576716

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JUHXXX10.1177/0096144215576716Journal of Urban HistoryKenny

Article
Journal of Urban History
2017, Vol. 43(1) 91­–114
City Glow: Streetlights, Emotions, © The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0096144215576716
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Nicolas Kenny1

Abstract
Proliferating streetlights generated complex emotional responses in modern cities. Drawing
on recent scholarship in the history of the emotions, this article argues that examining the
feelings of pride and prestige associated with technological innovation, but also of anger and fear
when light was lacking or unpleasant, reveals the intimate nature of urban dwellers’ relationship
to their environment. Street lighting is often studied as part the networks of infrastructure
that gave cities their contemporary form, or as elements of the commercial expansion that
made them centers of consumerism. At the intersection of these trends stood the emotional
experiences of those seeking to lay claim to the urban night. If the cultural significance of
emotions varies according to historical circumstances, comparing the tensions, politics, and
atmospheres of streetlights in distant places like Montreal and Brussels suggests that the rapidly
changing urban environment of the period produced its own distinct emotional regime.

Keywords
streetlights, emotions, cities, infrastructure, night, Montreal, Brussels

Though less frequented than its iconic downtown business section, the eastern stretch of
Montreal’s Sainte-Catherine Street running between Dézéry and Davidson Streets was, in
October 1901, lively and bustling. In the shadow of the gigantic Hochelaga Cotton Manufacturing
Company, stood working-class row-houses, tramway lines, and a small park on which a public
market would soon open, with a post office, church, and banks nearby. For F. H. Badger, super-
intendent of the city’s light department, this 1,100-foot portion of road did not receive “proper”
illumination in the evenings, prompting him to suggest the city reallocate funds from another
ward to this priority area, which, conveniently, would “also be of benefit” to the local fire and
police stations.1 It was equally convenient, no doubt, that populist Montreal mayor Raymond
Préfontaine also happened to be an influential land speculator in that part of town (Figure 1).
Real or perceived political pressure notwithstanding, the decision to put a light here and not
there was all in a day’s work for the city electrician, responsible for ensuring that when he left the
office each night, as much of the city be as brightly lit as his budget allowed. This was but one of
countless gestures shaping the carefully calculated, though contentiously debated, systems of
poles and wires, pumps and pipes, roads and tracks designed to enable power, water, vehicles,
merchandise, not to mention people, to move smoothly through the modern city, and by which

1Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Corresponding Author:
Nicolas Kenny, Department of History, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia,
V7M 3B1, Canada.
Email: [email protected]
92 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

Figure 1. Bumbray Park, off Sainte-Catherine Street in the bustling east end of Montreal, a high-priority
area for additional streetlights, according to the city electrician.
Source: Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, Albums de rue E.-Z. Massicotte.

municipalities attempted to pull their overflowing agglomerations into more manageable entities.
The rapid development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North American and
European cities is often analyzed in terms of the construction and articulation of these grids of
services and infrastructure. Urban dwellers’ visceral, emotional experiences of these develop-
ments, however, are typically glossed over, mentioned in passing or overlooked entirely.
This article shifts the perspective away from the mechanics of urbanization to the atmospheres
and tensions of city life they generated. For all Superintendent Badger pondered how to distribute
lamps throughout the city, urban dwellers’ deeply felt preoccupations suggest there was more at
stake than cold measurements and account ledgers. Examining two cities, Montreal and Brussels,
I am less interested in the process through which networks of streetlights were put in place than
in the implications of the presence, or absence, of that light on the way residents understood what
it meant to live in metropolitan settings. Comparing cities on different continents illustrates how
street lighting was a profoundly emotional issue, revolving around the politics of access to light,
of the city’s self-representation, and of its residents’ sense of belonging. Debates over how, when,
and where to light city streets brought individual citizens into direct contact with their municipal
representatives and institutions, and illuminated varying ideological divisions about the necessity
and right to have light as well as about where the public purse’s responsibility began and ended
Kenny 93

in this regard. More importantly, this preoccupation with how public spaces were to be lit at night
spoke to the complex emotional dispositions of urban dwellers. From chest-swelling feelings of
pride and romanticism to stomach-churning fear and outrage, lampposts did more than cast a
practical light on the pavement below; they made visible the spectrum of emotions accompany-
ing nocturnal experiences in this period of urban and technological development. If emotions are
individual, subjective responses to outside stimuli, their significance lies in the way they feed
into social dynamics. Considering the diversity of reactions to this infrastructure shows how
emotions, as much as lighting itself, shaped nocturnal atmospheres, and as such placed individu-
als in dialogue, and often in tension, with the broader urban society they formed.

Infrastructure and Emotion

By the late nineteenth century, streetlights, particularly when powered by electricity, had become
a quintessential symbol of urban modernity.2 Seen as enhancing security, both by facilitating
movement and reducing criminality, and creating new possibilities for industry and commerce
after sundown, they embodied the order, standardization, and rationality that proponents of inte-
grated “network-based urbanism” diligently pursued, reinforcing the perception that the city was
“an abstract object to be managed and controlled.”3 Bright lights were also said to confer a cos-
mopolitan ambiance to cities, accentuating the beauty of boulevards, promising ever-more excit-
ing forms of consumption and leisure, constituting radiant status symbols for municipal
administrations eager to display their ability to exercise control over the urban environment and
their adherence to the triumphant progression of industrial capitalism. If the blaze of electric light
fostered the impression of living in a “dream world,” these were, for those who financed and
controlled the power switches at least, dreams of security, efficiency, and profitability in con-
stantly expanding proportions.4
The story of urban illumination has generally been written, as historian Joachim Schlör
observes, from the perspective not of the night but of the light that seeks to annihilate it, the
technological evolution from oil, to gas, to electricity presented as a narrative of “forward-storm-
ing progress,” overlooking a more nuanced story of “changing relations between light and dark.”5
Christopher Otter further argues that the tendency to reduce urban lighting to either an instrument
of surveillance or a spectacle of consumerism, veils a more intricate political history of “techno-
logical government” that determines who gets to see what in which circumstances.6 Despite the
hubris of many commentators, streetlights never did transform night into day. The pools of light
they created may indeed have been bright, but they also caused glare or flickered out. And as
soon as one stepped away, the darkness seemed even darker.7 These invitations to reconsider the
cultural significance of this key urban infrastructure are an opportunity to step in and out this
light, to analyze it relative to the darkness that, far from being eliminated, continued to surround
and impose limits on brightness.
Unsightly poles and wires, light considered either obtrusively excessive or woefully inade-
quate, and the feelings of annoyance or insecurity they caused were reminders of “high modern-
ism’s” failure to impose its “imperialist” and “hegemonic” master plan for the “rational design of
social order” on civil society in general, and on cities in particular. Meticulously engineered,
these plans ignored local, informal knowledge, making the networked city ultimately discon-
nected from the “autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it.”8 Streetlights
amplified these unplanned and contingent aspects of metropolitan life, but these have tended to
be forgotten in all the talk of orderly networks and scientific rationality. Otter’s excellent analysis
of how liberal conceptions of freedom defined the politics of seeing, for instance, mentions only
“in passing” the “modalities of vision that have less to do with power than with emotional and
affective experience.”9 It is this wayward thread I wish to pick up in weaving this story.
94 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

