,” Harper’s Weekly, February 9, 1901, 141. Harper’s Monthly (114, no. 681 [February 1907]: 359–67) later published “Manhattan Lights” by Edward S. Martin, lauding the poetry of the city lights, with numerous night photographs. 105. “The Picturesqueness of New York Streets: Illustrated in the Paintings of Birge Harrison,” The Craftsman (January 1908): 397–99. 106. See Garland Greever and Joseph M. Bachelor, eds., The Soul of the City (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 118 (Mifflin), 69 (Hall). 107. New York Sun, March 30, 1902; cited in Nancy K. Anderson, “Dark Disquiet: Remington’s Late Nocturnes,” in Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, ed. Nancy K. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 72. 108. See Wanda Corn, The Color of Mood: American Tonalism, 1880–1910 (San Francisco: M. H. De Young Memorial Museum, 1972), 1–12. After those of Whistler, Ryder, and Blakelock, the most widely known tonalist night scenes were those of Inness, among them Early Moonrise (1893), Moonlight

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109.

110.

111.

112. 113.

114.

115.

116.

117.

(1890), Night (1890), Montclair by Moonlight (1892), and The Moon at Night (1890). See Cynthia H. Prebus, “Transitions in American Art and Criticism: The Formative Years of Early American Modernism, 1895–1905” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1994), 553–601. See Edward Bryant, ed., Pennell’s New York Etchings (New York: Dover, 1980), ix; cited in Joseph Pennell, “The Pictorial,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 61 (1912–1913): 111. Pennell saw big changes in New York between the early 1890s and 1904, when he returned from London. “Fairy boats float by in the night,” he said (cited in Bryant, Etchings, 104). On tonalist and impressionist views of New York, see William H. Gerdts, Impressionist New York (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994). On Ash Can New York, see Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (New York: Norton, 1995); Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Eliot Clark, “J. Alden Weir,” Art in America 8 (August 1920): 242; cited in Gerdts, Impressionist New York, 173. Other Hassam nocturnes include Horse-Drawn Cabs at Evening (c. 1890), Rainy Night under the Electric Light (1899), and Broadway at Forty-Second Street (1902). See Gerdts, Impressionist New York, 25–28, 63. Gerdts also discusses the impressionist night paintings of Edward Redfield, such as Between Daylight and Darkness (1909) and Brooklyn Bridge at Night (1909) (ibid., 90–92, 171–72). In Montreal, for example, Harold Mortimer Lamb took night photographs like those of Steichen and Stieglitz, and his article on “Pictorial Possibilities” begins by quoting Whistler. See Harold Mortimer Lamb, “Pictorial Possibilities of Night Photography,” Amateur Photographer, November 5, 1907, 440–42; Ariane Isler-de-Jongh, “The Night Photography of Harold Mortimer Lamb,” History of Photography 20, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 157–59. In Pittsburgh, Aaron Harry Gorsen painted nocturnes of the Monongahela River and steel mills. For an analysis of photo-Secession photographers that stresses New York City itself as a decisive shaper of new photographic styles, see William R. Taylor, “Psyching Out the City,” in Uprooted Americans: Essays in Honor of Oscar Handlin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 245–87. This claim, inscribed by Stieglitz on the back of a print of this photograph, may well be applied to other views he took that same night. See Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), 1:148–51, nos. 251–56. Of his night wanderings, Stieglitz said, “I loved the signs, even the slush, as well as the snow, the rain, and the lights as night fell. Above all there was the burning idea of photography, of pushing its possibilities even further” (cited in Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer [New York: Random House, 1973], 39). By 1906 there was a night category at the Third American Salon; Albert R. Benedict won first prize with his Stieglitz-esque Waiting, depicting a row of streetlights and their shimmering reflections. See Keith F. Davis, An American Century of Photography, 2nd ed. (New York: Abrams, 1999), 64. See also Keith F. Davis, Night Light: A Survey of 20th Century Night Photography (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1989). Night shots by Fraser and Stieglitz were reproduced in one of the earliest articles on the subject. See James B. Carrington, “Night Photography,” Scribner’s Magazine 22 (July–December 1897): 626–28.

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118. See William Sharpe, “New York, Night, and Cultural Myth-Making: The Nocturne in Photography, 1900–1925,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2, no. 3 (1988): 3–21. On the manipulation of photo images with color pigments and brushes, see Corn, Color of Mood, 16. 119. New York Times, January 5, 1908, part 1, 9. See also Robert Doty, Photo Secession: Stieglitz and the Fine-Art Movement in Photography (New York: Dover, 1960), 46. 120. In 1911, J. Nilsen Luarvik wrote of Stieglitz that “his Winter—Fifth Avenue, made in 1893, created a sensation, not only in photographic circles, but in the world of art, and blazed the way for a whole school of painters, who set themselves the task of depicting the streets and life of New York” (“Alfred Stieglitz, Pictorial Photographer,” International Studio 44 [August 1911]: xxv). 121. Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York: Bonanza Books, 1963), n.p. Steichen was deeply disappointed at not being able to photograph Whistler on his first trip to Europe in 1900–1902. 122. A daytime photograph of the Flatiron Building by Jessie Tarbox Beals, Horses, Madison Square (1906), conveys this idea even more strongly; at the picture’s vanishing point, the long line of horse-drawn vehicles converges on the Flatiron, as if it were Moloch receiving its tribute of human and animal sacrifice. See Davis, American Century, 55. 123. Herman Melville, Pierre, or, The Ambiguities (New York: New American Library, 1964), 267. 124. O. Henry, “From the Cabby’s Seat,” in The Complete Works of O. Henry (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 67. 125. Paul Strand complained of the impressionistic effects that Steichen “Whistlered” with a soft-focus lens. Paul Strand, “The Art Motive in Photography,” in Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 281. 126. Coburn opened a studio in New York in 1902, had a one-man show at Stieglitz’s “291” Gallery in 1907, and did the photographs for Henry James’s New York Edition, 1907–1917. But by 1912 he had settled permanently in England. 127. Cited in Dixon Scott, “The Painter’s New Rival: An Interview with Alvin Langdon Coburn,” American Photography 2, no. 1 (January 1908): 18–19. 128. Coburn might also have been thinking of the way in which Whistler studied the river scenes intensely and then painted them from memory the next day. Like the pictorial photographer painstakingly composing a shot and then taking a long exposure, Whistler created his own “time-exposure” scenes in his mind, which he then “printed” on canvas in a matter of minutes when he was ready. 129. Cited in Scott, “Interview,” 19. 130. Alvin Langdon Coburn, “The Relation of Time to Art,” Camera Work 36 (October 1911): 72. 131. Ibid., 73. 132. See Mike Weaver, “Alvin Langdon Coburn,” Aperture 104 (Fall 1986): 16. 133. For an analysis of how Stieglitz, too, accentuated the surface arrangement of forms in a Whistlerian or Japanese manner, see William Inness Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), 155–57. The photography critic Sadakichi Hartmann praised Whistler for adding to the Japanese aesthetic “light, atmosphere, distance, and mystery” (The Whistler Book [Boston, 1910], 67).

