New York City: Light it Right

"Sodium-vapor—or high-pressure sodium—lighting was Brandston’s bad guy, what he calls “the lamp of least choice.” He and the Municipal Art Society, under whose aegis he was conducting the tour, object to the color of the light—unlike whitish metal halide, high-pressure sodium burns yellow-orange. “There is this negative subliminal response,” Brandston said. “The connotation, mainly, is crime.” This month, the M.A.S. launched a campaign against the sodium lights. In a press release, Vanessa Gruen, from the M.A.S., asserted, “Yellow light muddies the colors of the surrounding neighborhoods and causes trees to look brown. It makes people feel less secure, because the colors around them are not true.” Asked for comment, Seth Solomonow, a Department of Transportation spokesman, said that high-pressure sodium lights are durable and cost-efficient, and have been the city’s default lights for thirty years.

In Brandston’s view, an overreliance on instruments, instead of instincts, mars contemporary urban lighting plans, which should be determined not by how technically bright an area is but by how well someone standing in it can actually see. “We have, over time, overlighted everything in America,” he told the tour group. Cities, he said, should be thought of as rooms without ceilings."