Darkness and the night has always been a challenge for
society; or at least for those forces that want to regulate and control a
particular society. As Bryan Palmer has noted, “The night time has been the
right time, a fleeting but regular period of modest but cherished freedoms from
the constraints and cares of daily life.”
Disrupting the darkness with light, was a way for regulatory forces, be they
state or otherwise, to step in and attempt to control a situation. Pitched
battles for control over light and darkness could result. Or entertaining
battles; as my own research has found, the train journeys home from Manitoba’s
Winnipeg Beach in the first half of the twentieth century often featured young
men attempting to extinguish the lights on the train in an effort to create a
little darkness for youthful indiscretions.
These battles became part of the mythology of a late night trip home from
Winnipeg Beach.
In his book
Disenchanted
Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, Wolfgang
Schivelbusch tracks the transformation of light as a man-made product from the
campfire to the state-run distribution of gas and then electrical lights.
Distributed from a central production facility, gaslight was an industrial product,
but it didn’t transform the night; the gas lights cast flickering globes of
light along the streets, but couldn’t completely light them and people’s eyes
still registered the streetscape as being in semi-darkness. Electrical lighting
could turn the streetscape from night into day. It could saturate the night to
the point where people could see in colour.
With an eye towards Foucault’s notion of power, Schivelbusch describes light,
and the systems that distribute it as the hand of the state and regulatory
forces reaching out across the cityscape; “The 20
th century was to
experience this relentless light to the full. The glaring and shadowless light
that illuminates HG Wells negative utopias no longer guarantees the security of
the individual. It permits total surveillance by the state. The Utopian dream
of nights lit up as bright as day was transformed into the nightmare of a light
from which there was no escape.”
We needn’t be quite so grim about our lighted state, but
people in Toronto were aware of the power that the addition or subtraction of
lights could have.
Mary Louise Adams has pointed out the use of “Morality
Lights” in Toronto to control behaviour. In her article “Almost Anything can
Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in the Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto,”
she notes that spotlights were added to school properties in the 1940s to
prevent “school yards from becoming lovers’ lanes” after dark.
What was happening in the 1940s wasn’t new. An article from
the Toronto Daily Star in 1899 follows
the city council as it discusses installing morality lights, and yes, they’re
clear that the lights will serve a moral role, in High Park:
“Lights in Dark Places”
A motion to place four electric lights in High Park (three
of them near Mrs. Myers’ stand) was moved by Ald. Score.
The question is, are the lights needed?
Ald. Bowman said the lights were needed and there was not
time to refer the matter to the Fire and Light Committee
The lights were needed for the moral good of the city, Ald.
Frankland said.
“It is strange,” remarked his worship, “that if these lights
are so badly needed the Fire and Light Committee have not made a
recommendation.”
Ald. Score thought the matter could be handed more
expeditiously by the Council.
Ald. Hallam said the lights were needed “in the name of
order and decency and everything else.”
“Who’s going to vote against it?” inquired Ald. Denison.
The motion was carried and the lights will burn nightly
until October 15th.
And neither is this experience “old.” Today cities, school
divisions, and other groups in charge of controlling the intersection between
land and people routinely use light and sightlines to shape and control the
environment. Although, today we would more often speak of doing so in terms of
safety and security rather than moral imperatives. Though, the moral imperative
and concerns about moral threats remains with us.
In 1907, Toronto city council’s island committee looked at
expanding the number of lights on the island. The city already had an
electrical power plant on the island, but by switching from that plant to the
Toronto Electric Light Company, the city would be able to bump up the power of
its existing lights on the island by 25 per cent, increase the number of lights
from 38 to 50, and keep them lit all night long, as opposed to the former
practice of shutting them down at midnight.
Previously the lights had been turned out before midnight, but after facing
complaints in 1906 the city had agreed to keep them on until Midnight.
Now, if the city followed through, they would stay on all night. If lights are
an application of power, this was certainly a big step forward for the City of
Toronto. Although we don’t get a sense from the news coverage in the Toronto
Daily Star that this extension of city power had moral implications; rather the
story focused on the fact that shifting suppliers might save the city $211.
As an aside, when it was approached by the city about extending service on the
island the Toronto Electric Light Company pointed out to council that the
island was already included under its contract with the city so it was
obligated to supply the service; although it was grumpy about doing so because
given that the lights only shone for five months of the season, the company
considered lighting the island a money losing proposition. The island,
therefore, ate into profits that the company made elsewhere through supplying
lights to the city itself.
A list of suggestions for new light placements in 1907
included everything from locations next to avenues to spots near sandbars,
breakwaters and ponds.