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134. Alvin Langdon Coburn, review of the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo, Harper’s Weekly, November 26, 1910. 135. Crane’s view was from Columbia Heights; letter from May 11, 1924, cited in John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (London: Anthony Blond, 1969), 364. 136. Martin, “Manhattan Lights,” 367. 137. Coburn, “The Relation of Time to Art,” 73. 138. Ezra Pound, “Patria Mia,” in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 107. 139. Ezra Pound, Personae (New York: New Directions, 1949), 235. Chapter Three

Colonizing the Night

1. See Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 183. For a skyline photograph of the festivities, see John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: A Essay in Graphic History (1953; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 435. 2. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Richard Kimbrough (serialized 1899; published 1900; repr., New York: Norton, 1988), 7. 3. David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 51. On how New York was electrified, see also ibid., 50–84. The Municipal Art Society complained about the Heinz sign that its vulgar message was “thrown in the faces of all who throng Madison Square.” See John DeWitt Warner, “Advertising Run Mad,” Municipal Affairs 4, no. 2 (1900): 276. 4. George Washington, letter to the New York City Common Council accepting the Freedom of the City in 1785; reprinted in New York Historical Society Quarterly (1917): 38. 5. See Ric Burns and James Sanders, New York: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1999), 206. 6. On the festivities, see David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 153–65. 7. Cited in Burns and Sanders, New York, 271. For a photograph of the Washington Square Arch and the East River bridges all lit up, see ibid., 272. 8. See Jan Seidler Ramirez, Painting the Town: Cityscapes of New York (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2000), 162–163. 9. London Times, October 4, 1909; cited in Nye, American Technological Sublime, 165. 10. Recent evidence suggests that Whistler was engaged in smuggling torpedoes to the rebels. See Simon Grant, “Whistler’s Call to Arms,” Art News 100, no. 8 (September 2001): 76. For an account of the mixed motives behind the emergence of the Valparaiso nocturne, see Katharine Manthore, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 159–76. 11. David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art (New York: Norton, 1984), 86. 12. Henry David Thoreau, “Night and Moonlight,” in Excursions, ed. Leo Marx (1863; repr., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1975), 318. Written circa 1852– 1854, “Night and Moonlight” was first published in the Atlantic Monthly (November 1863).

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13. Ibid., 307. 14. Ibid., 307. 15. On the cultural discourse of light and darkness that facilitated the European colonization of Africa, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 173–97. 16. Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987), 51. For Melbin, time, like space, is a container that can be filled with people and activity. Night’s frontier functions as both a safety valve and economic resource for people constrained by the limits of daytime life. Both frontier and nightlife, Melbin finds, feature uneven stages of advance, isolated settlements, a wider range of tolerated behavior, novel hardships, lawlessness and peril, helpfulness and sociability among the settlers, fewer status distinctions, and a decentralization of authority (29–52). 17. Ibid., 52. 18. Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Imhof and Dafydd Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 57. 19. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883; repr., New York: Penguin, 1984), 203–4, 238. 20. See Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 336; Neil Smith, “New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild, West,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 67–69. 21. The urban poor were compared to Indians not only in New York but also in Paris. In The Mysteries of Paris (1843), Eugene Sue wrote that the denizens of the night were “barbarians as much outside civilization as the savage tribes so well depicted by Cooper. Except that the barbarians of which I speak are in the midst of us.” Around 1900, small-time Parisian crooks lurking near the Place de la Bastille received the name “apaches” and were the subject of articles in Le Matin—“Parisian Apaches, and Where to Find Them.” See Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 120, 136. 22. ”Science Against Superstition,” Electrical World, August 2, 1884, 33; cited in Marvin, Old Technologies, 36. See also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (New York: Berg, 1988), 57, 134. The British Army used arc lights again in the 1880s against Egyptian troops. Drummond limelight, invented in 1825, was the first searchlight used in warfare, in an attack on Charleston, South Carolina, in 1863 during the American Civil War. 23. C.J.H. Woodbury, “The Savage and the Circuit,” Electrical Review, May 16, 1891, 160; cited in Marvin, Old Technologies, 36. Marvin comments, “Styling themselves as defenders of Western civilization, electrical experts” used “deception and coercion [as] accepted sanctions against those who refused to recognize the authority of electrical expertise. The amount of deception considered proper was proportionate to the cultural strangeness of those against whom it was directed,” including “non-Europeans, Indians, blacks, women, criminals, and the poor” (62). 24. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1066. See also Nye, Electrifying America, 32.

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25. Evening Post, October 8, 1892, 4, col. 2. 26. See photograph in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, reproduced in Burns and Sanders, New York, 183. 27. Andreas Blühm and Louise Lippincott, Light! The Industrial Age, 1750–1900: Art and Science, Technology and Society (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2000), 186. 28. Grover Cleveland, cited in Burns and Sanders, New York, 187. 29. Reputedly, the body of the statue was based on that of the sculptor Bartholdi’s mistress (see Burns and Sanders, New York, 186). 30. Melech Ravitch, “In the New York Statue of Liberty,” in New York: An Anthology, ed. Mike Marqusee and Bill Harris (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 231–32. 31. William Hard, “De Kid Wot Works at Night,” Everybody’s Magazine, January 1908; cited in Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan, eds., Popular Writing in America: The Interaction of Style and Audience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 257. 32. See “An Electric Torchlight Procession,” Scientific American, November 15, 1884, 310. 33. See Burns and Sanders, New York, 174; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1065. On the context of Edison’s work, see Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2003). 34. Humphrey Davy created the first arc light in 1809, when he sent an electric current arcing across the space between two carbon electrodes, heating the electrodes to a white heat that gave off an intense light. A hundred times more powerful than gaslights or the incandescent bulbs that began to replace them in the 1880s, arc lights, or “sun towers” as they were sometimes called, were regarded more as “city lighting” than street lighting because of the large area they covered. They were used sporadically in Europe and the United States after 1850, and became popular in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when better technology and lower costs made them an attractive alternative to gas. See Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 126; for an illustration of Broadway at Madison Square, see Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1063. 35. Nye, Electrifying America, 31; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1063. 36. Nye, Electrifying America, 33; Marvin, Old Technologies, 164. 37. On how colonial rhetoric suffused descriptions of London, see Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 38. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 7. See also Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907; repr., London: J. M. Dent, 1947): “darkness enough to bury five millions of lives” (xii); and “The whole town of marvels and mud, with its maze of streets and its mass of light, was sunk in a hopeless night” (222). 39. Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 222. 40. Cited in ibid., 133. 41. Stephen Crane, “In the Broadway Cars” (n.d.), in The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. R. W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 186–87. (First published in Last Words [London, 1902].) 42. Jacob Riis, The Making of an American (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 423–24. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. 43. See Peter Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 162ff. My understanding of Riis

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44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

owes much to Hales as well as to David Leviatin’s introduction to his edition of How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis (New York: Bedford, 1996). See also Alexander Nemerov, “Burning Daylight: Remington, Electricity, and Flash Photography,” in Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, ed. Nancy K. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 76–95. Hales and Leviatin make the important point that Riis did not himself take all the photographs published under his name, suggesting that we regard Riis more as a film director, scripting shots that he would later arrange in slide shows to express his vision of the slums. Jacob Riis, “Slums and Socialites,” New York Sun, February 12, 1888, 7; cited in Rick Beard, ed., On Being Homeless: Historical Perspectives (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1987), 53. See Leviatin, introduction, 34–39. Hales, Silver Cities, 193. Riis, “Slums and Socialites,” 7. Hales, Silver Cities, 198. Ibid., 177. Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 66. Nye, Electrifying America, 50–51, 60. Leviatin, introduction, 28. See Thomas A. Gullason, “The Sources of Stephen Crane’s Maggie,” Philological Quarterly 38 (October 1959): 497–502; Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Gandal provides a theoretically sophisticated examination of how new notions of psychology and morality shape Crane and Riis’s differing but interrelated “tourism” of the slums. Frank Norris, “Stephen Crane’s Stories of Life in the Slums,” The Wave (San Francisco) 15 (July 4, 1896): 13; cited in Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, ed. Thomas A. Gullason (New York: Norton, 1979), 151. See Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 13, 1875 and February 10, 1877; reproduction in Howard B. Rock and Deborah Sash Moore, Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 183. Sol Eytinge, Harper’s Weekly, August 9, 1879. The Little Laborers of New York City, Harper’s 48, no. 279 (August 1873); reprinted in Frank Opel, ed., Gaslight New York Revisited (Secaucus, NJ: Castle, 1989), 371. Stephen Crane, “An Experiment in Misery” (1894), in The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. R. W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 33–34. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. Crane, The New York City Sketches, 246. Crane, Maggie, 53. Like Crane, Ash Can painter Everett Shinn also focused with detached sympathy on snow-aggravated poverty. See Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 167–69. Stephen Crane, “The Men in the Storm,” in The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, vol. 8, Tales, Sketches, and Reports, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 317. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text.