Recent scholarship on the emotions encourages us to consider these experiences of the urban
night in relation to the spaces and materiality that produce them.10 Streetlights generated an ever-
intensifying, often enthralling, and sometimes troubling aura that seemed to magnify the plea-
sures and terrors of the night. They were a material component of what geographer Ben Anderson
calls the “affective atmospheres”11 that pervaded urban environments, their occupants associat-
ing these objects with feelings of personal safety, aesthetic taste, or aspirations of status.
Historians have of late paid growing attention to the way interior sentiments structure social
relations and shape historical processes, showing how the way emotions are felt, the meanings
they convey, and the different emotional dispositions considered appropriate or legitimate
changes according to time and place.12 Felt individually, emotions acquire broader cultural reso-
nance as they are expressed to others, valorized or stigmatized by the power dynamics of broader
social groups which are defined variously as emotional “regimes” or “communities.”13 My objec-
tive here is to read through expressions of a multiplicity of emotions (which are often studied in
isolation14) in order to understand the interior, ardent, and sometimes unpredictable responses to
the intensity of urban life that often clashed with increasingly pervasive attempts to shape and
regulate space, as well as behavior within it.
Designed in the quest for rational, technological solutions to problems of circulation and
criminality, it is the underlying political and cultural meanings of streetlights that tell us about
emotional outlooks on the frenetic, enjoyable, or threatening city. The play of the light through
the evening mist, shimmering off windows or glimmering along an animated boulevard, forged
an important affective connection to the city, while shadowy corners and dark alleys aroused fear
and suspicion, exposing the subjectivities that underlay the putatively rationalist planning imper-
ative, and serving to justify the denigration of urban dwellers on the margins of middle-class
respectability. Passionate debates by municipal officials, letters from irate citizens, newspaper
investigations, and poetic musings attune us to the way myriad individual responses to urban
infrastructure nourished the collectively experienced atmosphere of city life. By their very nature
as intangible and fleeting phenomena that nonetheless “envelope and press upon” us, atmo-
spheres are slippery to work with.15 As feminist theorist Teresa Brennan has shown, atmospheres
become perceptible through the affects individuals transmit to one another, both directly and via
their environment.16 Following this reading as well as Anderson’s, then, the glow of streetlamps
was but one element of the unique nocturnal atmosphere of these industrializing cities. The light
they cast, and the penumbra between them, created varying atmospheres associated with fear or
excitement only as individual emotional responses to these spatial and material elements of city
life were expressed and shared, normalized or discredited. Interpreting the atmospheres resulting
from the meeting of light, bodies, and streets, as well as the emotions underlying them, shows
how streetlights encapsulated the interaction between modern urbanism and lived experiences of
the nocturnal city, albeit in ways that correspond primarily to those whose background afforded
them a place in the discussion. Of those castigated as villains in the shadows, testimonials are
rare.

Montreal and Brussels

Similar in size and regional importance, simultaneously and rapidly growing into booming cen-
ters of manufacturing and trade, Montreal and Brussels are representative of countless other cit-
ies transformed by the intense industrialization of the period.17 Otter notes that illumination was
very much “rooted in locality,” emerging from specific spatial and political contexts.18 But if
examining street lighting in two distant and unconnected cities can indeed help to uncover unique
patterns in each, a comparison such as this more broadly shows how these local preoccupations
spoke to the ways in which modern urban environments resonated emotionally with their inhabit-
ants. Lighting may have progressed differently in the two places, and the available sources
Kenny 95

Figure 2. Streetlights on Windsor Street in Montreal, ca. 1908.

Source: Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

emphasize different aspects of residents’ connections with it, but at the end of the day, this juxta-
position seeks to address wider processes—how the glow of street lamps participated in the
emotional landscape of metropolitan life—rather than place-specific narratives. The social nature
of emotions is often analyzed in reference to broader regional or national settings, but focusing
on cities allows us to observe how emotions were produced in relation to people’s tangible inter-
actions with the technologies that were irrevocably changing the way they lived. The conceptions
of streetlights discussed below show this dynamic taking shape across cities whose shared char-
acteristics counterbalanced the distance between them, allowing us to generalize about the nature
of the connection between emotion and infrastructure beyond these specific cases. Circumstances
unique to each generated discrete experiences, but in both places these were related using words,
references, and assumptions, which suggest that the modern city was itself constitutive of a dis-
tinct form of what historian William Reddy calls an “emotional regime.”19
From the time gas fixtures replaced oil lamps, lighting Canada’s then largest city was a high-
profit, monopolist’s game. Founded in 1837, the Montreal Gas Company, known for its inflated
rates and inconsistent service, was the city’s sole light supplier until the late-century rise of elec-
tric power increasingly confined gas to the residential market. Having encountered the technol-
ogy at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the entrepreneur J.A.I. Craig conducted the first
electrical lighting tests in Montreal, including a display before thousands of enthusiastic observ-
ers, some reading newspapers, as the “night sun” cast a “fine soft pale light” over military exer-
cises underway on the Champs de Mars.20 In the end though, it was Craig’s rivals at the upstart
Royal Electric Company who, in 1886 and amid allegations of corruption and political favorit-
ism, won the contract to light the city’s streets. Fifteen years later, the gas and electric utilities
merged to form the all-powerful Montreal Light Heat and Power Company (MLHP), whose
lucrative contracts with the city allowed it to pay its shareholders a steady stream of generous
dividends. Smaller companies servicing suburban municipalities were bought out as soon as they
were deemed a threat, and without much competition, the MLHP oversaw the rapid expansion of
Montreal’s street lighting service (Figure 2), all the while charging considerably higher rates than
what other North American municipalities paid.21
96 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

Figure 3. Streetlights on the Grand’Place in Brussels, ca 1900.

Source: Painting by Luigi Loir.

With the abundance of hydraulic resources in Montreal’s hinterland; growing municipal,

industrial, and consumer demand; and close ties between company executives and capitalist-
minded politicians, electricity imposed itself more quickly in Montreal than in Brussels. In the
Belgian capital, local authorities boasted of having been one of the first cities on the continent to
adopt gas streetlights in 1819, decades before even the ville lumière of Paris. After outsourcing
to two successive companies, the city took direct control in 1875, building and operating a coal-
fueled gas plant that employed more than one thousand workers at a time. As of the early 1880s,
electricity was used to illuminate landmark theatres, parks, and squares (Figure 3), and it long
coexisted with gas, sometimes on the same lamppost. In 1896, the London-based India Rubber
Company won a contract to light Brussels’s most prestigious thoroughfares. Amid accusations
that the city council was favoring the publicly funded gas plant, demands for the generalization
of electric lighting became incessant, but the new technology would only come to dominate in
the interwar years.22

Prestige on the Boulevard

These demands came from many quarters. Politicians, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens each
had their own priorities, and municipal coffers never seemed deep enough to keep up with the
relentless lobbying for additional and brighter lights to be placed in the petitioners’ respective
parts of town. On the surface, requests for more light very much reflected the calls for greater
accessibility, mobility, and security, which the historiography tells us dominated the discourse on
illumination. By elevating the sense of sight over more tactile and auditory forms of perception,
streetlights were understood as enhancing the rational individual’s freedom not only to move
about the city at will but also to adopt the orderly, respectable, and sanitary comportments
expected of the occupants of modern cities.23 Viewing these requests—and the city’s attempts to
Kenny 97