It may be that there were moral tactical reasons for the placements, but it’s
hard to tell from the city council appendix. Certainly people like Christopher
St. George Clark, the Toronto journalist/muckraker who penned,
Of Toronto the good: a social study: the
queen city of Canada as it is in 1898 thought it was a concern. Clark wrote
that, “In the course of a ramble over the island on a Saturday night, I came
across several couples en flagrante delecto!”
More lights, on all the time, would have made it easier for people like Clark
to ferret out the goings on of men and women sharing space on the island.
(Clark doesn’t seem to have been overly concerned about how men spent their
time together.)
But what did more light on all the time (or at least five
months of the year) really matter? With an eye to Schivelbusch, it implies the
City of Toronto was increasing its control over the island in both a
metaphorical and practical way. But looking through the city council minutes it
can be hard to tell where the line between moral and practical concerns began
and ended. Were the lights intended to keep people from being naughty on the
island, or simply to keep people from bashing into things after it became dark?
If we take this concept of light as power seriously, it doesn’t matter what the
city’s intentions were; the light spread over saints and sinners alike. It
reshaped the behavior of people out for a stroll and young couples that might
have hoped to cavort in the woods, though the couples might have felt its
intensity more sharply. We could probably look at this in terms of
negative—I’ll tell you what not to do or try to prevent you from doing
something—and positive—I’ll tell you what you should do or support what you are
doing—applications of power. Historians are more interested in the harsher, or
negative, applications of power rather than the positive applications. It’s
sexier to see how a couple in the woods was ferreted out by light than it is to
consider how the people going for a walk were guided by that same light. But
both examples are part of the same process.
The same report that recommend switching light suppliers on
the island also discussed the possibility of switching the source of the
lights’ power from electricity to gas. On that matter, R.J. McGowan, Secretary
Fire Department, had this to say:
“To light the Island with gas would, in my opinion, not be
as satisfactory as with arc lights. There would be difficulty in keeping the
posts properly in position, the vibration of the posts would make the supply of
mantles costly, the lamps could be easily tampered with and extinguished if
desired, and to keep them clear from flies and other insects would be next to
impossible.”
“In the city we experience great difficulty from flies,
spiders, and other insects during the summer months, to such an extent that the
draft flows of the burners frequently become choked in one day, preventing
proper circulation and ensuring a poor light. This difficulty would be greatly
increased on the island and for this reason, more particularly than the others
mentioned, I think the arc lighting most suitable for lighting the island.”
The suggestion that gas lamps could more easily be
tampered with expresses a practical and, potentially, a moral concern. The
Canadian Pacific Railway trains that whisked campers home from Winnipeg Beach
had gas lamps in the cars and patrons could and sometimes did mange to
extinguish them. And let’s not be coy here, the long-remembered rationale was
that the men would put out the lights to have a little more privacy with the
women. That could have been McGowan’s concern as well, or perhaps he was simply
concerned about people bumping intro trees or falling into the lake if the
lights went out. Either way, the focus is upon the people on which the light
fell.
However, I find the statements about “flies, spiders and
other insects” clogging up the gaslights equally interesting. One of the themes
I’m interested in is how Toronto became a modern city during this period and
part of that process was an ongoing trend towards separating itself from
nature, becoming more inorganic or, to play off my title for this blog, getting
dressed. We can see how switching from gas to electric lights would have been
part of that process. The gaslights were far more beholden to the impact of
nature; be it from weather conditions or from fauna. A well-dressed city needed
electric lights to function properly in a mechanical sense and in its ability
to guide behavior, regardless of whether that guidance was positive or negative.
The island, even more remote from city and a little more undressed, would have
been even more of a threat to the gaslights. Gaslight couldn’t satisfactorily
control the island, because nature—flies, spiders, and other insects—would clog
up the flames. It required the discipline of electric lights.
But let’s turn the point above around; it’s also interesting
that the city contemplated putting gaslights back on the island, when it
already had an existing electrical power plant there. McGowan clearly
considered a point worth mentioning, or maybe he was just cautioning against
it. However, it’s worth looking into whether the island committee considered the
gas option because it felt that gaslights would be closer to nature; less
industrial than the electrical light and fitting for an island that was
considered an outlet from the urban environment. Maybe it didn’t want the
island so completely controlled? Or, it may simply have been that the island
committee wanted to know which was the cheapest option and didn’t care about
the tactile experience of gas versus electrical lights. Some times it really
does just come down to dollars and cents. Although in McGowan’s report to the
island committee he says nothing about the cost of gaslights versus electrical
lights; cutting directly instead to what he considered the flaws of gas.
