5 December 07: The Possible City:
Snake uprising



by Nathaniel Popkin
December 5, 2007

The King cobra, which smells with its tongue and sees clearly at night, is declining with the forests of Southeast Asia. Perhaps the other snakes in the region see this as good news. The King, after all, is ophiophagous: it feeds mostly on those other snakes (even the venomous ones). We might call it a cannibal.

The Cobra highway light, that ubiquitous lamp so named for the curving shape of its neck, was introduced in 1957 by Westinghouse. The lamp they called the Silverliner became the most popular street and highway lamp in America. That year, General Electric countered with its own Cobra-style lamp, the M400. Typically posted 40-45 feet above the ground, the Cobra highway light was designed to make driving safer. But most cities, new and old, installed the Cobra everywhere: on shopping and residential streets and alleys, on boulevards and parkways. In old cities like ours doing so meant removing cast iron and wooden street lamps and replacing them with aluminum posts. Because the new lights cast so much light, they could be installed on just one side of the street, thereby saving municipal funds. The lamps were efficient and easy to maintain.

Like their namesake, they were cannibals too -- and by the mid-1960s Cobras were king. But for islands of historic preservation like Society Hill, in most city neighborhoods and downtowns the Cobra light had eliminated the old-style lamp. To be fair, cities like New York and Philadelphia began lighting the street at the expense of the sidewalk in the late nineteenth century. But it's worth wondering if the swiftness with which the Cobra came to dominate the streetscape was the result of the kind of reckless manipulation of government that General Motors used to obliterate the streetcar in favor of the diesel bus.

One of the problems with using highway lamps to light city streets is scale. "We need to see where the light is coming from," says Tod Corlett, a professor of industrial design at Philadelphia University's school of Design and Media. Corlett, the Venturi-influenced designer who has been retained by the East Falls Development Corporation to design signage and other streetscape improvements, has a keen sense of how people engage in the urban landscape. "If we can't find the light -- if it's way up there -- it makes us uncomfortable." Thus a 40 foot -- even a 25 foot -- lamp post is too tall for human beings. As a result, and because the light from a Cobra lamp gets caught in the tree canopy, the city sidewalk feels unworldly, haunted, and unsafe.

At the highway scale, the Cobra light is symbolic of the way we value the driver over the pedestrian. The light bathes the carriageway, but often leaves the sidewalk itself simply dark. Now imagine turning a Cobra light 180 degrees around. Magic. Now it lights the sidewalk; now working backwards imagine we lived in a society that valued the sidewalk more than the street. What would that be like?

This question lit up Lewis Mumford's Underwood fifty years ago. In a classic New Yorker Skyline column, The Highway and the City, an angered and jaw-droppingly precise Mumford predicted every destructive result of the then just-passed Interstate Highway bill. "For the current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar," he writes, "and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside of rational criticism." Indeed, predicting "the total defeat of the city itself as a place that offers the maximum possibilities for face-to-face meeting, social cooperation, and transactions of every kind," he couldn't understand why every other diverse mode of transportation, including feet, was being sacrificed for one, the automobile. Citing all the benefits we already know and the one most important for him -- efficiency -- Mumford says, "Every urban transportation plan should, accordingly, put the pedestrian at the center of all its proposals . . . But to bring the pedestrian back into the picture, one must treat him with the respect and honor we now accord only to the automobile: we should provide him with pleasant walks . . . It is nonsense to say that this cannot be done in America, because no one wants to walk."

"Here's one more thing we need to do, maybe you've already thought of this," says Dennis McGlade, president and principal at Olin Partners, the landscape architecture firm. The two of us are walking up Walnut Street the day before Thanksgiving. It's 60 degrees and the city is joyous. "Right now there is no one thinking about you and me," he says. "There's a Streets Department that is supposed to cover the sidewalk but no Sidewalk Department that also thinks about the street."

Just then I grab onto one of Paul Levy's Center City Luminaires, the now-ubiquitous hunter green Philadelphia street lamp. "This," I respond, "is a symbol of that idea. This lamp illuminates the sidewalk primarily. As a byproduct it also lights the street." (Lighting experts say street lamps are more effective at lighting the carriageway than Cobra lights because they are non-glaring and their light doesn't get lost in the tree canopy.)

City for people or city for cars?