keep up—solely from the perspective of the light would indeed suggest a relatively clear-cut
story of modern technocratic responses to a clearly identified urban problem with scientific,
widely applicable solutions. Focusing on emotional experiences at play, however, paints a mess-
ier picture in which what took place in the shadow of night was just as influential on urban dwell-
ers’ vision of the city as that which happened in the halo of light.
Indeed, the self-consciously rationalist arguments framing requests for lighting cannot be dis-
associated from the murkier knowledge of the night that spawned them. For instance, several
requests before the Brussels administration had to do with the need for more streetlights in the
downtown theatre district, evoking not just questions of visibility but also a halting nocturnal
atmosphere in which the urbane pleasures of big-city entertainment are burdened with a sense of
uneasiness about potential dangers on the journey home.24 Or, when one city councillor called for
“abundant and very intensive” lighting on a busy square en route to the harbor and principal
manufacturing suburbs, his vision for more efficient, profit-generating traffic flow was rooted in
the immediate lived experience of thousands of vehicles and pedestrians ploughing through the
worn-down pavement of a cluttered thoroughfare.25 Clearly, the supposed progress that street
lighting offered was a slow moving affair, punctuated by gaps between expectations and daily
uses of the street as wide as the space between the lampposts themselves.
For political and business elites, streetlights served an important legitimating function, display-
ing their capacity to embrace the expectations of modern metropolitanism and cultivating the
image of forward-looking cities, attractive to wealthy investors and respectable citizens.
Commentators took seriously, and personally, the prestige exuded by streetlights, exuberantly
hailing the “prodigious” and “irresistible” progress that defined the age, to cite the passionate
words of a Brussels city councillor. Reminding his colleagues of “the humble tallow candle and
smoky lamp” that seemed to take him back a century, his thoughts were turned to the future.
“What pride we feel when we compare to those pale and drab candle ends that sufficed for our
fathers, and even for ourselves in our youth or our childhood, the flood of light that gas now
spreads over us, in our streets and in our homes.” Soon, he predicted, gas lighting would in turn
fade into a distant memory, “arousing the same disdain and the same pity as the miserable tallow
candle of yore.”26 Twenty-five years later, the prophecy seemed fulfilled for a Montreal author.
The same comfort and reassurance in the technologies of the present informed his vision of bygone
times, shuddering at the thought that urban dwellers were once “reduced to lighting streets and
public squares either by the light of the moon, torches, resin, lanterns they were forced to carry
themselves, or by smoky lamps. . . . Indeed, all of that once existed,” he lamented, before exalting
the “progress,” which, “through the discoveries of science, has given us gas and electricity!”27
Author Léon Clerbois’s 1910 history of municipal lighting in Brussels similarly lauded the
“incessant progress” his city had made since the candlelit seventeenth century. Praising the clair-
voyant early adoption of gas which had opened nothing less than “a new era that would transform
humanity!” Clerbois insisted that the danger, suspicion, and fear that once darkened the night had
been eliminated. No matter what ill-intentioned detractors might claim, Brussels had nothing to
envy of other European capitals. In measuring up to rival cities, Clerbois struck a sensitive chord.
The promise of offering a brighter experience of the night than could be had elsewhere was cen-
tral to the pride-laden discourse. To criticism leveled at Brussels for its comparative slowness in
adopting electrical lighting, Clerbois responded with “official figures” showing that, measured in
terms of the number of lamps and length of gas mains, Brussels was in fact better lit than Paris
and London, and on par with Berlin.28
But in such debates, statistical data was no substitute for firsthand visual experience. Reacting
to charges that small towns using the new technology had better lighting than the venerable capi-
tal, for instance, the councilman Camille Lemonnier vigorously retorted that nowhere on the
continent had he seen better and brighter streetlights. “Our lighting is quite simply magnificent,”
further emphasized one of his colleagues.29 Montrealers made similar claims. Recognizing that
98 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

continued improvements remained necessary, Arthur Parent, Badger’s successor as superinten-

dent, took solace in finding that his city “compare[d] favourably,” when measuring up to such
“well-lighted” places as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. During his
tour of these cities, it might be noted, he had felt “overwhelmed with kindness” on the part of his
hosts, with whom he had had extensive discussions about different technologies and the atmo-
spheres each created.30 That personal touch was equally important when Montreal hosted visiting
dignitaries, as when officials felt the need to quintuple the number of arc lamps shining over the
prestigious Dominion Square in order to project “a better impression of our good city,” to mem-
bers of the British Parliament and English Boards of Trade. Surely, Montreal’s amour-propre
would not allow it to be outdone in this regard by “every big American city.”31
As much as bright lights stirred feelings of pride and satisfaction, perceived inadequacies
aroused corresponding sentiments of shame and embarrassment. For all that defenders of gas in
Brussels could boast, others were irritated that electricity remained a luxury into the twentieth
century, their city not surpassing, but ranking well behind, its peers.32 That the switch had been
made in some streets but not others accentuated their malaise. Stepping from electric to gaslight,
“we are struck by the abandon and sadness in which the street is plunged,” sighed one councillor,
another lamenting the poor lighting on the boulevard du Midi, a primary entryway into the capi-
tal.33 In Montreal, special fixtures were designed for the mayor’s private residence (Figure 4).
Mounted on bronze posts, the hexagonal lamps were trimmed with gold and engraved with the
mayoral and municipal coats of arms. It was also customary for two lamps to remain outside the
residence of the outgoing mayor, and one in front of the homes of all other former mayors.34
When the administration decided to end the practice for the sometime mayors, the MLHP advised
those concerned that they would henceforth have to make their own “arrangements for a continu-
ance of the light.”35 Among these was Raymond Préfontaine, whose ward, we saw at the outset,
the city electrician had once taken pains to brighten. “I beg to state that if the City of Montreal
cannot afford to pay the ex-mayors of the city the compliment of maintaining the gas lights
installed in front of their residences any longer,” Préfontaine replied, “they are welcome to
remove them.”36 The formulation is superficially polite, but read in the context of the prestige
streetlights represented, the nettled tone of the response, and its veiled implication that the deci-
sion resulted from the incompetence of city officials, suggests that a miffed Préfontaine took the
removal of these lights, and of the honor they conveyed, as a personal affront.
Extending beyond their mere functionality, the emotional associations urban dwellers made
with lamp standards were bound up in their design as well (Figure 5). In both cities, municipal
officials were sensitive to the aesthetic potential of lampposts, specifying that these should not be
“disgraceful”37 in appearance or “cumbersome” on the streets. Instead, they should have a “pleas-
ant silhouette,” be “worthy of our great thoroughfares,”38 and “adorn a decorative and artistic
cachet.”39 Like fine architecture and inspiring monuments, lampposts offered the opportunity to
elevate the intellect of the nocturnal user of the street. “Let us never lose sight,” pleaded Clerbois,
“that the public way should be a permanent and living art museum, inspiring in all a feeling for,
a love for beauty, an aversion to all things ugly, banal or vulgar.” Though conceding artists’ pro-
pensity for ignoring such matters as technical requirements and cost, he insisted trifling pecuni-
ary considerations should not hold back the city. In seeking to “uproot” the “excessive indifference,
poor taste and utilitarianism” of the times, the author distinctly engaged the question of urban
lighting in a more subjective realm of aesthetics, situating the relationship to the street on a plane
not of scientific rationality but of individual experience and personal fulfilment.40
For the critics, this opportunity was being squandered, the lack of artistic interest in the design
of streetlights causing a “deplorable effect” on the city.41 Commenting on the “detestable” sight,
one councillor elicited the assembly’s laughter by joking that “from a revolutionary perspective,
we can congratulate ourselves. These are excellent lanterns for hanging future aristocrats.”42
Residents in both cities were adamant that technological changes had to accommodate their
Kenny 99

Figure 4. Decorative lamp designed to stand outside the Montreal mayor’s private residence.
Source: La Patrie, April 25, 1904.

deeply held sense of attachment to the texture of their environment. The exchange between
Arthur Parent and Lewis Skaife, Corresponding Secretary of Montreal’s Numismatic and
Antiquarian Society, is revealing. To Parent’s request for permission to install on the society’s
Chateau Ramsey property “a small pole” for an electric arc lamp, Skaife acquiesced, “provided
the pole is of iron and nicely painted.” For technical reasons, an iron fixture could not be placed
there, replied Parent, careful nonetheless to confirm the wooden post would indeed be “nicely
painted,” and reassuring Skaife that it would “not in any way be unsightly.”43 For its part, the
100 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

Figure 5. A streetlight in Brussels.

Source: Published by Léon Clerbois in Histoire de l’éclairage public à Bruxelles (1910).