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63. Charles Wisner Barrell, “The Real Drama of the Slums,” The Craftsman (February 1909): 563; cited in Henry Adams, “John Sloan’s The Coffee Line,” Carnegie Magazine 57, no. 6 (November–December 1984): 23. 64. Sloan’s technique here follows a “soup” or thin-paint method of tonal composition traceable, via Sloan’s friend Robert Henri, to Whistler. See Adams, “John Sloan’s The Coffee Line,” 22. 65. See Adams, “John Sloan’s The Coffee Line,” 24. But Sloan often made up his own signs. Here, he inserted the last three letters of a lighted billboard at the upper left, “KEY.” This shape echoes the blank square on the wagon, suggesting the importance of the scene and Sloan’s message, not Hearst’s. 66. Stephen Crane, “When Every One Is Panic Stricken / A Realistic Pen Picture of a Fire in a Tenement” (1894), in The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. R. W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 102. 67. See Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (New York: Norton, 1995), 73; Zurier, Picturing the City, 170–74. Shinn also provided illustrations for an article called “The Cross Streets of New York,” Scribner’s Magazine 28 (November 1900), which contains night photos and views. 68. Michael Gold, Jews Without Money (1930; repr. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984), 126. The mute subjects of Riis and Shinn also gained voice in the writing of Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska. 69. Henry James, The American Scene (1907; repr., New York: Penguin, 1994), 66–67. 70. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905; repr., New York: Penguin, 1985), 161. 71. Ibid., 321–22. 72. George Beard, American Nervousness (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1880); cited in Nye, Electrifying America, 142. 73. Rainer Maria Rilke, “People by Night,” in The Book of Pictures (1899), in Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1962), 63. 74. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. P. Patton, in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Tractenberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 208. Hard to reproduce, the delicate tones of Whistler’s nocturnes could be said to resist aura breaking in an age of mechanical reproduction. 75. Ibid., 208. 76. The great critical success enjoyed by Remington’s shows at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1908 and 1909 was linked directly to his night scenes. The night paintings have now been studied and exhibited as a group for the first time; see Nancy K. Anderson, ed., Frederic Remington: The Color of Night (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 77. See William Sharpe, “What’s Out There? Frederic Remington’s Art of Darkness,” in Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, ed. Nancy K. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 16–51. 78. Frederic Remington’s diary, Remington Museum, Ogdensburg, New York, entry for March 8, 1908: “What is America done with its forests gone and the scum of Europe in its place. It may be someone else’s America but it isn’t mine. I guess mine is about dead anyway and I seem to be doing an obituary.”

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79. Ibid., entry for January 15, 1908. 80. Thoreau, Walden (1854), in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking, 1964), 560. 81. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 30; Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and DayDreaming” (1908), in Criticism: Major Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 427–28. 82. Thoreau, “Night and Moonlight,” 318. 83. Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels, Frederic Remington: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 426. 84. Homer Davenport, letter to Eva Remington, May 15, 1909, Frederic Remington Art Museum, Ogdensburg, New York. Chapter Four

The Empire of Light

1. Globe and Commercial Advertiser, New York, November 11, 1909, 1. 2. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1054. 3. Henry Clews, Fifty Years in Wall Street (New York: Irving Publishing, 1908), 448–49; cited in Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago, 1984), 36. For an overview of how nightlife evolved at the turn of the century, see Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 113–45. See also Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), esp. 9–40 (on urban sketches as a way of understanding the chaotic city), 174–203 (on slumming). 4. See John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York: A Essay in Graphic History (1953; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 441 (Madison Square Garden watercolor by Louis Sonntag, 1895), 463 (Madison Square Garden entrance at night by H. C. Christy, in Harper’s Weekly, November 26, 1898). 5. On how advertisers and business leaders “reinvented” the city as a safe and attractive tourist destination and entertainment center for Americans as well as Europeans, see Angela Blake, How New York Became American, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 6. “All-Night Life in New York,” Vanity Fair 3 (April 1915): 50. 7. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 8. Percy Gaunt, “The Bowery,” words by Charles H. Hoyt, from the musical A Trip to Chinatown (1892). 9. New York World, 1915; cited in Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 80. 10. James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912; repr., New York: Dover, 1995), 42. 11. Edward S. Martin, “Manhattan Lights,” Harper’s 114, no. 681 (February 1907): 359–67. 12. Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel (1927; repr., New York: Anchor, 1973), 107–8, 145–46. 13. Anonymous, cited in Ric Burns and James Sanders, New York: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1999), 326. 14. On the Village’s bohemian revelry, see Andrea Barnet, All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913–1930 (New York:

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15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

Workman, 2004); Luther S. Harris, Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Burns and Sanders, New York, 336–37. Burns and Sanders, New York, 331. On Harlem nightlife in its social and intellectual context, see David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 198–239. Gay nightlife throve in Harlem; see Chauncey, Gay New York, 244–67. Langston Hughes, “Negro” and “Dream Variations,” in Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Knopf, 1995), 24, 40. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 197. See Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1069. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 255–56. Joseph Lee, “Play as an Antidote to Civilization,” Playground 5 (July 1911): 125. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (1933; repr., New York: Viking, 1968), 328; cited in Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 233. Jimmy Durante and Jack Kofold, Night Clubs (New York: Knopf, 1931), 113; cited in Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 208. James Weldon Johnson, cited in Burns and Sanders, New York, 333. Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (1926; repr., New York: Harper, 1971), 188. See Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 208–11. Claude McKay, “The Harlem Dancer,” in Complete Poems, ed. William J. Maxwell (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 172. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” in Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner, 1996), 217. Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, 90, 148. Eric Walrond, “City Love” (1927), in Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader, ed. Louis J. Parascandola (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 182. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. For example, in Song of Towers (1934) and Aspiration (1936), painter Aaron Douglas’s silhouetted figures appear to yearn toward stylized skyscraper towers in the distance. While suggesting the racial and economic tension between Harlem and downtown, his daytime motifs and theatrical lighting effects seem more concerned with a nightclub-style staging of emotion than with representing the look or life of the nocturnal streets outside. McKay, Home to Harlem, 266, 290. Ibid., 290 (ellipses in original). Nocturnal Harlem’s romantic combination of commotion and quiet later inspired Hughes’s “Juke Box Love Song” (1950), where the poet proposes to take the lights and traffic sounds, “and for your love song tone their rumble down.” Langston Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Knopf, 1995), 393. Arna Bontemps, cited in Burns and Sanders, New York, 326. Henry James, The American Scene (1907; repr., New York: Penguin, 1994), 90. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913; repr., New York: Penguin, 1987), 45. Willa Cather, “Behind the Singer Tower,” in Collected Short Fiction, Vol. 1 (1892–1912), ed. Virginia Faulkner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

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37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

