After Dark In 2020, more than 304 million streetlights lit the night sky. And more added daily.

Before 24-7 illumination, eating and sleeping patterns were dramatically different. Once the sun set, activity was restricted. In fact, it was common to sleep the night away in a pattern of two four-hour sleep periods with one or two hours of wakefulness in between. Those hours were spent reading, writing by candlelight or praying. Prayer manuals offered special prayers for the in between sleep period. Although sleeping eight hours is considered normal now, sleep experiments resulted in participates falling into the segmented system routine after being deprived of artificial light. This result suggests segmented sleep is the natural sleep pattern for humans.

Night Time Trolley
Budapest's trolley/tram system of lines is numbered from 1 to 69, with gaps in the numbering system due to the closing of lines over the years.
There are thirty lines carrying 370 thousand people per year on the main radial and riverside routes on both sides of the Danube and several of the bridges. Tram tickets are validated by using the punch machines on board the trolley. To exit at a stop, a button on the door must be pushed, or the door will not open.
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72nd Street Subway—Third Place
468 subway stations service 4.5 million riders on an average weekday, which means approximately 1.4 billion riders per year.Twenty-six routes carry riders over 660 miles of track each day.

How much electrical power is required? Enough to light the city of Buffalo, New York for an entire year.

Looking closely at the photograph, a vertical beam of blue light is in the background-”Tribute in Light” (Photograph taken September 11, 2004.)
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9th and 10th Avenue— First Place
In 1808, John Randall, Jr. laid out the plans for New York City's street system. He designed a gridiron system of north-south avenues crossed at right angles by east-west streets. His gridiron spanned the area of east Houston Street to 155th Street. This system is still in use today.
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Yellow Fog—Honorable Mention NY Center For Photographic Art
The sodium vapor street lights on the west side of Manhattan, which burn with a yellow light, create a ghostly, surreal cityscape.
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Always Remember--911 Memorial Lights
The Tribute in Light is an installation of lights placed at the site of the World Trade Center to create two vertical columns of blue light in remembrance of the terrorists attacks of September 11, 2001.

On each September 11 starting in 2003, the lights blaze into the night sky. On a clear night, the lights are seen from over 60 miles away, and clearly visible to all of New York City and most of northern New Jersey, Long Island, and as far south as Hamilton, New Jersey-near Trenton.
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The Child In Us
June 5, 2019, New York City police began Operation Meltdown. The city confiscated 46 ice cream trucks, which owed at least $10,000 in outstanding parking or traffic tickets. Between 2009 and 2017 some ice cream companies allegedly had 22,000 outstanding summons for traffic violations. A web of fraudulent transactions was discovered wherein ice cream trucks were re-registered under the names of shells companies without bank accounts in order to avoid paying traffic violations.
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Big Apple—New York City
John J. Fitzgerald, a reporter for the Morning Telegraph, used the term, Big Apple, during the 1920's in his newspaper column Around the Big Apple. The term apple was used by stable hands in New Orleans when referring to horse racing and racetracks. Fitzgerald may have picked up the term from jockeys and trainers in New Orleans who aspired to race on the Big Apple, meaning a New York City racetrack.

In 1997 the corner of 54th & Broadway, where Fitzgerald lived for 30 years, was renamed Big Apple Corner.
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Sunday Night In Times Square
Until 1904, when the New York Times moved to 43rd street just off Broadway, the area was known as Longacre Square.

Longacre Square in New York City and London was originally the carriage trade center where carriages were built and repaired.

The New Year’s Eve tradition of lowering a lighted ball in Times Square was started by the newspaper. The first ball descended from a flag pole in 1907. Made of iron and wood, with one hundred 25 watt light bulbs, it was dropped one second after midnight.
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Nighttime At Lincoln Center—Second Place
On May 14, 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ground for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts became a reality in September, 1962 when the first of its performing spaces, Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall), was inaugurated with a concert of music by Vaughan Williams and Mahler (among others) played by the New York Philharmonic conducted by its Music Director of the time, Leonard Bernstein.
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Times Square—Third Place
Broadway, which passes through Times Square, became known as the great white way when theaters began to use electrically lit signs to advertise what was playing.

The first electric billboard appeared in Times Square in 1917 when a mechanically animated sign advertised Wrigley's Spearmint gum using 17,500 electric bulbs. The sign was a gum pack, eight stories tall and two hundred feet long.

Today, zoning requires buildings in Times Square be covered with billboards, and each billboard be 11/2 times brighter than a typical lighted billboard.
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Columbus Circle From Inside
Shops at Columbus Circle, a four story mall in the Time Warner Center, features a 150 foot high glass wall, on which and through which, the hustle and bustle of Manhattan is seen.

The Time Warner Center includes a luxury hotel, 198 luxury condominiums, upscale shopping mall, expensive restaurants, a concert hall, CNN studios, and a large Whole Foods Market in the basement.

The entire structure, covering half of Columbus Circle, is designed to allow cell phones to work anywhere in the building—including elevators.
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Central Park Night
Even for longtime Manhattan residents, navigating one’s way in Central Park can be tricky. It is fairly easy to get turned around and in certain parts of the park landmark buildings can be obscured.

Some New Yorkers know the nineteenth-century cast-iron lampposts in Central Park are stamped with a with a four digit code to identify the location in the park. The first two digits on the lamppost are the nearest cross street. The last two digits indicate east and west. An even number means closer to Central Park West, an odd number closer to 5th Avenue.

The last two digits increase as one moves toward the center of the park. For example, 9703 indicates a location on the West side aligned with 97th Street while 9746 indicates the East side close to the middle of the park.

This numerical system was originally designed to help park employees locate lamps in need of servicing, but it is also a subtle method used by visitors to know where they are in the park—at least those who know the secret.
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Christopher Columbus At Night
Located at the intersection of Broadway, Central Park West, Central Park South (59th Street), and Eighth Avenue, Columbus Circle was completed in 1905. The designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, intended for this to the main entrance, and this would create a grand entryway for what was to be one of the largest city parks in the world.

The circle itself was designed by William Eno, who was known for devising ways to make travel safer, even in the days when cars were few in New York City.
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After Dark In 2020, more than 304 million streetlights lit the night sky. And more added daily.

All photos © 2004-2023 Gary Ricketts. All rights reserved.

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