Brussels streetcar company had taken the precaution of promising to install “artistic” lampposts
along the central boulevard Anspach in order to quell concerns that the trolley system would
disfigure the prestigious thoroughfare. What the city got instead, lamented a councillor, were
posts “without the least artistic form” salvaged from Paris, “where no one wanted them.” Worse,
the lighting produced by this “horrible line of masts,” though electric, was “petty and insuffi-
cient,” he vociferated. “This bad joke must come to an end,” added an outraged colleague.44
Kenny 101

Indeed, though many criticized the slowness of electrification, the switch itself had side effects
that also offended aesthetic sensibilities. The “indiscriminate and unregulated” mess of wires
feeding not just streetlights but also indoor lighting systems, streetcars, and telephone lines,
“strangled” busy intersections, and were compared in Brussels to spider webs, and in Montreal,
to a “Chinese harbour after a typhoon.”45 The lampposts themselves were a frustrating nuisance,
blocking sidewalks, impeding circulation, and raising fears in passers-by when decrepit fixtures
threatened to topple over and cause fire or injury.46 Lampposts were also the scenes of more
mundane, day-to-day annoyances of city life. Repeated complaints from one resident prompted
the MLHP to remove decorative spikes from a pole “to prevent the boys from climbing onto Mr.
Callaghan’s roof.”47 For its part, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union took exception to
“the many signs advertising a certain brand of cigarette, attached to disused city lamp posts.”48
While advertisers frequently asked to hang signs on “dead” gas lampposts, permission was
granted at the superintendent’s discretion, and allowing a tobacco company to do so was deemed
inappropriate. The WCTU’s exasperation seems to have also been felt by the superintendent
himself, whose reprimand to American Tobacco, written even before the temperance group’s
complaint, clearly betrayed his own impatience with the company’s behavior.49

Demanding Light
There was, undeniably, a good measure of political grandstanding in the emotionally laden tones
that politicians, bureaucrats, and other city promoters adopted in discussing streetlights. The
boastfulness of some was an effective way of showing they took municipal aspirations to heart;
the indignation of others was a compelling rhetorical tool in the cut-and-thrust of political life.
But if they framed the discussion in these terms, it was also because such attitudes resonated
deeply with the emotional dispositions of the citizens with whom they interacted. Municipal
services, and streetlights in particular, were a primary point of contact between urban dwellers
and the apparatus of urban governance. Residents wrote frequently to city administrators, request-
ing more light here, reparations there, and voicing their concerns about the trials and tribulations
with the spaces they encountered on a nightly basis. Their letters, and the vivid, expressive lan-
guage they employed, offer a window into the potpourri of emotions that framed city life in ways
made new by the intensifying encounters between the darkness of night, and the rays of artificial
light that sought to tame it.
Fear is the emotion most commonly associated with the night. The very purpose of street
lighting had always been to tame this fear, to remove the “perilous obscurity”50 that threatened
the safety and accessibility of the street. In reality, even as more and more people did take to the
streets after sundown for both leisure and work, the darkness never did cease to send a frisson
of alarm shivering through the spine of many urban dwellers, some of whom professed to not
even dare step out after sundown.51 On a utilitarian level, they worried about their ability to see
and move without impediment, especially on busy avenues where streetcars rushed by, height-
ening the risk of collisions with pedestrians.52 As lighting proliferated, expectations swelled,
people growing impatient when they perceived a lack or absence of artificial light. One
Montrealer complained that the “unsatisfactory” lighting in his street placed people using the
steps of his house in constant danger of falling. A nearby gas lamp had been removed, and the
shadows cast into the darkness of night by other poles in the street had caused at least two acci-
dents, he maintained.53 A few blocks over, members of a Presbyterian congregation felt that
attending evening prayer services should not come with the risk of injury they faced each time
they tripped in the stairs of their church, on account of two gas lamps having recently been
removed from Dorchester Street.54 Situations like these caused city folk to “suffer great incon-
venience, discomfort and annoyance,” wrote another group of petitioners, voicing the exaspera-
tion of countless other similar requests.55
102 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

These vexations aside, concerns about criminality, including theft and violence, aroused the
most pressing nocturnal dread. Even before the electrification debate, residents of the boulevard
du Midi were angered that Brussels seemed to cut costs at their expense, many standards remain-
ing unlit each night, others casting but a dim glow. Their council representative enjoined the city
to quickly ensure this boulevard received the same secure lighting as all the others, as the current
situation made it possible for “murders to be committed in the middle of the night.”56 For their
part, residents of Montreal’s rue Lasalle grew increasingly upset that their neighborhood was
becoming “very dangerous.” In a nearby wooded area, they had witnessed “bands of rascals
gathering for the night.” “Our wives and children are afraid, with good reason, to go out at night,
they added, casting nighttime fear as a feminine trait and associating the provision of light with
masculine conceptions of familial responsibility.”57
It is significant to note that it was not necessarily actual acts of crime, but rather the fear that
crime could happen in these circumstances, that mobilized residents to petition their municipal
governments. Many expressed an unwavering faith in the widespread notion that additional light
would naturally result in order and good behavior. A Montreal businessman who requested better
lighting near his brick factory was perturbed that people in the vicinity were “constantly molested
by a crowd of roughs.” He considered the “Police force” (scare quotes in the original) “so insuf-
ficient and small that the only protection we can ask is good light and then protect ourselves.”58
This spirit of self-sufficiency was steeped in the oft-repeated maxim that a good street lamp was
the equivalent of an extra police officer in action, a perspective that had municipal administra-
tions dreaming of cost-cutting opportunities. It remains common today to hear the association
made between streetlights and personal security, and this despite research suggesting that more
lights do not always mean less crime.59 What is revealing here, however, is less the fantasy of
order entertained by rationalist city planners than the way the presence or absence of light enkin-
dled people’s emotional posture vis-à-vis their own willingness to venture out at night, and the
intuitively defined level of acceptable risk they formulated at the precise moment they stepped
into a set of stairs or walked across an intersection, through an alley or into a park. It is telling to
note that when singing instructor Cal Corey begged the light committee to tend to Berthelet
Street, “plunged in darkness,” it was above all a “feeling of security” he and his neighbors were
craving.60
Of course, these irritants were real, and if nightfall stoked the imagination, crime did happen.
For months, residents of Hermine Street had endured nuisances they attributed directly to the
absence of light. “It is overbearing and ridiculous the conduct and insults we have to put up with
owing to the darkness,” wrote one Mrs. Canning on behalf of the other “grumbling” tenants. “I
could send you from 14 to 16 names that are in the same misery so dark that the [house] numbers
cannot be seen,” she continued. All she wanted was to prevent the “scandal” disrupting her fam-
ily, whose ears she wished to “protect . . . from the abusive language they have to listen to.” For
emphasis, she recounted a recent “terrible fight” one night outside her home. “All around was in
dread it was a murder the sidewalk was a pool of blood sunday morning not three feet from our
doors” [sic]. The obscurity of the night provoked a host of negative emotions in Mrs. Canning:
irritation with the atmosphere of the street, anger at the gas company and city officials, worry for
her family, and dread at the thought of the scene she had witnessed, her terror spoken by the
rambling, unpunctuated style of the missive.61
Events like these were exceptional, and while a bloodbath at one’s door unsurprisingly trig-
gered extreme emotions, the wider significance of these letters resides in what they tell us about
changing expectations and assumptions regarding ownership of the modern urban night. Demand
for the protection of light grew precisely because the urban bourgeoisie increasingly claimed the
nocturnal street as a space for them to invest. Though many saw “the distance separating electric-
ity from gas” as “a thousand times greater than the interval separating gas from the candles of our
fathers,” historian Peter Baldwin suggests that the real consequence of electrification was not so
Kenny 103

