The Edison bulb revival began quietly in the 1980s, when entrepreneur Bob Rosenzweig began manufacturing reproductions for collectors. Sales were thin for years, until CFLs began replacing incandescent bulbs on store shelves. By the mid-aughts, Rosenzweig’s products were all the rage with restaurant designers in New York. Then came the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which unintentionally kicked the Edison revival into overdrive. Its new standards for energy consumption effectively banned most “general service” incandescent light bulbs, which became illegal to manufacture or import after 2014. But there were exceptions—bug lights, black lights, three-way bulbs and “decoratives” such as Edison bulbs.
Like many people, I paid little mind to the aesthetics of light until incandescent bulbs began vanishing. This was driven home to me on a late-night walk in Rome several years ago. Halfway up the Janiculum Hill, I peered into the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio—home to Bramante’s Tempietto, a masterpiece of the High Renaissance said to mark Saint Peter’s martyrdom. What should have been a profoundly moving moment was spoiled by the bluish CFLs illuminating the courtyard. The buttery complexion of Bramante’s travertine, the tawny cloister walls—all lost in a flood of convenience-store glare.That glare is spreading; recently, many American cities have begun replacing familiar high-pressure sodium-vapor streetlights with efficient LED units. As of last fall, some six million LED street luminaires had been installed across the nation—most of the super-efficient blue-white type. These have saved millions in energy costs. But people actually liked the “jack-o’-lantern glow” of the old sodium-vapor lamps, and find the new LED light—in the 4000 to 6500K range—to be annoying. Science is on their side, as the new streetlights may contribute to sleep problems, like using a smartphone before bed. As the American Medical Association recently explained, “blue-rich LED streetlights operate at a wavelength that most adversely suppresses melatonin during night,” causing five times greater impact on circadian sleep rhythms than ordinary street lamps.
With our streets so amped up with light, it’s hardly surprising that we expect our bars and cafés to provide respite from the lumen storm outside. Edison light bulbs are today as much a part of the upmarket consumerscape as cruelty-free cosmetics or cage-free eggs. They are markers that signal the presence of creative-class tribal space. Their soft glow appears to be crafted by artisans from a more earnest age, one caressed by the dim light of steampunk suns.
This is, of course, more than a little ironic. “You can’t…brag how green you are by serving organic beer and locally grown produce while you are lighting your business with the least efficient light bulbs available in the world,” scientist Noah Horowitz told the New York Times several years ago. Delightfully complicating this is the recent arrival of solid-state Edison bulbs, which use a thin array of light-emitting diodes instead of a tungsten filament. Indistinguishable from more than a few feet away, they epitomize our tangled obsessions with both technology and an imagined urban past.Just how accurate a marker of affluence and gentrification are Edison light bulbs? Very, it would seem. I recently walked most of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue at twilight looking for the bulbs. The borough’s original Main Street, Flatbush makes a 10-mile plunge from downtown Brooklyn to Floyd Bennett Field—Gotham’s failed first municipal airport. Much of the route is an unspoken boundary of sorts between majority-black neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and East Flatbush to the east, and the mostly-white enclaves of Park Slope, Ditmas Park, Midwood, and Marine Park to the west. That line has blurred in recent decades, as creative-class elites moved east to reclaim white neighborhoods—Prospect Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Prospect Park South—that emptied after World War II.
