Thinking about lights

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.”[1] 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. [2] 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.[3] 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.”[4]

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.[5]

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 15^th.[6]

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.[7] 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.[8] 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.[9] 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.[10]

A list of suggestions for new light placements in 1907 included everything from locations next to avenues to spots near sandbars, breakwaters and ponds.[11] 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!”[12] 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.”[13]

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.

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[1] Bryan Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgressions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 19.

[2] Dale Barbour, Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011).

[3] Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 114, 118.

[4] Schivelbusch, 134.

[5] Mary Louise Adams, “Almost Anything can Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in the Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers Canadians de sociologie, Vol. 19, No. 2, Special Issue on Moral Regulation (Spring, 1994), pp. 217-232, 228

[6] “Council sat nine hours and passed estimates,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, June 13, 1899, page 5.

[7] Report No. 1 of the Island Committee, Jan. 21, 1907, Toronto City Council Appendix A, 1907, Pages 126-127, Toronto City Archives.

[8] Report No. 10 of the Island Committee, June 20, 1906, Toronto City Council Appendix A, 1906, Page 848, Toronto City Archives.

[9] “Cheaper Light at Island Park,” Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, Jan. 22, 1907, Page 9.

[10] Report No. 5 of the Island Committee, March 18, 1907, Toronto City Council Appendix A, Pages 363-364, Toronto City Archives.

[11] Report No. 12 of the Island Committee, June 17, 1907, Toronto City Council Appendix A, 1907, Page 879, Toronto City Archives.

[12] Christopher St. George Clark, Of Toronto the good: a social study: the queen city of Canada as it is (Montreal: The Toronto Publishing Company, 1898), 106. Adams, 219.

[13] Report No. 1 of the Island Committee, Jan. 21, 1907, Toronto City Council Appendix A, 1907, Pages 126-127, Toronto City Archives.