much the new visual experience, but rather the more diverse crowds attracted into the streets, as
growing numbers of men and women could afford the leisure activities that beckoned.62 The
primarily middle- and upper-class urban dwellers demanding light lay bare their understandings
of their own place in the city, of when they could move around within it and to which ends. In
their minds, darkness was the domain of “loafers” and “ruffians,” of “apaches” and other “loose
characters” who took refuge in the shadows and terrorized the women of the neighborhood.
Women themselves were also cast into these roles, since, as historian Mary Anne Poutanen
shows, the presence of streetlights made prostitution more visible and simultaneously fueled the
discourse of moral opprobrium about illicit nighttime activities.63 By defining darkness as the
realm of what they perceived to be these most disreputable urban types, evoking feelings of anxi-
ety and trepidation, these letters simultaneously cast the lamps as beacons of respectability and
moral virtue. If the entertainment and amusements spawned by electric lights “suffused” the
night with “moral ambiguity” in the minds of many reformers,64 nocturnal illuminations guiding
bourgeois city dwellers to and from their homes were no less imbued with more reassuring feel-
ings of moral propriety. When an anonymous Montreal journalist published an exposé of the
city’s “seamy side,” it was, tellingly, by gaslight that he made his observations. “Back of the
well-lighted streets and the open, honest faces are other streets whose lights burn not so brightly,
and other faces not so fair,” he cryptically wrote, clearly demarcating the object of his investiga-
tion from more respectable citizens and spaces, which, by then, would have been enjoying the
bright comfort of electricity.65
Beyond their functionality, streetlights built reputations and shaped the way people conceived
of their own participation in the spatial arrangements and social structures of city life. Light was
needed “not only for illuminating purposes but also in the interest of morality.”66 Take Montreal’s
Busby Lane, for example, decried as being “the night refuge of many of the worst characters in
the city.”67 The situation raised the ire of one landlady, who insisted that because of her tenants,
the area was changing and “never had such a respectable class of people living there as there are
today.”68 In buttressing the claim that specific city blocks needed better light on account of the
quality of their inhabitants, petitioners often pointed to the presence of churches and convents
nearby, pleading that the “select class” frequenting these institutions, as well as the succor they
provided to society’s less fortunate, rendered them worthy of illumination, such that their work
might be accomplished without trepidation.69 As darkness harbored the city’s most menacing
sorts, more privileged urban dwellers saw lighting as something their upstanding neighbors had
come to deserve. Streetlights, they believed, would not only ward off troublemakers but also
reward those whose behavior and lifestyle elevated city life to a more confident, self-assured, and
serene emotional register.
The tensions underlying the number, placement, and brightness of streetlights in cities like
Montreal and Brussels were thus informed by the three-way relationships between fledgling
municipal administrations, a booming private sector, and urban dwellers immersed in the busy
rush of the metropolis. These relationships were about politics and money, about the exercise of
authority and claims to public space, about how infrastructure should function and for whom,
about who would pay and who would profit. Like all human relationships, they were infused with
emotion. When landlords complained that an absence of streetlights made it difficult to find ten-
ants, or when business owners insisted that the municipal taxes they paid entitled them to more
light, financial considerations translated into the anger and exasperation they felt toward city
hall, prompting “urgent” demands that “justice be served.”70 The fear of accidents, theft or vio-
lence that motivated so many citizen demands was undeniably bad for business.
As in council debates, the rhetoric wielded by petitioners may have been theatrical, but its repeated
use allows us to capture what Peter Stearns describes as the “emotional styles” of the period.71 Polite
formulations remained essential and basic etiquette was never transgressed, though petitioners occa-
sionally sought to break down the boundaries that separated them from the administration by
104 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

enjoining officials to accompany them into the darkened streets so that they might experience the
discomfort for themselves. At the same time, many letter writers did not hesitate to make their impa-
tience known, not only by insisting on the gravity of their situation, but also by reminding bureau-
crats that the demand in question was one of a long series, sometimes stretching over many years.
“My dear Robertson,” cajoled J. Widmer Nelles, addressing his local councillor on a familiar tone.
“You will not I hope think me too great a nuisance,” he continued, recognizing the “annoyance”
Robertson must have felt in his “duty as a representative of the people.” Surely though, Robertson
would remember his request from 18 months prior for lights in a part of Rachel Street that remained
“uncomfortably dark.” “Could you not arrange an arc light […]?” wondered Nelles. “Please try and
do something,” he timidly signed off.72 Residents of Sainte-Élisabeth Street, having seen a first peti-
tion go unheeded, sharpened their tone considerably in a second letter five months later. Their ire was
manifest not just in the increased number of signatories (11 had signed the first letter, 23 the second,
suggesting that the original group’s emotional appeals had had a galvanizing effect on their neigh-
bors), but in the decidedly more pointed and urgent language employed – the “complete obscurity”
of the first missive was now a “cause of disgrace,” a cover for dangerous hoodlums “troubling the
peace.”73 City officials, for their part, took personally the accusations they were failing in their duties,
conflating the “progressive march forward” of their city with their own sense of self-worth.74 In this
context, Parent made a point of underlining the alacrity of his responses to citizen complaints,
requesting a dedicated horse and buggy for faster service and “a badge bearing the Department and
Corporation signs” that he might display when making service calls.75 To the extent that historical
assessment of the emotions requires we interpret what individuals felt through the words they left
behind, we might reasonably speculate that this desire for status and willingness to display his cre-
dentials on his physical person were indicative of Parent’s own feelings of devotion and pride toward
his mission of making light cut through the pall of the urban night.
Elected officials and bureaucrats who bore the wrath of their constituents in turn projected
these emotions to the companies contracted to provide the service. The very role of private enter-
prises in the supply of light also illustrates the connection between human emotion and the mate-
rial infrastructure of the city. In Brussels, protracted debates over the relative merits of privatization
turned acrimonious. Emotions flared as insults flew and shouts filled the chambers. Over the
years, proponents of the free market accused their opponents of putting their feelings of megalo-
mania ahead of the public interest they had been elected to protect, while the latter suggested that
recourse to the private sector was beneath the dignity of their great city.76 In Montreal, mean-
while, the press regularly lambasted the MLHP for gouging the city, and the city for its lack of
spine in taking on the monopoly. The relationship between the two entities was decidedly chilly.
Upon receiving “very unfavourable reports,” the city electrician lashed out at the company that
“public opinion . . . is very much exercised at the defective lighting.”77 The same testiness would
invariably color the MLHP superintendent’s replies, as he sought to minimize the complaints and
turn the tables on the city, which, he charged, did not devote sufficient police resources to protect-
ing the company’s lamp standards from “malicious and intentional” vandalism.78
In Montreal, the frustrations associated with the governance and delivery of this public service
came to an emotional boiling point during the wiremen and linesmen’s strike that darkened the
April nights of 1902. On the 14th, seventy-five electricians of the MLHP and of the Lachine
Rapids Company (a suburban supplier) walked off the job, demanding pay raises and nine-hour
shifts. Their numbers swelled—a reported total of three hundred fifty strikers joining the ranks
within the first few days—and the conflict became the talk of the town. Underlying the daily
newspaper coverage and the demands of both parties, we see not only the emotional posturing of
both parties but, equally importantly, the heightening of nocturnal fears as the standoff resulted in
scores of unlit lamps every night. The workers knew they had a powerful bargaining chip. Urban
dwellers had grown accustomed to the comforts of nighttime brightness, and the longer the strike
caused darkness, the more pressing became their feelings of discontentment and impatience.
Kenny 105

As historian Mary Blewett has shown, emotional standards of the day meant that the success of
businessmen in breaking labor demands resided in their ability to maintain a cool disposition, rein-
forcing their authority by taming their anger to appear fully in control.79 This was exactly the strategy
adopted by MLHP superintendent Gossler, whose daily statements to reporters were hopeful and reas-
suring. “We are getting on well,” he proclaimed, insisting that the setbacks affecting the service were
only temporary. Obstinately refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the electricians’ union, he calmly
pointed out that his company was receiving applications from all over the country and that the arrival
of replacement workers would mean that “in a day or two everything will be running smoothly.”80 In
private though, Gossler’s correspondence with the city was far more seething than soothing. Outages
due to the absence of workers were compounded by vandalism to the wires feeding the lamps.
Revealing the anger and consternation he hid from journalists, Gossler’s daily letters to Badger
express his growing irritation with the situation, and with what he perceived to be the city’s lack of
action in protecting his company’s property.81 For their part, workers “emphatically” refuted allega-
tion of vandalism, arguing that the company sabotaged its own lines in a bid to portray itself as the
victim of an unruly and aggressive workforce. Knowing that while the darkness put pressure on the
company, it could also turn public opinion against them, the workers crafted a narrative of positive
emotion to portray themselves publicly. Their rallies were described as large and enthusiastic, strength-
ening their solidarity and resolve. The men were characterized in the press as “solid,” “sanguine,” and
in “excellent sprits,” all of which reinforced their confidence they would be victorious.82
Between the employers’ outward calm but gnawing rage and the workers’ ebullience were the
impatient complaints of residents subjected to nightly outages. Though the lights only went out
in certain neighborhoods, Badger received bitter remonstrations from affected citizens, and the
press was keen to emphasize that “partial” though the darkness was, the “situation [was] becom-
ing serious.”83 The “complete obscurity” was anything but “reassuring” for the population, wrote
La Patrie, while congratulating the strikers for their “good conduct.”84 Other unions framed their
support for the striking electricians less in terms of class solidarity than on the grounds that the
darkened streets were shrouded in a “pathetic state of affairs.”85 Despite the employees’ recrimi-
nations that the hired replacements were unqualified, the company managed to progressively
restore the lights, much to the papers’ relief. Nevertheless, on the eve of the strike’s resolution,
the Star continued to report that citizens of some wards were “not in a happy mood.”86 To their
relief, the battle would soon end. A deal brokered by Montreal mayor James Cochrane forced the
employer to concede to salary demands, and the incident was soon forgotten.87 But for the twelve
days, and nights, it had lasted, the darkness provoked by the strike had, for different reasons, cre-
ated rushes of emotion in the different actors concerned—workers, employers, city officials,
ordinary residents and the journalists who covered it all—vividly displaying the emotional asso-
ciations that shaped urban dwellers’ relationship to the materiality of the modern city.

