archive.today • Why Is Everything So Ugly? | Issue 44 | n+1 | The Editors
After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city's 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white. Again environmental concerns necessitate this scale of change, and again we wonder why, when it comes to its light bulbs, New York has chosen to back the blue.
Inertia, disinterest, thoughtlessness, yes, but also the promise of increased police vigilance. Still, what is most striking about New York's ominous glow-up is the sense that the city has been estranged from itself: the hyperprecise shadows of every leaf and every branch set against every brick wall deliver a Hollywood unreality. New York after hours now looks less like it did in Scorsese's After Hours and more like an excessive set-bound '60s production.
The new ugliness is defined in part by an abandonment of function and form: buildings afraid to look like buildings, cars that look like renderings, restaurants that look like the apps that control them. New York City is a city increasingly in quotation marks, a detailed facsimile of a place.
MTA to install bright, white lights in every NYC subway station - Gothamist
it should be illegal to blanket a place in all-night bright white LEDs. I've lived in two apartments where flood lights across from my apartment prevented me from keeping my shades open even a crack and waking up with the sun... And the first of them was actually low pressure sodium so while it was a good amount of light it was at least easy on the eyes
some of my friends live near car dealerships and depending on the weather they literally light up the sky so that it never fully gets dark, even at their house like half a mile away
I'm not even sure I love streetlights, though if you keep them dim and such it's less bad. But honestly they should just shut off at a certain time except where absolutely required
It’s because boomers use those nighttime satellite images as a litmus for how developed a country is. Can’t let the commies be brighter than us at night.