Chicago would be something less, something smaller and meaner, without its glittering nighttime lights.
Downtown glistens along the lakefront and mirrors itself in the waters of the river, and it is all dazzling imagery.
The white glow of the Wrigley Building is trademark Chicago. So are the pyramids of light atop the Merchandise Mart and the streams of lit-up windows and TV spires of Sears Tower.
But there’s an art to outdoor lighting, and it’s tempting to overdo it. We surely do. Anyone flying into O’Hare International Airport at night can see the miles of lamppost glare that blots out starlight and turns night into a techno-blur.
City lighting — or, rather, overlighting — has become a paradox, a dilemma with no easy answers in our era of Fear Thy Neighbor. Space Age technology enables us to light up as never before, but today’s children grow up and are seldom or never able to see the Big Dipper at night.
We have cloaked the zodiac. The constellations are whatzis now: rare species overhead, when visible. To see the Milky Way (in ersatz), check out the Adler Planetarium. The Stone Age had a better deal.
Like many cities, Chicago runs scared of the dark. We equate light glare and plenty of it with safe streets, and City Hall now is stepping up wattage in alleys at a cost of $8 million.
There’s nothing paranoid, of course, about wanting to see clearly when you’re driving, walking across a street or facing strangers in the night. Big-city dangers are all too real. Lamppost glare goes with the territory, spilling into parlor windows, like it or not.
“The only complaints we get are from astronomers,” says Terry Levin, spokesman for the city’s Streets and Sanitation Department.
“People want more light. They don’t want dark spots.”
It’s not that simple, though. Chicago’s lampposts, by and large, spew a glaring light — and aren’t unique that way. The street lighting of choice in American cities is high-pressure sodium vapor, a stalag kind of brightness that took over in the energy-crunch 1970s.
High-pressure sodium gives more energy for the dollar and has a long bulb life. It’s a harsh light, however, viewed by some as golden or golden-white and by others as yellow or orange-yellow.
The big reason for using it is that it’s brighter, says Levin. He cites the contrast with neighboring Evanston, where residential streets are much darker.
But the contrast between light and dark in Evanston “is what I find interesting,” says Ted Wolff, a Chicago landscape architect. “We’ve come to accept sodium vapor since the first energy crisis in the 1970s, not that it’s beautiful.”
To make it tougher on the eye, the typical cobrahead lamppost diffuses the light widely instead of shielding it and focusing it downward more narrowly.
Spreading the light makes it possible to light streets and sidewalks more strongly and evenly in the overlapping space between one lamppost and the next. We’ve grown accustomed to this overpowering of nature. There may be few hard figures to prove that more light means less crime — a multitude of studies have been inconclusive — but it’s reasonable to think so and it does ease fears.
There’s a price to pay though. The light can be brutal, even blinding. Viewed head-on, glare may be all you see. It blots out what is behind it and turns the horizon into a torchlight parade that muffles the profile of the city.
About 30 percent of the light, by some accounts, is wasted. It dribbles into the sky and pumps up the muddled glow that blots out the stars.
Light pollution is a term for it. The stuff even generates pink clouds at night, turning good intentions into quirky blotch. Is it light or blight?
Roosevelt Park, for example, is a block-square bit of greenery where West Roosevelt Road and South Clark Street come together as overpasses. The park has tennis courts and kiddie swings, and its north and east sides are lined by townhouses with soft lamplight in the courtyards.
There was a chance here for sensitive street lighting. Roosevelt Road was rebuilt in the mid-1990s and studded with 1890s-style lampposts and obelisks topped with globes. It’s a dressy vista, but it swamps itself in 1990s sodium glare. The Clark Street side dumps in more visual confusion with blunt cobrahead lamps. The horizon is lost in a blaze of amber.
Lampposts aren’t the only culprits in sky blur. Outdoor lighting sprays from commercial signs, parking lots, sports fields. Many household security lamps are frantic enough to give astronomers fits. Filling stations are gross offenders. LaSalle Street’s Board of Trade Building turns on at night; its silvery rooftop goddess perches above walls that seem to be baked in an inferno.
Nearby Dearborn Street teaches a subtle lesson in the Federal Center’s “Flamingo” sculpture by Alexander Calder. The sculpture is lit by fixtures buried in the sidewalk, yet deftly arranged to accent the contrasting folds and swoops of the structure.
On 9th Street in Grant Park, there’s the famous statue of Gen. John Logan, a Civil War hero mounted on his charger and brandishing the flag atop a manmade hill. The lights are against him, though.
Sculptors Augustus St. Gaudens and A. Phimister Proctor joined with the legendary architect Stanford White to create this monument a century ago. The world saw the general on television when antiwar protesters huddled on the hill during the 1968 Democratic convention.
But the campaigner of Vicksburg is no match for the lamppost globes and traffic lights of South Michigan Avenue. At night he’s feebly lit by poles and stubby ground fixtures rammed into Stanford White’s hill.
What a downer. The general is a ghost: a pale rider on a pale horse, a final casualty in the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Not that there’s anything new about that. Chicago’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, never saw electric lights until he arrived here from Wisconsin in 1887. The sputtering arc lamps of those early days were “dazzling and ugly,” he remembered in his autobiography. Blaring electric signs already shouldered rudely over sidewalks, as they still do in neighborhood after neighborhood.
There was a time when quiet suburban streets contented themselves with a few lampposts and 500 watts of incandescent light — the warm, white type invented by Thomas Edison and still the choice in homes. Mercury vapor eventually took over, to yield in turn to sodium vapor. Now many of those same streets might have 1,000 watts every 100 feet.
Is there no solution to urban sky blotch? Astronomers mention Tucson, Ariz., as a model. It’s that rare city where sky watchers wield clout. David Crawford, a tireless partisan of glare-free skies, is based at Kitt Peak Observatory, 55 miles away.
Tucson uses sodium vapor, but the low-pressure type, in shielded lamps that focus downward and give starlight a chance. Low-pressure sodium, however, renders colors so poorly that there are complaints that it turns complexions yellow. It’s considered inferior for night vision.
Researchers now seem to favor metal halide lighting. It isn’t as energy-efficient as high-pressure sodium but is said to be easier on the eye and truer to nature. There’s a welcome blue in its spectrum — also true of the sun, moon and stars. In 1995, a study team led by Dr. Mark Rea found that nighttime side vision was 50 percent better with metal halide. That could have great import for safe driving.
Chicago, like other cities, may be stuck with what it has. It committed to sodium in the rush for energy-saving (and lighting contracts, no doubt).
“A changeover to metal halide would be extremely expensive,” say Bob Shook and Jim Baney, of the lighting design firm of Schuler and Shook. They worked on the ornamental relighting of downtown State Street, something of a model for bringing visual order to Chicago’s jumbled lighting scene.
Since then, the city has expanded the program into a number of other commercial districts. Downtown Randolph Street is the latest, but the glare is still there.
It seems evident that light should be directed where it’s needed and only in the amount needed. (The Kennedy Expressway does it with downlighting that limits light spill.) Lamppost fixtures require glare controls. The quality and placement of light is as important as the quantity. Artificial lighting is a compromise with nature.
“Let there be light,” said the Lord. But who foresaw overspill?