A Question of Atmosphere
Finally, the simple presence or absence of lamps in the street was only part of the larger implications
of urban illumination. Just as central to this dynamic was the quality of the light itself. Nocturnal
atmospheres, we have seen, did not simply emerge from new forms of artificial light, but were the
product of emotional interactions with it in the distinct social and spatial setting that was the modern-
izing city. As such, the attempts by municipal authorities to manufacture nocturnal atmospheres they
associated with security and efficiency often garnered criticism from those whose preferences were
for softer nocturnal hues. Particularly striking in the context of the predictable, progress-oriented
discourse on multiplying sources of light is the frequent uneasiness, even resistance, to the intensifi-
cation of nocturnal light and the corresponding banishment of shadows and darkness. For all that
electricity promised to set the night ablaze, many urban dwellers continued to feel a deep personal
attachment to what Lynda Nead calls the “poetics of gas,” its “organic and bewitching [power] to
106 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

render familiar daytime places strange and unfamiliar” in delicious, if not entirely comforting,
ways.88 Even high-ranking municipal officials, including the mayor of Brussels, Charles Buls, ques-
tioned whether the increased illumination promised by electricity was not in fact excessive. Buls was
highly critical of the effects of electrification on his cherished city. These new lights produced “a
very sad effect,” on the city’s grand boulevards, he argued, pointing out that even the boulevard de
l’Opéra in Paris had been stripped of its electric lamps, their unpleasant effect considered inappropri-
ate for the splendor of the setting. Instead, he wished to preserve a “cheerful air,” not by concentrat-
ing streetlights so that they might shine more brightly, but by spreading out a greater number of
dimmer points of illumination, an effect he argued was better achieved with gas.89 Creating a pleas-
ant atmosphere that offered respite against the pressures of a dense urban environment mattered far
more to him than ensuring the city had acquired the latest technology. Even in Montreal, where
electrification was more precocious, Arthur Parent conceded that parks and squares should, in sum-
mertime, be lit with a type of petroleum lamp, that “does not disfigure the aspect of the ground with
large poles and wires, permitting also to light under the trees.”90
Buls’ comments came as Brussels was beginning to experiment with electricity in places like
the city’s prestigious municipal park, which occupied the space between the king’s official palace
and the national parliament. Despite the shift in technology, the city electricians implementing
the plan on an overcast and chilly spring evening of 1894 worked to maintain a soft and romantic
atmosphere, much to the delight of those attending the inauguration. Covering the event, a jour-
nalist from the daily Petit bleu raved about the unique, and to his eyes, pleasurable ambiance. He
noted the suddenness with which the shadowy darkness was lit up by a “lunar light,” waking the
dormant sparrows into “startled chattering.” Lit from below, the leaves on the trees resembled
intricate green lace, interspersed with softly glowing spheres like stars fallen from the sky and
hanging in the branches. The success of this “charming effect,” continued the reporter, rested
precisely in the sparseness of the lamps. “The light is not blinding,” he explained, giving the
walkways “an intimate melancholy of exquisite poetics.” To the “vigorous” light produced by
standard arrangements, he much preferred this “slightly capricious and fanciful coquetry.”91
Commentators often framed their description of the atmosphere of urban lighting in the image
of an evening stroll taken by young lovers. Following a New Year’s tradition of saluting local
residents with a few lines of verse, the lamplighters of the Brussels suburb of Saint-Josse, known
as “light-carrying knights” serenaded their municipal compatriots with the promise of chasing
away obscurity (Figure 6):

So that any honest girl

Facing no danger and well at ease

May walk in the evening

With her lover, avoiding the puddles

But for many, the increasing ubiquity of streetlights meant that lovers could no longer steal away
to the soft dimness in the nooks of public walkways as they once did. How the older generation
looked back with melancholy at the happy but oh-so-distant time when the slightest bit of green-
ery could “mysteriously and jealously shelter their love,” deplored the suddenly nostalgic
Clerbois.92 Another Petit bleu writer, apparently not sharing his colleague’s enthusiasm for the
new electric lights, also denounced the end of cupid’s mystery “in the woods of our old park.”

In the wholesome darkness

Love will no longer draw its bow

Kenny 107

Figure 6. Poetry offered by lamplighters to the residents of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode in Brussels, in Léon

Clerbois, Histoire de l’éclairage public à Bruxelles.

...

And now the electric lamp

Strips the shrubs of their poetry

...

You’ll no longer hear on the bench

Where the young soldier squeezes the maid

108 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

Kisses that sound like trombones

And the sighs of the regiment

As it’s in the dark and staggered rows of trees

—Always respected by the gas!—

That Mr. Buls, true potentate,

Chases the shadows by the ampere

Farewell then saucy couples

Cooing beneath the austere moon

The grove being without mystery

The tommy will lose his voice

The verse, humor, and irony wielded against this new iteration of the “siècle des lumières” sug-
gests not just a resistance to technological advances labeled as progress but also a masculine
conception of the urban night as a privileged site of sexual permissiveness.93
Not all critics were so light-hearted, however. Accompanying a visual reportage of the many
pleasures made possible by Montreal’s artificial lights, a La Patrie writer reminded readers that
behind the nightlife of leisurely strolls, shopping, theatres, and fancy restaurants was the night
work that made it all possible: “Go and see, by the crimson lights of the blast furnaces, the work-
ers in the harsh rolling mills, go and see the glassblowers under the white light,” he exhorted,
appealing to feelings of compassion and appreciation.94 For a group of tired workers treading
home from a long day at the factory, described by a Brussels writer, the “magical illumination”
produced by streetlamps flickering in the fog went entirely unnoticed. If their strenuous work
fueled the progress of the modern city, it ironically made them oblivious to urban charms.95 Anti-
urban commentators went further yet, portraying the illuminated night in overtly negative emo-
tional tones of anxiety and perdition, where the eerie glow of both gas and electric lights bring
out the streets’ more sinister qualities.96 To some, the proliferation of electric streetlamps, and
especially the temptation for consumption they produced, were among the modern luxuries that
not only degraded the moral standards of urban centers but also precipitated worrisome migra-
tory patterns from the countryside to the city, destroying the health and vitality of the nation.97

Conclusion
On both sides of the Atlantic, the material and technological structures that reshaped cities were
intricately connected to the emotional postures and dispositions of their inhabitants. Modern
urbanism strove to evacuate the city of impracticality and fear, removing the obstacles impeding
its security and efficiency. Because streetlights were such ubiquitous and emotionally conten-
tious elements of this landscape, they were central both to the ethos of professed rationality and
progress through which the city was refashioned, as well as to the complex and interior human
experiences that went along with these material developments. When this mission faltered, nego-
tiating the darkness remained a defining feature of turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban life, espe-
cially away from the main thoroughfares.
Kenny 109

Figure 7. “Nostalgic and pensive souls” under the streetlights of Brussels in Marius Renard, Notre pain
quotidien (1909).

