Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [844]
BRIGHT LIGHTS
The first private house in the city to convert entirely to incandescent lighting was J. P. Morgan’s Madison Avenue mansion. Despite an explosive mishap that scorched the walls and carpets, the banker professed great pleasure; less so his neighbors, annoyed by the clanking of the generator installed in his garden. The Vanderbilts wired all three of their uptown palaces, though William H. backslid to gas after some mechanical disruptions. Within a year over five hundred wealthy homes were electrified: New York’s bourgeoisie now glowed in the dark with new intensity.
Houses of commerce switched to electricity with dispatch. The New York Stock Exchange installed three “electroliers” of sixty-six lamps each above the main trading floor. Scant steps away, at Broad and Exchange Place, the new nine-and-a-half-story Mills Building (1883) became the first office building in the city, and likely in the world, to have its own electric generation plant: it powered the 5,588 lights in quarters rented by bankers, brokers, and railroad and insurance companies and in the top-floor restaurant. In 1889 the first electric elevators began gliding up and down, and by the following year they were being purchased in lieu of hydraulic models. The first escalator would follow a decade later.
Industry lit up too. Machine shops, piano factories, sugar refineries, and newspaper plants went incandescent. Edison talked eagerly about converting 240,000 sewing machines to electricity: “In the tenement-house districts our business will be simply enormous,” he enthused. Manufacturers and financiers—the sorts who joined Edison in becoming members at the new and exclusive Electric Club (1886)—boasted that direct current would make it possible to significantly lengthen the working day, a prospect not greeted with universal acclaim.
What did delight almost everyone was the electrification of nightlife. Department stores shifted from gas to bulbs in the late 1880s. Freed from fear of fire, their window displays now shimmered in the night air, lending new glamour to commodities, providing virtual theaters for audiences passing by. Actual theaters seized on Edison’s lights too. In 1883 Niblo’s Garden featured “novel lighting effects by the Edison Electric Light Company,” including an illuminated model of the new Brooklyn Bridge and chorus girls who flourished electric wands.
The lady in the harbor went electric too. In 1886, when the Statue of Liberty was officially dedicated, its hand was brilliantly illuminated—too much so for mariners, and it had to be toned down—and its base was garlanded with eight-thousand-candlepower lamps. On a more domestic note, a New York Edison vice-president lit up his Christmas tree with incandescent colored globes, creating an instant popular sensation.
Hotels, restaurants, cafes, and shops—all beckoned customers with their radiance. Even shady places opted for the spotlight: Edison personally installed electric lights at Harry Hill’s, and the enterprising “French Madame” screwed bulbs into sockets on her doorstep. Illumination spilled down from the elevateds, which lit up their station platforms. It shone in from luminous Hudson River steamers and the yachts of the Bennetts and Goulds. Electric nights drew throngs of festive boulevardiers to the streets, linking its big-city image indelibly to the bright lights of its avenues. This identification was fixed forevermore with the emergence, in the mid-1890s, of what people began calling the “Great White Way”—a stretch of Broadway between 23rd and 34th streets that began to blaze with electric advertisements. The first large illuminated sign—a fifty-foot-high and eighty-foot-wide display at Madison Square—used fifteen thousand lights, which winked on and off in a sequence controlled by an operator in a shanty on a nearby roof, to trumpet Coney Island hostelries. It was soon superseded by a forty-five-foot-long Heinz (“57 Varieties”) pickle, outlined in bright green bulbs against an orange background, easily visible a mile away.
In 1887 Mayor