That's a question Levy, CEO of the Center City District (CCD), began tackling a decade ago when the first lamps were installed -- and the first Cobras were unceremoniously toppled. Since then the CCD has installed nearly 2,100 lamps, including 92 now going up in Washington Square West and between the Comcast Center and the Parkway. Levy's vision was immediately convincing. Center City was all of a sudden pleasant to be in at night. Soon, as the CCD expanded its lighting program, others followed. The University City District, which has installed 300 lamps, is adding 84 more along Baltimore Avenue; Penn adopted a shorter Center City hybrid lamp, Drexel the arms in the air lamp -- and other parks, bridges, institutions, and public spaces quickly followed suit. In my estimation, and including the work of the CCD, since 1998 Philadelphia has replaced Cobras with about 4,000 pedestrian scale street lamps. All this has changed our perception of the Philadelphia night. Now a cobra-lit street feels wrong: mottled, dark, uncertain, and sometimes, as in my own block, inappropriately bright.

The uncertainty is telling, especially at this time of year, when darkness falls at 4:30. The air is chilled, Septa is lousy at night. If we go out, too-often we drive; otherwise Philadelphia greets the dark winter with a wink and a "see you in the spring." The sidewalk, betrayed, is empty. The shopkeeper can't make it -- every aspect of city life suffers, but unnecessarily. It isn't that cold out. Appropriate lighting would not only light but warm our way.

Many over the years have proposed that better lighting would cut crime. All too often this hypothesis has been accepted at face-value and used as an excuse to blast a cobra light into an area that didn't want or need it, turning a city neighborhood -- or a suburban parking lot -- into a kind of permanent crime scene. However, studies over the years suggest that better lighting is effective. In order to come to a decisive conclusion, the British Home Office surveyed a bunch of British and American studies on the subject. Their meta-analysis concludes that improving lighting can reduce crime by 20%; one study, indicating that lighting is an effective crime-reducer, says that by lowering the cost of public safety, new lighting pays for itself in a year.

Proper sidewalk lighting makes the pedestrian feel at ease. "The street lamp is one of the things that defines the sidewalk. Of course at night it's the really the only thing," says the industrial designer Corlett. Especially in Philadelphia, which lacks the scale of New York and its consistent retail presence (which adds light and dimension), the lighting has to be right. When it isn't the problems of the streetscape are only amplified. When it's inconsistent and fragmented, when the block you are on is well-lit but the next one isn't, the city seems to fall apart.

This is almost universally the case on the borders of parks and college campuses. Independence National Historical Park, which boasts several different well-proportioned lamps, including the Old Philadelphia lantern with the natural wooden post, is properly lit. But walk on the street next to the park or between its various parts and you're in Cobra territory. Nowhere else does the old Silverliner look more out of place! The same goes for much of Market, Chestnut, and Walnut between Penn and Drexel, for some of the edges of Temple's campus, for many of Septa's stations and the vast majority of bus stops, for the entrances to parks, including Clark Park on Baltimore Avenue, and most neighborhood squares and recreation centers. Only recently have the Cobras been removed from around the four main squares -- leaving the sidewalk to the other, non-venomous garden-style snakes (if only these lampposts ate the rats!).

The reader ought not think I don't like darkness, or shadows. (I am a writer, after all.) Dickens, whose love of the night city ("I wrote very little in Genoa and thought I had avoided traces of its influence -- but, good God, even there I had at least two miles of streets by the lights of which I could roam around at night, and a great theater each evening.") made him something of an English flaneur. He saw all the urban layers, perhaps those most of all darkened by coal and poverty and prison. He would have hated the Cobra's blitzkrieg. My plan is thus meant simply to comfort and warm the pedestrian.

But we need to admit that much of rowhouse Philadelphia, lacking retail lighting even at most corners, where most building owners don't turn on their front door lamp, where porches and in-set front doors create more shadows, where abandonment amplifies the problem still, where Cobra lights on too-tall and therefore leaning aluminum posts reinforce the feeling of decay, is dark and foreboding at night, a night that right now lasts nearly fourteen hours. These sidewalks are empty and they need not be.

They must not be, if we imagine the city should be full of life.

They ought not be if we are sure the city is an antidote to our culture's atomism.

Proper lighting is not the only solution, but it's a necessary one.