The differing nature of the source material available in the two cities means that certain per-
spectives, while present in both, can be more fully explored in one locale or the other. The
detailed city hall minutes and literary representations of Brussels, written for public consump-
tion, complement the more confidential tones of the reams of letters by Montreal citizens to their
municipal administration. Analyzing them together affords the opportunity to grasp the range of
emotions intertwined with nocturnal illumination, ranging from pride and self-confidence, to
more bitter notes of shame, anger, discomfort, and dread when the light was deemed unsteady,
insufficient, or altogether wanting. The similitude in the emotional interaction with streetlights in
these distant cities points to the effervescent, modern urban environment itself as one historically
specific context in which emotions are expressed, jarred, redefined, and given meaning.
Taken together, this range of feelings surrounding both the politics and the aesthetics of street-
lights, this aggregation of minor day-to-day, night-to-night, joys and annoyances, terrors and
romances, tell a broader story of the emotional relationship urban dwellers developed with their
cities. This is evident in the fictional story of a young maid arriving in Brussels, fascinated with
the white clarity of streetlights through the opaque shadows of nightfall, casting their rays into
her troubled sense of urban exile through “the sort of dread that the unknown instils in nostalgic
and pensive souls (Figure 7).”98 It is equally evident in the detailed hand-drawn map
110 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

Figure 8. A hand-drawn map by a group of Montreal residents of Pointe Saint-Charles in 1904

accompanies a request for more lights in order that they might better enjoy their local park.
Source: Archives de la ville de Montréal.

accompanying the request for more lights from a group of Montreal residents wishing to enjoy
their local park at night, its walks, ponds, playgrounds, and riverfront promenade (Figure 8).99
These sources, which explore and reveal the intimacies of urban life, tell us about the way city
dwellers sought to appropriate urban space, to feel at home within it, even after sundown.
Attending to these subjective responses to the increasingly intense illumination of the urban night
contributes to our understanding of how individuals are imbricated within the broader social
world they inhabit. Far from being fleeting, solitary phenomena inaccessible to the historian, the
expression of individually felt emotions placed urban dwellers in dialogue with one another, and
participated in the construction of distinct atmospheres that underpinned the connection to their
environment. To some, streetlights reflected the value of their city and of themselves, and debates
over the number and placement of lights were rooted in conceptions of class and gender privilege
in which the placement and number of lamps set apart the respectable and deserving from those
considered threatening and illicit. But streetlights also mattered because they contributed to
structuring the rhythms of urban life, from the extension of daytime into the darkness of a late
winter afternoon, to the riveting pleasures of a summer evening on the boulevards, and to the
labor that increasingly stretched deep into the night or resumed even before dawn. Though street-
lights were eminently practical infrastructures, the atmospheres they conveyed and the emotions
they elicited situates them not just pragmatically on street corners but at the intersection of ratio-
nalist modern urbanism and the subjective experiences of space these forces generated.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Stéphanie O’Neill, Francesca Buxton, and Tamara Lees for their invaluable research assis-
tance at different stages of this project. My thanks to Roxanne Panchasi, Mary Anne Poutanen, Jarrett Rudy,
Kenny 111

and anonymous referees whose feedback helped strengthen my argument, as well as to members of the
Montreal History Group, the University of British Columbia history colloquium, and the Urban History
Group, who generously responded to earlier drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
Research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes
1. Badger to Fire and Light committee (hereafter FLC), October 3, 1901, VM 50, Fonds du comité des
incendies et de l’écairage, S2 D65, Archives de Montréal (hereafter AM). All translations mine.
2. John Jakle, City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001), 15; Christopher Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in
Britain, 1800-1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1.
3. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological
Mobilities and the Urban Condition (New York: Routledge, 2001), 40–42; Nigel Thrift, Spatial
Formations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 45. See also Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, Technology
and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1988).
4. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 82. See also Mark J. Bouman, “Luxury and Control.
The Urbanity of Sreet Lighting in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” Journal of Urban History 14, no. 1
(1987); David Nasaw, “Cities of Light, Landscapes of Pleasure,” in The Landscape of Modernity: New
York City 1900-1940, ed. David Ward and Oliver Zunz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992); David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
5. Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840-1930 (London: Reaktion Books,
1998), 25.
6. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 10, 19.
7. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 83.
8. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 4–6, 58, 89, 144.
9. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 5.
10. Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, eds., Emotional Geographies (Aldershot, United
Kingdom: Ashgate, 2005), 3.
11. Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009). On emotions and atmo-
sphere, see also Graham Richards, “Emotions into Words—or Words into Emotions?” in Representing
Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music, and Medicine, ed. Penelope Gouk and
Helen Hills (Aldershot, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2005).
12. Nicole Eustace et al., “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” American Histoical
Review 117, no. 5 (2012).
13. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle
Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
14. Joanna Bourke, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History,” History Workshop
Journal, no. 55 (2003); Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger:
The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986).
112 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

15. Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” 77.

16. Theresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
17. This article derives from a larger project that examines sensory experiences in these two cities: Nicolas
Kenny, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2014). For more on comparison between them, see Serge Jaumain and Paul-André Linteau, eds.,
Vivre en ville. Bruxelles et Montréal au XIXe et XXe siècles (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006).
18. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 227.
19. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.
20. “The Electric Light,” Montreal Daily Witness, May 17, 1879, 4.
21. Christopher Armstrong and H. V. Nelles, Monopoly’s Moment: The Organisation and Regulation of
Canadian Utilities, 1830-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 100–7; Clarence Hogue,
André Bolduc, and Daniel Larouche, Québec, un siècle d’électricité (Montreal: Libre Expression,
1979), 11–88; Paul-André Linteau, Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération, 2nd ed. (Montreal:
Boréal, 2000), 134–38, 273–77.
22. Pierre Loze, Du halo au réseau. La lumière dans la ville (Brussels: Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles,
2007); Thérèse Symons et al., Lumière et éclairage (Brussels: Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, 2007),
19–20.
23. On the liberal undercurrent of modern urbanism, and the self-regulating behavior it was designed to
elicit, see Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003).
24. Bulletin communal de Bruxelles (hereafter BCB), March 1, 1909, 145; December 24, 1910, 1804;
December 16, 1912, 1603.
25. BCB, November 7, 1910, 1490.
26. BCB, August 29, 1881, 240.
27. Gaston Labat, Almanach de Montréal (Imprimerie Guertin, 1906), 17. Unable to resist a good pun, the
author of a guidebook published by a luxury hotel in Montreal wrote of the “joy” he felt at living in
this “enlightened age.” Queen’s Hotel, Montreal (s.n., 1906), 3.
28. Léon Clerbois, “Histoire de l’éclairage public à Bruxelles,” Annales de la Société d’archéologie de
Bruxelles 24, no. I–II (1910): 137, 74–76.
29. BCB, December 19, 1908, 1264.
30. Parent, Report to the Chairman and Members of the Fire and Light Committee, November 10, 1904,
VM 50, S2, D79, AM.
31. Horn to Robertson, FLC Chairman, July 8, 1903; Parent to Roberston, July 28, 1903, VM 50, S2, D71,
AM.
32. BCB, July 7, 1902, 27.
33. BCB, November 20, 1911; October 27, 1913, 1089.
34. Parent to FLC, March 3, 1904, VM 50, S2, D75, AM; “Les réverbères de M. le Maire,” La Patrie,
February 18, 1904, 10; “Les réverbères du maire, prêts à être installés,” La Patrie, April 25, 1904.
35. MLHP to Jacques Grenier, February 25, 1904, VM 50, S2, D75, AM.
36. Quoted in MLHP to Parent, March 3, 1904, VM 50, S2, D75, AM.
37. City of Montreal, “Cahiers des charges,” 1904, VM 50, S2, D64, AM.
38. BCB, December 11, 1905, 1001.
39. BCB, December 11, 1905, 1008.
40. Clerbois, “Histoire de l’éclairage,” 171; Hugo Lettens, “Sculpture et lumière électrique à la fin du 19e
siècle,” Cahiers de la Fonderie 23, 1997.
41. BCB, May 8, 1892, 297.
42. BCB, April 29, 1907, 846. The reference is to the practice of hanging representatives of the Ancien
Regime from street lamps during the 1789 French Revolution. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted
Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, United Kingdom: Berg,
1988), 100–3.
43. Parent to Skaife, July 27 and August 1, 1904; Skaife to Parent, July 30, 1904, VM 50, S2, D 77.
44. BCB, November 19, 1900, 732, 739.
45. Ibid.; Electrical Department, Montreal, October 9, 1902, VM50, S2, D69, AM; Percy Nobbs, “City
Planning as Applied to Montreal,” in For a Better Montreal: Report of the First Convention of the City
Improvement League (Montreal, 1910), 46.
Kenny 113

