Broadway Nocturnes

By 1905, electric lights – first installed between Union Square and Madison Square a quarter century earlier – had illuminated Broadway all the way to Times Square, with marquee signs and electric billboards adding to the incandescence.  To capture this Great White Way (a term popularized in 1904), Hine ventured out on nocturnal excursions with his camera. 

Like the leading Pictorialist Alfred Stieglitz, who had introduced night photography to America a decade earlier, Hine preferred to shoot after a rain storm, when puddles and wet pavements reflected and multiplied the electric lights.  Exposing the negatives fully required long exposures and a tripod, turning the head lamps of passing streetcars into brilliant horizontal streaks.

While City Beautiful reformers decried electric signs as a modern blight, Hine traced their ancestry across two centuries urban illumination.  “All things are relative,” he wrote in his album’s introduction.  Not long after the introduction of gas lamps on lower Broadway in the 1830s, Barnum had used them to emblazon his name on the facade of his American Museum.  Before that, Hine reminds us, it was whale oil: “As far back as August 1806 a Philadelphian writing of his visit to New York says of the City: ‘It has a very brilliant appearance in the evening, particularly Broadway. The shops are mostly open and very handsomely lighted, which gives them an air of great splendor.’ ”  Hine even cites an earlier date: “In 1697 it was ordered that the street be lighted ‘in the dark of the moon’ ”—with whale-oil lanterns spaced 114 feet apart. By uncovering these precedents and continuities, Hine complicates the very notion of modernity.