The modern sodium lamp has a flimsy and slovenly appearance. It hangs above the street in a half-completed arch, its unembellished curve clashing equally with the upright housefronts and the horizontal pavement. Its being has been absorbed into its function, and when it replaces the disciplined rows of gas lamps, the effect can be compared to replacing a row of uniformed policemen with a gang of efficient guerillas. In the heat of action, a policeman s uniform is far less functional than the jeans, guns, and ski mask of the urban guerilla. But it has a deeper function, which comes from transcending functionality.
Street lighting is a gauge of security, a sign that the city has eyes.
Even so, people seem to be less interested in the quantity of light than in the urbanity of its source. The cold, hard stare of the modern street lamp is received more as a threat than a comfort. Its all-seeing shadowless glare seems to sweep the street of its social meanings, robbing us of intimacy and inviting the very danger against which it warns for we instinctively sense that the distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, crime and law, are wiped away by this soulless illumination. When people are allowed to choose their townscape, they frequently insist that gas lamps be retained, or replaced by electric lamps that copy traditional forms and soften the street with a familiar chiaroscuro. In the street where I passed my childhood, there stood an iron chapel in forest green, the sections of which had been cast in the form of cathedral arches, decorated with leaf moldings and filled with sheets of perforated metal.