1970), 43. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. The story was originally published in Collier’s 49 (May 18, 1912): 16–17, 41. With Mosaic imagery that might have served Cather, David Nye comments of the Singer Tower that looking across the East River toward New York, “you saw this pillar of fire . . . the only building that stood out. . . .You might say this is the origin of the lighted skyline.” David Nye, “The Electrical Sublime in the American City, 1870–1931,” available at http://www.nottingham. ac.uk/3cities/nye.htm. Between 1880 and 1910, 1.4 million Jews came to New York; in 1910 they made up 25 percent of the population, and by 1920 they constituted 30 percent of it. Italians arrived a little later; 1.9 million came to the United States in 1899–1910, 77 percent of them of rural background; in New York their number more than doubled from 220,000 in 1900 to 545,000 in 1910. By 1930 there were over 1 million Italians in New York City, or about 17 percent of the population. New York Herald, October 29, 1905. See Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 20, 26. “Began Art Career as Illustrator on Makio,” Lantern, undated clipping in Bellows’s papers; cited in Doezema, George Bellows, 44. A historical irony: like Cather’s fictional Mont Blanc Hotel, the Singer Building did not last. It was destroyed in 1968 to make way for another skyscraper, earning a final distinction of being the tallest building yet demolished. See David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 66. See also David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 93. In 1894, the sign was replaced by the Heinz sign and its forty-five-foot pickle that so irked patriots during the “Welcome Dewey “ celebrations in 1899. See Margaret Weigel, “Electronic Bulb Signs in fin de siècle New York: Technology, Spectacle, and Commerce,” available at http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/ mit2/Abstracts/Weigel.pdf. On the history of New York signs, see Tama Starr and Edward Hayman, Signs and Wonders: The Spectacular Marketing of America (New York: Currency, 1998). Coney Island and Broadway echoed each other in the electric bathing department too: “To-day, on a winter evening, I arrive in Times Square about six o’clock. It is Broadway’s finest hour. Here, until midnight, New York takes its bath of light.” Paul Morand, New York (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), 186. For an illustrated examination of Coney Island’s appeal, see John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). See also John A. Jakle, City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 169–79. See Nye, Electrifying America, 132; the department store and the amusement park, at the center and fringe of the city, on the two poles of transit, are almost mirror images. Both sell a commodified fantasy experience—one by day, and the other by night. See Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (New York: Norton, 1995), 52. O. Henry, “Brickdust Row,” in The Complete Works of O. Henry (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 1369. Ibid., 1370.

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50. Richard Le Gallienne, “Human Need of Coney Island,” Cosmopolitan 39 (July 1905): 243; reprinted in Frank Oppel, ed., Tales of Gaslight New York (Secaucus, NJ: 1985), 307. 51. Maxim Gorky, “Boredom,” Independent 63 (August 8, 1907): 310. 52. Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. Ben Bellit (1940; repr., New York: Grove Press, 1955), 39. 53. Burns and Sanders, New York, 261. 54. James Huneker, New Cosmopolis: A Book of Images (New York: Scribner’s, 1915), 165, 166, 169; cited in Jakle, City Lights, 174. 55. Joseph Stella, “Discovery of America: Autobiographical Notes, Art News 59 (November 1960): 64. Though unpublished until 1960, Stella wrote this text in 1946 at the request of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 56. Ibid., 65. 57. Ibid., 65. 58. For more on the painting, see Kasson, Amusing, 88–90; Wanda Corn, “An Italian in New York,” in The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 135–92. 59. “Broadway,” Atlantic Monthly 125 (June 1920): 854–56; cited in Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987), 61. 60. H. G. Wells, The Future in America (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1907), 48. 61. Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America, quoted in Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky (London, 1972); cited in Nye, American Technological Sublime, 193. On Times Square nightlife, see William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); James Traub, The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2004), 17–52. 62. Bruce Barton, “Trustees of Light,” Light Magazine (May 1923): 4; cited in Nye, Electrifying America, 274. 63. Vachel Lindsay, Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay, ed. Mark Harris (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 54. 64. Florence Earle Coates, “New York: A Nocturne,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and Joseph M. Bachelor (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 263. 65. Cervin Robinson and Rosemari Haag Bletter, Skyscraper Style: Art Deco, New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 67; cited in Nye, American Technological Sublime, 195. See also ibid., 188, 190. 66. George Moore, “The Savagery of Electric Sky-Signs,” World Today (1924): 222–23. 67. Claude McKay, “On Broadway,” in Complete Poems, ed. William J. Maxwell (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 156. 68. Pierre Loti, “Impressions of New York,” Century Magazine 85 (February 1913): 611. 69. Theodosia Garrison, “Signs,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and Joseph M. Bachelor (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 153. 70. For a detailed consideration of the painting in the context of Stella’s transatlantic perspective, see Corn, Great American Thing, 135–92. On Stella in relation to many other artistic representations of the Brooklyn Bridge, see Wanda

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

Corn, “Joseph Stella and New York Interpreted,” Portfolio 4 (January–February 1982): 40–45; Peter Conrad, The Art of the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 223–47. Stella, “Discovery of America,” 66. Loti, “Impressions of New York,” 611. Robert Coady, Soil 1 (December 1916): 3. James, The American Scene, 58. New York Sun, February 13, 1913, sec. 4, 16; cited in Nye, Electrifying America, 77. See Joann Moser, Visual Poetry: The Drawings of Joseph Stella (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 55–57; Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella (New York: Abrams, 1994), 79. Haskell discusses New York Interpreted and its context; see 83–107. Claude Bragdon, cited in Burns and Sanders, New York, 345. Alfred Werner, Max Weber (New York: Abrams, 1974), 50; see also Abraham Davidson, Early American Modernist Painting, 1910–1935 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 33. The shift from a picturesque style to a modernist, geometrically oriented rendering of the “New New York” has been described in Corn, Great American Thing, 160–77. Stella, “Discovery of America,” 65. Edgar Saltus, “New York from the Flatiron,” Munsey’s Magazine 33 (July 1905): 382. O. Henry, “The Voice of the City,” in The Complete Works of O. Henry (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 1221, 1223. Stella, “Discovery of America,” 65–66. Stella also spoke of the “scintillating, highly-colored lights” as creating “a new polyphony” (65). See Corn, “Joseph Stella,” 43. Stella, “Discovery of America,” 65. Katherine Dreier [unsigned essay], “The Voice of the City: Five Paintings by Joseph Stella,” Survey (November 1923): 142–47. All quotations from 142; the other pages are black-and-white images of the five panels, in left-to-right order. In “Discovery of America,” Stella follows the same basic trajectory as Dreier, finishing with The Port. I thank Sumner Braunstein for bringing the Dreier essay to my attention. The phrase was first used about New York in the 1880s, and then repopularized in the 1920s by the British critic/artist team of James and Muirhead Bone. Irma Jaffe, Joseph Stella (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 78. In New York, artificial light itself would seem to be the masculine aggressor: “A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violation of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity” (Stella, “Discovery of America,” 64–65). Stella, “Discovery of America,” 65. Joseph Stella, “Brooklyn Bridge: A Page of My Life,” Transition (June 1929): 16–17, 86–88; reprinted in Haskell, Joseph Stella, 207. Ibid. Jaffe, Joseph Stella, 25. Federico García Lorca, from a lecture given in Spain, cited in Mike Marousee and Bill Harris, eds., New York: An Anthology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 14. Lorca, Poet in New York, 53–55. The American surrealist painter Louis Guglielmi created a visual equivalent of Lorca’s poem, The Bridge; for a discussion of his work, see Conrad, Art of the City, 245–47.