46. Parent to Badger, November 17, 1898, VM50, S2, D56, AM; John Barlow, City Surveyor, to Badger,
VM50, S2, D68, AM; George Hadwill, Montreal Board of Trade, to City of Montreal, March 21, 1902,
VM50, S2, D69, AM; Petition from twenty-four signatories to FLC, June 9, 1903, VM50, S2, D71,
AM.
47. J.J. Callaghan to Parent, n.d.; Gossler, General Superintendent, MLHP, to Badger, July 4, 1902, VM50,
S2, D68, AM.
48. Elizabeth Muir McLachlan, president, WCTU, to Mayor of Montreal, June 1, 1904, VM 50, S2, D76,
AM.
49. Parent to American Tobacco Co., March 30, 1904, VM 50, S2, D75, AM. On attitudes toward tobacco
in Montreal during the period, see Jarrett Rudy, The Freedom to Smoke: Tobacco Consumption and
Identity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005).
50. BCB, December 24, 1910, p. 1804.
51. Victor Morin to FLC, October 6, 1902, VM 50, S2, D69, AM.
52. Residents protested to the company directly, and both residents and company directed their complaints
to the City. Montreal Street Railway Co. to Roberston, October 30, 1902; Petition from residents of
Huntley Street to P. Martineau, City Councillor, December 1, 1900, VM 50, S2, D69, AM.
53. Barnard and Dessaulles, Advocates, on behalf of Edward major, to L.O. David, City Clerk, October 17,
1904, VM 50, S2, D79, AM.
54. John Hyde to Robertson, Fire and Light Committee, October 14, 1904, VM 50, S2, D79, AM.
55. Petition from seven signatories to Fire and Light Committee, November 16, 1898, VM 50, S2, D56,
AM.
56. BCB, August 7, 1882, 150.
57. Petition from fourteen signatories to Fire and Light Committee, May 7, 1909, VM 50, S2, D101, AM.
58. Ed. Sheppard to Badger, June 3, 1899, VM 50, S2, D57, AM.
59. Stephen Atkins, Sohail Husain, and Angele Story, “The Influence of Street Lighting on Crime and Fear
of Crime” (Crime Prevention Unit Paper No. 28, Home Office, London, 1991); Paul R. Marchant,
“Have New Street Lighting Schemes Reduced Crime in London?,” Radical Statistics, no. 104 (2011).
60. Corey to FLC, March 4, 1901, VM 50, S2, D63, AM. Emphasis mine.
61. P. Canning to FLC, October 3, 1904, VM 50, S2, D79, AM.
62. BCB, June 23, 1883, 583; Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City,
1820-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 155–57.
63. Mary Anne Poutanen, Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming 2015). Cited with author’s permission.
64. Ibid., 157.
65. Montreal by Gaslight (s.n., 1889), 8.
66. J. D. Miller, Toilet Laundry Co., to FLC, April 9, 1902, VM 50, S2, D67, AM.
67. Petition from eight signatories to FLC, September 29, 1902, VM 50, S2, D69, AM.
68. Isabella Ransom to Surveyor’s Office, September 20, 1902, VM 50, S2, D69, AM.
69. Petition from sixty-one signatories to FLC, September 17, 1898, VM 50, S2, D56, AM; Petition from
twenty-one signatories to P. G. Martineau, city council, September 20, 1899, VM 50, S2, D58, AM; L.
J. Forget to A. A. Lavallée, October 28, 1903, VM 50, S2, D72, AM.
70. A. Mathieu to FLC, September 21, 1899, VM 50, S2, D58, AM.
71. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New
York University Press, 1994).
72. Nelles to Robertson, November 7, 1903, VM 50, S2, D72, AM.
73. Petition from eleven signatories to FLC, November 27, 1901, VM 50, S2, D72, AM; Petition from
twenty-three signatories to FLC, April 23, 1902, VM 50, S2, D73, AM.
74. BCB, December 1, 1884, 590.
75. Parent to Badger, August 20, 1900, VM 50, S2, D61, AM.
76. BCB, August 29, 1881, 226–63; November 19, 1900, 733.
77. Badger to Gossler, March 17, 1903, VM 50, S2, D70, AM.
78. Gossler to Parent, November 3, 1903, VM 50, S2, D76, AM.
79. Mary Blewett, “Passionate Voices and Cool Calculations: The Emotional Landscape of the Nineteenth-
Century Textile Industry,” in An Emotional History of the United States, ed. Stearns and Lewis (New
114 Journal of Urban History 43(1)

York: New York University Press, 1998), 109–25. A strike by workers at the Brussels gas works had
caused similar controversy in Brussels five years earlier, raising fears of both the “black” of night and
the “red” of socialism. See Luc Keunings, “L’usine à gaz de Bruxelles en grève. La peur du noir à la
fin du 19e siècle,” Cahiers de la Fonderie 23 (1997).
80. “Electrical Workers Still Confident,” Montreal Star, April 18, 1902, 6.
81. Gossler to Badger, April 16, 17, 18, and 19, 1902, VM 50, S2, D67, AM.
82. “Over Two Hundred Linemen Are Out,” Montreal Star, April 16, 1902, 6; “Electric Workers Strike is
Still On,” Montreal Star, April 17, 1902, 2; “Electrical Workers Still Confident,” Montreal Star, April
18, 1902, 6; “Nouvelles Ouvrières,” La Presse, April 17, 1902, 11; “La grève des électriciens,” La
Patrie, April 21, 1902, 1. On emotions and labor, see Peter Bischoff, “Fear, Loyalty and Organization:
Unions as Emotional Arenas, 1880-1919,” in Emotions and Cultural Change, ed. Burkhardt Krause
and Ulrich Scheck (Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 2006), 263–77.
83. “Over Two Hundred Linemen Are Out,” Montreal Star, April 16, 1902, 6
84. “La grève des électriciens,” La Patrie, April 24, 1902, 1.
85. Boot and Shoe Worker Union to FLC, April 24, 1902; United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners
to FLC, April 23, 1902, VM 50, S2, D67, AM.
86. “Strike May Be at an End To-morrow,” Montreal Star, April 22, 1902, 6.
87. “La grève est finie,” La Patrie, April 26, 1902, 24.
88. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 83–84.
89. BCB, December 3, 1894, 665. This critique echoed the opprobrium that had earlier been leveled at gas
lamps, when these were first placed in front of the Opéra in 1872. Peter Soppelsa, “Finding Fragility in
Paris: The Politics of Infrastructure after Haussmann,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French
History 37 (2009), 235.
90. Parent, “Report to the Chairman and Members of the Fire and Light Committee,” November 10, 1904,
VM 50, S2, D79, AM.
91. Petit bleu, May 2, 1894.
92. Clerbois, “Histoire de l’éclairage,” 157.
93. Petit bleu, May 2, 1894.
94. “Montréal aux lumières,” La Patrie, January 11, 1913.
95. Louis Dumont-Wilden, Coins de Bruxelles (Brussels: Association des écrivains belges, 1905), 31.
96. See, e.g., Émile Verhaeren, Les villes tentaculaires précédées des campagnes hallucinées (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1949), 113–14.
97. Edmond Nicolaï, La dépopulation des campagnes et l’accroissement de la population des villes
(Brussels: Weissenbruch, 1903), 61.
98. Marius Renard, Notre pain quotidien (Brussels: Association des ecrivains belges, 1909), 57–58.
99. Petition from twenty-five signatories to Fire and Light Committee, December 10, 1904, VM 50, S2,
D80, AM.

Author Biography
Nicolas Kenny is member of the History Department at Simon Fraser University, where his research exam-
ines the corporeal and emotional relationship of urban dwellers to the city at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury. He is the author of The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto
Press, 2014).