Goodbye to the Amber Glow

“Artificial streetlights construct the city at night, as well as illuminate it. Sunlight, in comparison, which lands relatively democratically across everyone and everything, brings forward colors and shapes with effects beyond our mortal control. Streetlights, on the other hand, shape the city in their own image. In the 1970s, Chicagoans complained that a red dress, worn under the sodium vapor glow, became a murky brown, transformed into another color entirely. Our experience of night is a direct function of the chemical composition of streetlight lamps.” 

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