October 10, 2008

Lit From Within; The Fire This Time; Meet Me in Astoria; Obscene!

By NINA C. AYOUB

From murky gas lamps to frenzied neon, from Luna Park to the "Great White Way," New York has long been a city adorned in light. In America, gaslights arrived first in Baltimore, notes William Chapman Sharpe, but Gotham soon followed. By the late 1800s, New York had a "nocturnal semiotic arsenal that no other city could match." No city anywhere "had ever been so radiantly and thoroughly lit," says the scholar, a professor of English at Barnard College and author of New York Nocturne: The City