We ought to start with retail blocks. Of course many concentrated retail locations -- K&A, Broad-Erie-Germantown, Broad and Snyder -- are lit. But here again it's the kind of light that makes you uncomfortable. It also makes those locations disconnected. Rather the strategy has to be to knit together the entire city. Consistent lighting may do just that. We voters just passed a referendum assigning a lot of debt to commercial corridors (a terrible name suggesting the way urban life has become so segregated, I think); it isn't clear if there is funding for lighting. Nevertheless, a first phase might install the Center City Luminaires on 50 retail blocks in the expanded Center City (Passyunk Avenue, Fabric Row, Lancaster Avenue, throughout Old City, 2nd Street in the Northern Liberties, Girard Avenue come quickly to mind). This would cost about $8.2 million, a reasonable sum that would effectively expand the range and feel of the center. Cohesion of well-lit blocks being so important, placement of new lamps could be optimized by connecting to existing lamppost locations.

Tod Corlett and I were standing outside the Philadelphia University architecture and design center when we spoke about lighting. We were both holding cups of coffee. See this, he said, pointing to the well-proportioned but faux-nineteenth century street lamp along the campus path. "They wanted Ivy League," he said, "or what might like something out of Dickens. We told them that's not what a design school should look like. These used to be globes," meaning they were contemporary lamps from the 1970s. He told me he was similarly disappointed in the choice of lamp for the Avenue of the Arts.

"They're turn-of-the century," I said. "Replicas."

"They're the admission that Philadelphia's best days are behind it, not ahead."

It'll be true if we keep thinking that way, no doubt.

So we serve ourselves well if the new lamps are of contemporary -- or at least not falsely historicist -- design. The Center City lights are traditional but don't find it necessary to announce themselves as so. That's one reason they feel so good. But one way to subvert the instinct to historicize is for the city to hold a design competition. New York did just that -- though I haven't seen the winner. But it would be a mistake to design one kind of lamp. Actually Philadelphia needs lamps of two sizes -- one 14-foot for avenues and main shopping streets and another of 10-foot for rowhouse streets and parks (the existing alley light could remain) -- and perhaps several designs to fit diverse locations. There ought to be another distinct lamp to illuminate transit stations, but that's a subject for another time. In some intimate blocks, the city might want to experiment with illuminated bollards (like those on Market Street in the business district west of City Hall) instead of lamps and/or placing the lamps in the traditional placement up against the building.

Tod also warned me about quality. It will be easy -- tempting -- to cover more territory with cheap lamps. But street lamps, fiercely contemporary or revisionist, have to take a beating. Surface looks aren't enough. That's one reason I like the Center City Luminaires; they've held up great. Venturi's Manayunk lamps haven't -- and the pedestrian can feel the difference.

If we spend $15 million each year for the first three years of the Nutter administration lighting the sidewalk, we'll cover 270 blocks with good-quality, pedestrian-friendly lamps; the city will at once feel bigger (and more intimate thanks to the more-humane light), more cohesive, safer, and more open. Imagine if Germantown Avenue, that most complex, undulating street -- that stretches and ranges across so much well-trampled territory -- was lit altogether, consistently (but not necessarily with the same lamp throughout), with handsome, forward-looking respect for the walker. Now that's significant habitat loss for the King cobra, whose days we have to hope are numbered.

–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com


The Streetlamp Survey

by Nathaniel Popkin

Here are Philadelphia's street lamps, old and new -- and (many) new ones that are meant to look old. The issue of false historicism is an important one, especially in Philadelphia when it is so often appropriate to use period lamps. But sometimes it isn't -- case in point Love Park -- and only reflects the easiest reflex to hope for yesteryear. That's a dangerous proposition, which tells of insecurity and lack of confidence.

Still, there's enough ambition here. Temple University, especially, which blankets its campus with light, employs several contemporary lights. Manayunk, Penn, Jefferson, Drexel and Independence National Historical Park do too. What do you like? My contemporary favorite is the arms-in-the-air lamp, two versions of which we see here, one at Drexel, the other near the Constitution Center.

This isn't an exhaustive survey. I didn't get everywhere -- and I only repeat a few. However, many of the lamps pictured here are used in various locations. I show the Center City Luminaire several times because it's used from Center City to University City to Germantown. I show the white top lamp used in Chestnut Hill -- but also throughout the city; and several versions of the alley lamp. I was exhaustive on the true period lamps -- near the Second Bank of the United States one can find four or five slightly different lamps and altogether throughout east Center City there must be a dozen similar lantern styles. But if you look carefully you'll notice the differences.

Photo and technical credit to my friend Jeff McMahon.

Click to enlarge:



–Nathaniel Popkin

POSSIBLE CITY ARCHIVES:

• 4 Dec 07: A Junction that ought to be
• 6 Nov 07: Around the Mulberry Tree we go
• 29 Oct 07: Wondering about wandering
• 5 Oct 07: No other way
• 21 Sept 07: Here is the Possible City


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