Urban Light

My favorite passages in India Mandelkern’s Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles come in the closing pages: a “field guide” to the city’s lighting stock. This, I assure you, is not a knock on the rest of the book, which is smart and passionate, knowledgeable and deeply investigated.

My point is rather to identify a certain necessary shift.

Throughout Electric Moons, Mandelkern offers a sequence of set pieces: a capsule history of streetlights in Los Angeles; a portrait of the artist Edward Biberman, who for nearly 50 years portrayed lampposts in his paintings; a nuanced consideration of Chris Burden’s landmark (in all senses) installation Urban Light, which has fronted the Los Angeles County Museum of Art since 2008.

India Mandelkern sits down to talk Electric Moons with David L. Ulin on Wednesday, March 6 at 12:30 p.m. Pacific time.
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In the wake of all this, she wants us to understand, it’s time to get off the page and into the neighborhoods. Mandelkern’s field guide—or, as she calls it, “L.A.’s Top 40”—highlights her favorites of the city’s “over 400 unique streetlight designs,” focusing largely on what I think of as the classics: the Broadway Rose, the Wilshire Lantern, the Windsor Square Special, the S-1.

I would like to suggest that her publisher, Los Angeles’s Hat & Beard Press, issue a small stand-alone version of the field guide so I can carry it on my walks.

The effect of Mandelkern’s work is of a journey through space and time, a narrative through an unanticipated and yet essential lens. Those who don’t know Los Angeles often dismiss it as history-less, a landscape defined by sprawl and reinvention. But what’s most vivid in the writing here is how the place defies what we expect of it, or (more accurately) exists in many different registers at once. Streetlights represent an example: a set of structures so utilitarian, we routinely fail to notice them, and at the same time, emblems of the city’s legacies.

“There’s something magical,” Mandelkern reflects, “about stumbling on an old standard in situ. It’s like beholding an old totem or a heraldic coat of arms. Even when the paint is chipped, the spine is cracked, and some of the parts are missing, their blemishes smile in the stillness, as if they know something that we don’t. Time slows down around an old streetlamp. They are the last holdouts from a still recognizable but evaporating past.”

Mandelkern is addressing how it feels to inhabit place; there’s a reason she calls the book a social history. She’s particularly suited for such a venture: a native Angeleno, she has been a fellow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and now works at Los Angeles Metro, where she edits the blog the Source.

In Electric Moons, she frames the city’s development through the filter of lighting and vice versa; it’s a symbiotic relationship. “Lights on the street,” Mandelkern writes, “have always reflected life on the street. Well before electricity, they illuminated roads where people walked, children played, vendors worked, and neighbors gathered. Whenever public lighting markedly improved, the streets changed, too.… The electrical currents that powered L.A.’s first light masts powered the streetcars a few years later.… The brightest lamps clustered around traditional landmarks: the main street, the shopping district, the plaza, the town square.”

Electric Moons exists in conversation with a competition announced in November 2019 by the city’s then–chief design officer, Christopher Hawthorne, who contributes a foreword to the book. Encouraged by Norma Isahakian, former executive director of the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, his office issued a call for streetlight proposals, with the intention of rethinking, Mandelkern observes, “the architecture and design of the public realm, something for which Los Angeles had a less-than-lustrous record.… Most of the city’s best-known works of architecture were single-family homes.”

By way of inspiration, “entrants were required to come up with a plan for a shade structure, addressing another looming equity issue that climate change had made top of mind. (Shade is notoriously scarce in underserved neighborhoods.… Leafy tree-lined boulevards have become double powerful markers of privilege.)”

In addition, “a plan for pedestrian lighting should be built into the pole.”

Such requirements, of course, are fundamental to Southern California; streets and boulevards have long been canted away from pedestrians and toward the driver: widened to allow more lanes of traffic, lit from high above the sidewalk to illuminate the road. “Is your street lighting designed for ‘Model T’ traffic?” asks a print advertisement from the 1930s reproduced in Electric Moons. The text comes accompanied by a photo illustration that juxtaposes two streetlights: what appears to be a five-globe Llewellyn electrolier (a popular early model erected mostly in downtown Los Angeles) with a taller design featuring a teardrop luminaire towering overhead.

The metaphor is pointed: progress at the expense of polity.

Here, I want to return to the field guide because it suggests a set of access points. Not just to the lampposts, but also to the city’s future and its past. It’s no coincidence that the competition winner, “Superbloom,” was a bundled structure, designed by a team of local architects and artists and featuring pedestrian and automotive lighting, in which “every distinct piece—the roadway light, the sidewalk light, the security camera, the electric vehicle charging device—was a separate stem.”

The result is futuristic while also echoing, in the “drooping lollipop shapes” of its fixtures, “the multi-globed crowns of the early twentieth-century Beaux Arts posts.” It’s as if those Llewellyn and teardrop lampposts had alloyed into unlikely harmony.

The point, Mandelkern insists, is that streetlights are not merely streetlights any longer. In actuality, they have never been.

“Lamp posts,” she muses, “may first escape our notice, but as a visual language, they say quite a lot. Look up, and you’ll see how the poles play against the trees and buildings of the urban skyline. Look down, and you’ll see how the bases blend into the curbs and parkways of the sidewalk. Look around, and you’ll see how streetlights can link a skyscraper to a flagpole to a signpost to a person crossing the street. Streetlights structure the way people use public spaces, even if only to measure a distance, offer some shade, or prop up the guy who has had too much to drink.”•