Wild nights

Public lighting of a sort dates back to the ancient city of Antioch, but it was really King Louis XIV—the Sun King—who put street lighting on the map and turned Paris into the celebrated City of Light.

With electricity came a blaze of glowing advertisements that at the turn of the 20th century earned Broadway the title of the Great White Way.

“Mildly insane by day, the square goes divinely mad by night,” beamed journalist Will Irwin in 1927. “For then on every wall, above every cornice, in every nook and cranny, blossom and dance the electric advertising signs.”

But all this light has come at a cost.

Eighty percent of Americans cannot see the Milky Way at night for the glow of artificial light. Bad sleep is a result of locales that never really get dark. The natural patterns of wildlife are threatened by the perpetual glow. Perhaps most notably, stargazers say, there is a universal connection and an artistic aesthetic that’s missing from lives when we can’t see the stars.

In contrast to much of the United States east of