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94. Lorca, reprinted in Marousee and Harris, New York, 14. 95. On Stella’s influence on Crane, see Irma Jaffe, “Joseph Stella and Hart Crane: The Brooklyn Bridge,” American Art Journal 1, no. 2 (Fall 1969): 98–107; Jaffe, Joseph Stella, 246–47. 96. All quotations from Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” in Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1966), 46. 97. Stella, “Discovery of America,” 66. 98. Hart Crane, “Atlantis,” in Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1966), 114, 116. 99. Dreier, “Five Paintings by Joseph Stella,” 142. 100. Louis Baury, “The Message of Manhattan,” Bookman 33 (August 1911): 592. 101. Odette Keun, I Think Aloud in America (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939); cited in Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 323. 102. Ernst May, cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (New York: Berg, 1988), 154. 103. G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (1922), in The Collected Works of G. K. Chseterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 21:62. 104. Loti, “Impressions of New York,” 611. 105. Chesterton, What I Saw, 62–63. 106. “The multicolored lights of the billboards create at night a new hymn of praise,” Stella wrote, and he called the White Way panels his “Hymn to Electric Lights.” Joseph Stella, “New York”; cited in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella (New York: Abrams, 1994), 219. 107. London Times, October 4, 1909;.cited in Nye, American Technological Sublime, 165. 108. Dreier, “Five Paintings by Joseph Stella,” 142. 109. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 22. 110. Wanda Corn (Great American Thing, 146) calls The Port a “soft nocturne” as opposed to the “hard” nocturne of the White Way panels. She also uses the label “electric nocturne” for Stella’s’ Battle of Lights, distinguishing Whistler’s nocturnes, whose softly glowing lights have no clear source, from the New York razzle-dazzle, which is “modern, electric, and standardized” (171–72). But rarely do Stella’s paintings localize light sources; though often uniform, the lights glare out of the darkness without a pole, wire, or plug in sight. The catchy “electric nocturne” label suggests a post-Victorian artwork that emphasizes light rather than darkness, urban spectacle rather than meditative repose. Here Corn follows popular usage, which now applies “nocturne” to any representation of night; night has become electric, so the nocturne has too. But in accepting this definition we lose Whistler’s idea that as a dark, dreamy art form, the nocturne helps us to see something that the light cannot show. 111. Max Epstein, “Berlin im Licht,” Weltbrille 7 (1928); cited in Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 70. 112. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (1910), in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 29.

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113. Nye, American Technological Sublime, 152–53, 196–98. 114. Dreier, “Five Paintings by Joseph Stella,” 142. 115. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd. ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), 10. 116. Stephen Crane, poem 44, The Black Riders (1895), in Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1314. Chapter Five:

Skyscraper Fantasy

1. Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” in Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 127. 2. Thomas Wolfe, “No Door” (1933), in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, ed. Francis E. Skipp (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 68–69. © 1934, Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1961 Charles Scribner’s Sons. 3. William Carlos Williams, “The Flower,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 324. 4. Charles Reznikoff, “Winter Sketches” (1933), in The Poetry Anthology, 1912–1977, ed. Daryl Hine and Joseph Parisi (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 138. 5. See David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 41, 44, 63, 66. 6. See Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); WPA Guide to New York City (1939; repr., New York: New Press, 1992). 7. Consolidated Edison publicity, in Official Guide Book of the 1939 World’s Fair; reproduced in Peter Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 267. 8. Carl Sandburg, “Skyscraper,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 332. 9. Elizabeth Bishop, “From the Country to the City,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 13. 10. Williams, “The Flower,” 324. 11. Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: Viking, 1976), n.p. Also in Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 191. 12. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 112. 13. Walt Whitman, “A Song for Occupations,” in Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 244. 14. Le Courbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White (New York: Reynald and Hitchcock, 1947), 90. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City” (1932), in The Crack Up, ed. Edmund Nelson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 31. 18. “A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel Duchamp, Iconoclast,” Arts and Decoration 5 (September 1915): 428.

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19. C.R.W. Nevinson, cited in Jerome Tarsis, “The Precisionist Impulse,” Portfolio 4 (November–December 1982): 60. 20. Constantin Brancusi, “Brancusi Returns Here for Display,” New York World, September 30, 1926. 21. May Swenson treats these themes in her skyscraper-shaped poem, “The Totem” (1958). See May Swenson, To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (New York: Scribner’s, 1963), 64. 22. O. Henry, “An Unfinished Story,” in Complete Works of O. Henry (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 71. 23. O. Henry, “The Green Door,” in Complete Works of O. Henry (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 62. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. 24. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 57–58, 69. 25. Fitzgerald, “My Lost City,” 30. 26. Arnold Bennett, Those United States (London: Martin Secker, 1912), 45–46. 27. MacKnight Black, Thrust at the Sky and Other Poems (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), 39. 28. William Carlos Williams, “Flight to the City,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 187. 29. Marie Ganz and Nat J. Ferber, Rebels: Into Anarchy and Out Again (1920); cited in Ric Burns and James Sanders, New York: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1999), 248–49. 30. Charlton Lawrence Edholm, “City Windows,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 297. 31. Sandburg, “Skyscraper,” 329. 32. Edholm, “City Windows,” 297. 33. Walt Whitman, “City of Orgies,” in Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 158. 34. Wallace Stevens, “Six Significant Landscapes,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1975), 73–75; “lights masculine” in Wallace Stevens, “Of Hartford in a Purple Light” (1939), in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1975), 226. 35. Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years (New York: Dial Press, 1982), 129–30. 36. See Ezra Pound, “N.Y.,” in Personae: Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1949), 62;Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 365. 37. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 57. 38. e. e. cummings, “Post Impressions,” in Poems, 1923–1954 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 76. 39. Maxwell Bodenheim, “Two Women on a Street,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 86. 40. Image reproduced in Merrill Schleier, The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890–1931 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), fig. 30. 41. Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” (1926), in Kindergarten Chats and Other Essays, ed. Isabella Athey (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 206.

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42. See Thomas Bender and William R. Taylor, “Culture and Architecture: Some Aesthetic Tensions in the Shaping of Modern New York City, ” in Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature, ed. William C. Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 185–215. 43. See David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 91. 44. The inhuman city also appealed to George Ault (see Construction Night, c. 1923) and the precisionist Louis Lozowick, who depicted New York as a soaring jigsaw puzzle of windows and walls in New York (1926–1927, oil) and New York (c. 1927, lithograph)—works that conveyed the honeycomb effect while rigorously repressing any trace of human presence. 45. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (1932); cited in Michael Marqusee, ed., New York: An Illustrated Anthology (Topsfield, MA: Salem House, 1988), 165. Wright later rewrote the passage; see Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 55–56. 46. See Anna C. Chave, “‘Who Will Paint New York?’ ‘The World’s New Art Center,’ and the Skyscraper Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe,” American Art 5, nos. 1–2 (1991): 95–97, 105. 47. See Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, n.d.), 214; cited in Chave, “Who Will Paint New York?” 96. On the Stieglitz-O’Keeffe marriage and its impact on their art, see Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34–43, 117–79. 48. On the affair, see Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage, 37–40. 49. Weegee, Naked City (1945; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1985), 53. 50. Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 95. I discuss Black more fully in “MacKnight Black and American Futurism,” in Poetry and the Fine Arts, ed. Roland Hagenbüchle and Jacqueline S. Ollier (Regensburg, Germany: Pustet, 1989), 166–79. 51. Black, Thrust at the Sky, 25. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. 52. Janet Flanner, The Cubical City (1926; repr., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), 45–46. 53. Ibid., 44–45. 54. For a discussion of rape and phallic form, see Dolores Hayden, “Skyscraper Seduction, Skyscraper Rape,” Heresies 1 (May 1977): 108–15. 55. Sara Teasdale, “Union Square,” in The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale (Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, 1996), 31–32. 56. Amy Lowell, “The Taxi,” in Poems of New York, ed. Elizabeth Schmidt (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2002), 36. In 1912, Lowell entered into a “Boston marriage” with actress Ada Dwyer Russell. 57. Sara Teasdale, “Broadway,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 66. 58. Amy Lowell, “New York at Night,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 227–29. 59. Frances Shaw, “The City Lights from a Skyscraper,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 240.

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60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Florence Earle Coates, “New York: A Nocturne,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 262–64. 63. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I Too Beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex,” in Collected Poems, ed. Norma Millay (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), 688. 64. Dawn Powell, diary, September 15, 1932; cited in Phillip Lopate, ed., Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (New York: Library of America, 1998), 541. 65. Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein’s America, ed. Gilbert A. Harrison (1965; repr., New York: Liveright, 1996), 55. 66. Lowell, “New York at Night,” 227–29. 67. Sara Teasdale, “From the Woolworth Tower,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 338–41. For further discussion of the poem as well as photos of the nighttime view that the poet would have had, see John Timberman Newcomb, “The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems,” Modernism/modernity 10, no. 1 (2003): 111–14. 68. In this section I am indebted to Chave, “Who Will Paint New York?” 87– 107; Bram Dijkstra, “America and Georgia O’Keeffe,” in Georgia O’Keeffe: The New York Years, ed. Doris Bry and Nicholas Calloway (New York: Knopf, 1991), 105–29. See also Bram Dijkstra, Georgia O’Keeffe and the Eros of Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 71–84, 230–36. 69. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. Also in Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, 191. 70. See Wanda Corn, “Painting Big—O’Keeffe’s Manhattan,” American Art 20, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 22–25. 71. See Dijkstra, “America and Georgia O’Keeffe,” 109–10; for quotes, see O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 72. Georgia O’Keeffe, cited in Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, 191. 73. See Nye, American Technological Sublime, 180–81. 74. Alfred Stieglitz, cited in Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Random House, 1973), 161. 75. For an extensive reading of the painting that emphasizes its “portrait” qualities, see Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage, 153–79. 76. Harriet Monroe, “At Twilight,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 176. Writers often use images of crowns to adorn tall buildings in this era—U.S. light presents itself as regal or imperial display. 77. For some critics, the skyscrapers are simply like blossoming flowers; see Henry L. Sayre, The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 54–56; Dickran Tashjian, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 96. 78. Dijkstra, “America and Georgia O’Keeffe,” 126. 79. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 80. Ibid. 81. O’Keeffe painted two other city night pictures. Both return to key elements of New York with Moon: the central looming tower flanked by sky shapes, the prominent streetlight, and the cloud-cuddled moon. The Shelton Hotel at Night (1926), later destroyed by O’Keeffe, was reproduced in Arts and Decoration 26 (March 1927); see Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe, Catalogue Raisonné

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82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1105. Though the backlit building hides the moon itself, O’Keeffe positions a streetlight in front of the Shelton exactly where the moon should be, making her clearest statement about the synthetic organicism of the city. In Ritz Tower, Night (1928), she brings the moon back into view, only to set it distantly in the cloudy heavens, a weak echo of the haloed streetlight. In both pictures, the sky shape that formerly stood up to the assertive individuality of the skyscraper becomes a decorative background. George O’Keeffe, cited in B. Vladimir Berman, “She Painted the Lily and Got $25,000 and Fame for Doing It,” New York Evening Graphic Magazine Section, May 12, 1928; cited in Barbara Buhler Lynes, O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and the Critics, 1916–1929 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 287. Charles Hanson Towne, “The Lights,” in The Soul of the City: An Urban Anthology, ed. Garland Greever and John M. Bachelor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 312. George O’Keeffe, cited in Berman, “She Painted the Lily.” Henri Matisse, cited in Jack Flam, ed. and trans., Matisse on Art (New York: Dutton, 1978), 62–63. Williams, “The Flower,” 332. William Carlos Williams, “Perpetuum Mobile: The City,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 431. Williams, “The Flower,” 332. On Paterson’s man/city, woman/flower motif, which partly reverses his preferred city/flower metaphor of the 1920s, see William Chapman Sharpe, Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 134–74. William Carlos Williams, “To a Friend Concerning Several Ladies,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 165, 168. William Carlos Williams, “Flight to the City,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 186–87. Williams, “The Flower,” 322, 324. Ibid., 323–324. Ibid., 325. William Carlos Williams, “The Black Winds,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 190. William Carlos Williams, “Light Becomes Darkness,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 214. Elizabeth Bishop, “Love Lies Sleeping,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 16. O. Henry, “An Unfinished Story,” 71. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Man-Moth,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 14. Elizabeth Bishop, “Late Air,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 45. Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 217.

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102. The phrase “lamé with lights” recalls Baudelaire’s description of Paris as a prostitute disporting herself at nightfall: “tu te pavanes / Dans les voiles du soir passementés d’or fin” [“You strut about in the veils of evening, threaded with fine gold”] (“Epilogue,” Spleen de Paris). 103. Elizabeth Bishop, “From the Country to the City,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 13. 104. On Samuel H. Gottscho, see Donald Albrecht, ed., The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925–1940 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). Chapter Six

Staging the Night

1. See David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 29; Parisian theaters tried electricity in 1849 and 1855. 2. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 55. 3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City” (1932), in Edmund Wilson, ed., The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1945), 24. 4. Ibid., 31. 5. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1956) sums up these themes in cinematic form. On New York’s image in cinema, see James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (New York: Knopf, 2003), esp. 365–98 (“Nighttown”). 6. A significant exception to the building slowdown was Rockefeller Center (begun in 1932), whose construction fascinated observers throughout the 1930s. 7. “In recollections of the 1950s, in films, and in photographs, perhaps the most striking feature of Manhattan that emerges again and again is its emptiness—the abandoned look of even its most important arteries. . . . Much of the rest of New York looked similar—beaten up and exhausted by hard use.” See Mark Caldwell, New York Night: The Mystique and Its History (New York: Scribner, 2005), 300–301. 8. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 194. 9. On the thematics of sight and sense of involved spectatorship employed in representations of early twentieth-century New York, see Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), esp. 4–8, 86–103. 10. O. Henry, “Sisters of the Golden Circle,” in The Complete Works of O. Henry (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 79. 11. O. Henry, “Lost on Dress Parade,” in The Four Million (1906; repr., Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 223, 228. 12. O. Henry, “Man About Town,” in The Complete Works of O. Henry (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1937), 34–35. 13. Ibid., 37. 14. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890; repr., New York: New American Library, 1983), 66. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. 15. John Sloan, cited in John Sloan, 1871–1951 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1971), 109, 86. On Sloan and looking, see Zurier, Picturing the

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

City, 249–302; for her discussion of Night Windows, see ibid., 281–84. In 1912, Sloan drew a cartoon of himself leaning out from his high-up studio window, telescope to eye, examining a woman on the roof of a house below (see ibid., 287). John Sloan, cited in The New York Etchings of John Sloan (New York: Dover, 1978), 17. Fitzgerald, “My Lost City,” 29. Henry James, The American Scene (1907; repr., New York: Penguin, 1994), 153–55. Ibid., 155. Walt Whitman, “Broadway,” in Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 531. In “Atlantis,” near the end of The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane connects the romance of the city to what cannot be said: “Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee O Love.” I discuss this topic further in “ ‘Unspeakable’ New York: Censorship and the City,” Interspace 7 (1993): 83–91. Here I am indebted to Eric Savoy, who has proposed that throughout The American Scene, James’s New York is a city “in drag,” a city of excessive signification. Eric Savoy, “ ‘The Whitmanite Already Made’: Henry James as Reader of Whitman,” (paper presented at the Canadian Association for American Studies conference, Montreal, 1990), and “Reading Gay America: Walt Whitman, Henry James, and the Politics of Reception,” in The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life, ed. Robert K. Martin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 3–15. W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949), 48. See Karal Ann Marling, “Early Sunday Morning,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art (Fall 1988): 35–37. As she says succinctly, “Sloan’s architectural backdrop is Hopper’s subject” (37). Peter Conrad, The Art of the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 106. Hopper completed his last painting, Two Comedians, in 1965. Fitzgerald, “My Lost City,” 31. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 74. Hopper said the painting “was suggested by glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night” (“Such Is Life,” Life 102 [August 1935]: 48). On Hopper and marriage, see Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 43–114. For the Hoppers, marriage seems to have been like modernity: “Marriage is difficult. But the thing has to be gone through,” wrote Jo Hopper in her diary (cited in Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage, 44). See Marling, “Early Sunday Morning,” 39, 44–45. Edward Hopper, cited in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and Artist (New York: Norton, 1980), 58–60. See ibid., 251. See Victor Burgin’s photo-object critique, also called Office at Night (1985– 1986); Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage, 98–101, 105. Edward Hopper, cited in Levin, Edward Hopper, 59. Georges Hugnet, “In the Light of Surrealism,” trans. Margaret Scolaris, in Fantastic Art: Dada, Surrealism, ed. Alfred H. Barr (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 52.

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33. On Hopper and film, see Brian O’Doherty, “Hopper’s Look,” in Edward Hopper, ed. Sheena Wagstaff (London: Tate Gallery, 2004), 90–95. 34. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (1923; repr., New York, Harper and Row, 1984), 265. 35. Edward Hopper, cited in Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks With Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 134. 36. In preliminary drawings, as Jo Hopper confirmed, the woman holds a small sandwich, but in the painting the object is much smaller, and she has no plate, nor does her posture suggest eating. While the painted image, even seen close up, is hard to read, Hopper seems to have changed the sandwich to a matchbook to accentuate the frustrated connection between nighthawks. 37. See Wagstaff, Edward Hopper, 180–81. 38. Edward Hopper, cited in Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, 134; cited in Levin, Edward Hopper, 63. 39. George Foster, New York by Gas-Light (1850; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 123. 40. See Levin, Edward Hopper, 66, 229; Marling, “Early Sunday Morning,” 38–39. 41. See Marling, “Early Sunday Morning,” 39. 42. Hopper does approach Whistler directly in an early work, Blackwell’s Island (1911), where the reflection of an off-canvas moon glows on the East River. 43. I want to thank Ephraim Rubenstein for the poetry/prose observation and his years of help in understanding how artists see. 44. Vincent van Gogh, Lettres á son frère Théo, ed. Georges Philippart (Paris: Grasset, 1937), 238. Rodeurs de Nuit is also the French title of Hopper’s painting. On the relation of Nighthawks to van Gogh’s Night Café, see Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Complete Oil Paintings (New York: Whitney Museum, 2001), 288–93. 45. Edward Hopper, cited in Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, 134. 46. Circa 1925; see Levin, Edward Hopper, 9. 47. Edward Hopper, letter to Charles H. Sawyer, October 29, 1939, cited in Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper (New York: Abrams, 1971), 164. 48. Jean-Pierre Naugrette, “Peindre L’Amérique: Hopper Le Jour, La Nuit,” in Lectures adventureuses (La Garenne-Colombes, France: Editions d’Espace Européen, 1990), 224. 49. Edward Hopper, cited in Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, 142. 50. James McNeill Whistler, “The Red Rag,” in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1892; repr., New York: Dover, 1967), 126. 51. Edward Hopper, letter to the editor, Scribner’s Magazine, March 1927; cited in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper as Illustrator (New York: Norton, 1979), 7. 52. Edward Hopper, cited in Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, 135. 53. Edward Hopper, cited in Levin, Edward Hopper, 294. 54. Thomas Riley Marshall, vice president of the United States, 1917. Gordon Theisen touches on some of the points made here in Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006), 144–63. 55. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, in Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 1975), 70. 56. William McCleery, foreword to Naked City, by Weegee (1945; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1985), 6. On Weegee’s life and work, see Miles Barth, ed., Weegee’s World (New York: International Center of Photography, 1997);

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57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

André Laude, ed., Weegee (New York: Pantheon, 1986); John Coplans, ed., Weegee’s New York: 335 Photographs, 1935–1960 (London: Schirmer Books, 2006); Cynthia Young, ed., Unknown Weegee (New York: International Center of Photography, 2006). Arthur Fellig, Weegee by Weegee: An Autobiography (New York: Ziff-Davis, 1961), 52. On the rich photographic context against which Weegee’s brazen oeuvre stood out, see Jane Livingston, The New York School: Photographs, 1936–1963 (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1992). William Klein, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, David Vestal, and others made memorable photographs of the night city at this time; I focus on Weegee because more than anyone he revels in the theatrical quality of his subjects. Fellig, Weegee by Weegee, 18. Ibid., 27. See also Miles Orville, “Weegee’s Voyeurism and the Mastery of Urban Disorder,” American Art 6, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 34–35. Orville eloquently reads Naked City as self-consciously exploring “the theme of curiosity itself ” (30). Weegee, Naked City, 89 (ellipses in original). Fellig, Weegee by Weegee, 53. Ibid., 67. McCleery, foreword.7. Weegee, Naked City, 78. Ibid., 36. Fellig, Weegee by Weegee, 67. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 229–30. Muriel Rukeyser, “Seventh Avenue,” in Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), 882. Diane Arbus, cited in William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff, New York Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 371. Joseph Conrad, “Author’s Note,” in The Secret Agent (1907; repr., London: J. M. Dent: 1947), xxxvi. Langston Hughes, “Dive” (1951), in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, associate editor (New York: Knopf, 1994), 407. Copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; repr., New York: Vintage, 1972), 6. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically in the text. My thinking on Ellison, modernism, and technology is much indebted to John S. Wright, “‘Jack-the-Bear’ Dreaming: Ellison’s Spiritual Technologies,” boundary 2 30, no. 2 (2003):175–94. See also Robert G. O’Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Eric Sundquist, Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995); Nathalie Cochoy, Ralph Ellison (Paris: Belin, 1998). Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 256. Wright, “Ellison’s Spiritual Technologies,” 191. Ellison may have borrowed the name Rinehart from Count Basie’s song “Harvard Blues” (1941). The lyricist, George Frazier, referred to a Harvard legend about a student who, unlike Ellison’s character, has no social life.

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78. Langston Hughes, “Harlem,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Knopf, 1994), 426. 79. Quotes and images for this paragraph in Weegee, Naked City, 192–97 (ellipses in original). 80. See Morgan Smith and Marvin Smith, Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). 81. William Carlos Williams, “The Wanderer,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 31. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 82. See Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 1956), photographs following 266; Andreas Feininger, New York in the Forties (New York: Dover, 1978), 77–85. On V-J Day, August 14, 1945, over two million people jammed Times Square, which was fully lit up after four years of shading its lights. 83. William Carlos Williams, “The Last Turn,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 2, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1988), 82–83, lines 1–9. Subsequent references are noted parenthetically, by line number, in the text. 84. See Eliza E. Rathbone, Mark Tobey: City Paintings (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1984). The whole era has been seen as a meeting ground of the nocturnal and the abstract. In New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century (New York: Knopf, 2005), Jed Perl suggests that New York in the 1930s and 1940s was “a night city, a dream city” (556) of artistic possibility, “immortalized in the black-and-white abstractions” (68–69) of Willem de Kooning as well as the abstractly patterned photography of Aaron Siskind, William Klein, and others. 85. Delmore Schwartz, “America, America,” in Screeno: Stories and Poems, ed. Cynthia Ozick (New York: New Directions, 2004), 33. Epilogue

Night Now

1. Leopold Senghor, “New York,” trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy, in New York: Poems, ed. Howard Moss (New York: Avon, 1980), 246. 2. The line was apparently first used, in slightly different form, in the film Three Loves Has Nancy (1938). 3. Lydia Tomkiw, “New York Love Song (Part I Lower East Side),” in Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry since 1975, ed. Nicholas Christopher (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 203. 4. Jean Garrigue, “Bleecker Street,” in New York: Poems, ed. Howard Moss (New York: Avon, 1980), 77. 5. E. B. White, “The Lure of New York,” in Writing from the New Yorker, 1927–1976, ed. Rebecca M. Dale (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 202. 6. Amiri Baraka, “State/Meant,” in Home (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 252. 7. John Rechy, City of Night (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 21, 30. 8. On the deals and politics leading to the new look, see Lynne B. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). On the experience of being there, see James Traub, The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and

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9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

Profit in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2004), 113–288; Marshall Berman, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2006). Both Traub and Berman affectingly convey the changing conceptual and sensuous texture of the area. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (New York: Berg, 1988), 81. The Take Back the Night march format emerged from a nationwide antipornography rally held in San Francisco in 1978, which concluded with a nocturnal protest march down the city’s pornography strip. The action followed marches earlier in the decade in England, France, and the Netherlands aimed at establishing a woman’s right to walk the streets without fear. See Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (New York: William Morrrow and Co., 1980), 15, 19. Jane Dickson, Peepland: Paintings by Jane Dickson (Normal: University Galleries of Illinois State University, 1994), 49. On Dickson, see Berman, On the Town, 186–89. Dickson, Peepland, 47. For a while, seedy porn and spruced-up prosperity overlapped. Yvonne Jacquette captured both the past and future in her Times Square Triptych II (1986– 1987), an imposing work that monumentalizes Times Square as Joseph Stella did Broadway. With sleaze crowding the margins, three giant signs dominate: AIWA, Coca-Cola, and Panasonic. Brand-name commodity fetishism rules the light waves; Rechy’s generic “fascination” is long gone. The ongoing popularity of the nocturne as a musical form testifies to its appeal as a restorative antidote to the pressures of modern life. A perennially popular watercolor cartoon by Jean-Pierre Desclozeaux, Nocturne (1978), shows a man playing a piano whose lifted lid is filled with stars and a crescent moon. Classical nocturnes by Field, Chopin, Debussy, Edvard Hagerup Grieg, Gabriel Fauré, and Aaron Copland continue to attract listeners, as do more recent adaptations of the idea, especially in jazz, perhaps the quintessential late-night music. Mark Strand, “Night Piece,” in New York: Poems, ed. Howard Moss (New York: Avon, 1980), 274. Despite the persistence of the Whistlerian aesthetic, the term “nocturne” has become so commonly used for any work dealing with night that its earlier sense has been seriously eroded. Yet a growing awareness of the history of night images and lighting technology has reconfirmed its usefulness as a conceptual category. In addition to the critical and historical works already referred to in this book, see Barbara L. Jones, New York at Night (Auburn, NY: Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, 1989); Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife, 1900 –1945 (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, May–Aug 1991); Nightlife (New York: Associated American Artists, August 8–September 2, 1988); Keith Davis, Night Light: A Survey of 20th Century Night Photography (Kansas City, MO: Hallmark 1989). And there are many Web sites, including http://www.thenocturnes.com, an online exhibit of night photography. A show of paintings and photographs called “Night New York” was held at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in 2004, and included works done since the 1980s by Jacquette and Katz as well as Richard Bosman, Christine Ray, Ron Milewicz, Peter Henrick, and others, proving that the nocturne still packs an aesthetic and emotional punch. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art assembled a “New York at Night” photographic exhibition featuring work by Rudy Burckhardt, Gary Winogrand, Louis Faurer, and others.

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16. I explore this issue further in “Nostalgia and Connection in the Postmodern Metropolis,” in Post Ex Sub Dis: Fragmentations of the Modern City, ed. Ghent Urban Studies Team (Amsterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002), 238–64. 17. Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach (New York: Crown, 1991), n.p. 18. Emily Dickinson, “The Mountains Stood in Haze” (c. 1873), in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963), 889. 19. See also Harlem artist Romare Bearden’s New York Scenes series of watercolors, which served as a background to the opening titles of John Cassavetes’s film Gloria (1980). Apparently a nighttime helicopter ride over Manhattan, such as the one stunningly presented at the film’s outset, helped inspire Bearden’s imagery and fluid technique. See Ruth E. Fine, The Art of Romare Bearden (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003), 110, 210. 20. Interview with Roland Hagenberg, at George Segal’s studio, New Jersey, 1988, originally published in Art of Russia and the West (1989); available at http://home.hpo.net/hagenberg/creative7.html. 21. Elizabeth Bishop, “Night City [from the plane],” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 167–68. 22. Adrienne Rich, “North American Time” (section VIII), in Your Native Land, Your Life (New York: Norton, 1986), 36. 23. June Jordan, “Towards a City That Sings,” in New York: Poems, ed. Howard Moss (New York: Avon, 1980), 126. 24. Rich, “North American Time,” 37. 25. On Yvonne Jacquette, see Edwin Denby, ed., Aerial (New York: Eyelight Press, 1981), a book of her art accompanied by poetry and prose about it; Hilarie Faberman, Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2002), a catalog of the traveling exhibition of Jacquette’s work held in 2003–2004. 26. May Swenson, “Distance and a Certain Light,” in To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (New York: Scribner’s, 1963), 65. 27. Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets (New York: Horizon Press, 1965), 263–64. 28. Tom Disch, “In Praise of New York,” in Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry since 1975, ed. Nicholas Christopher (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 39. 29. Henry David Thoreau, The Moon, ed. F. H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 23. 30. E. B. White, “Here Is New York” (New York, Harper, 1949), 35–36, 50–51. 31. W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939,” in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair, vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 2003), 802–3. 32. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Bantam, 1972), 16. 33. See Marc Spiegler, “Blinded by the Light,” Metropolis (April 1996): 52–57, 73, 75. On U.S. light pollution and possible remedies, see David Owen, “The Dark Side: Making War on Light Pollution,” New Yorker, August 20, 2007, 28–33. 34. Laurie Sheck, “The Return,” in Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry since 1975, ed. Nicholas Christopher (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 190. At New York’s Columbia University, the astronomy department confirms that “the observatory atop Pupin Hall is rendered obsolete by light pollution from the city, so students travel elsewhere to observe” (Columbia Daily Spectator, November 12, 1998, 1). Even in rural New England, careless and fearful

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

overlighting prompted a newspaper editorial titled “An Unhealthy Glow,” which attacked light pollution in New Hampshire and Vermont, and asked, “How could we over-estimate the value of saving the night?” (Valley News, March 19, 1999, A8). Thoreau, The Moon, 50. Edward Sorel, “Contemporary Streetlights,” American Heritage (February– March 1983): 55. Adrienne Rich, “The Dream Site,” in An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988–1991 (New York: Norton, 1991), 16. Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information (New York: Random House, 1993), 222, 223. Henry Beston, The Outermost House (New York: Doubleday, 1928), 165–66. See Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World after Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987), 125; Christopher Dewdney, Acquainted with the Night: Excursions through the World after Dark (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004), 104–06; Ben Harder, “Bright Lights, Big Cancer: Melatonin-Depleted Blood Spurs Tumor Growth,” Science News 169, no. 1 (January 7, 2006): 8. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, trans. Lewis Galantière (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942), 23. In 1999, Russian scientists with U.S. backing attempted to deploy an “artificial moon” named Znamya from the space station Mir. The twenty-five-meterwide piece of reflective foil would have cast a glow, about ten times brighter than the moon, on a spot five miles in diameter, in Siberia and selected sites in North America. The failed experiment drew the ire of the International Dark Sky Association, founded in 1988 by astronomers who promote outdoor lighting that will not contribute to light pollution. Its motto is Carpe Noctem— “Seize the Night.” In Britain, the Campaign for Dark Skies cites parliamentary research showing that outdoor lights have little impact on reducing crime, and may even encourage it, since criminals need light to see and movement in a lighted area attracts little attention. New York Times, June 14, 2004, 18. In 2006, the city of Reykjavik, Iceland, held the first-ever planned urban blackout, to give residents a chance to get to know the night. The winning entry came from Thomas Phifer and Partners of New York. It uses an LED, low-energy, long-life lens lamp to keep light from spilling into the sky. e. e. cummings, “Impressions” (1923), in Poems, 1923–1954 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 43. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” in Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Modern Library, 1959), 58.

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