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Paris on the Prairie

Chicago leads the pack of American cities that are rediscovering the power of urban lighting.

As you walk down the sidewalk of Chicago's State Street, even during the day, you can't help but notice the ornate light fixtures. Dozens of cast-iron lamp posts, fashioned after antique pieces from the 1920s, imbue the boulevard with an historic elegance.

But if you take an evening stroll along the thoroughfare, it isn't the 28-foot-tall poles or the yellow glow emanating from the acorn- shaped lanterns that grabs your attention. Rather, you will find yourself drawn to lines of small blue lights--mounted in pairs just overhead on each pole--that converge on the horizon and lead you down the street. Before you realize it, you've passed the landmark Marshall Field department store and the grand marquee of the Chicago Theater.

Although these blue lights contribute almost nothing in the way of meaningful illuminative power, they nevertheless serve a very potent purpose. When Chicago's top planners and architects designed a new look for State Street four years ago, they wanted to add visual energy to the pedestrian's street-level experience. Whimsical? Perhaps. Effective? Absolutely.

This same philosophy underlies the new street lighting that is going up all around downtown Chicago, in the area known as the "Loop." The city is tearing down hundreds of the old "cobra head" lights that have loomed over the streets for decades. In place of these icons of the automobile era, Chicago is installing vintage-style lights that most people find much more attractive. While those eye-catching blue bulbs are unique to State Street, the idea behind them infuses every aspect of Chicago's lighting effort: Pedestrians, once again, matter.

The evidence is all over downtown Chicago. Michigan Avenue is now lined with handsome "electroliers," cast from an original 1909 design with a halo of six round bulbs. The banking district along LaSalle Street is lighted with ornate lamps topped by double-acorn fixtures. Many side streets have been upgraded with historical lighting, as have the formerly dark and dangerous streets shadowed by the city's elevated train.

Chicago is finding that lighting the modern city is really about reaching back to the past. "Though it seems simple, lighting has so much to do with the personality of downtown," says Tom Cokins, executive director of the Chicago Central Area Committee, a local think tank. "Historical lighting brings us back to a true urban feeling and away from those space-age lights that fell out of H.G. Wells and onto our streets."

Yet historic lamp posts are only one part of Chicago's ambitious plan for lighting up downtown. The facades of public buildings, such as the city's beaux-arts Cultural Center, are newly lit, as well as a number of privately owned buildings in the Loop. The Chicago River now flickers at night with reflections from 11 bridges that cross it downtown, their girders and rivets accented by alternating shades of purple, red and blue. The goal is to restore economic vitality downtown by appealing directly to pedestrians' senses, causing visitors and Chicago residents alike to regard the Loop not merely as a place but as a literally electrifying experience. "People expect something different than the suburbs," says Mayor Richard M. Daley, who initiated the project. "The experience is what being in the city is all about."

All around the country, in fact, big cities and small towns alike are starting to view lighting as a way to juice up their downtowns, neighborhoods and historic districts. Not long ago, Cleveland lit the last of eight bridges over the Cuyahoga River, the colors helping to enliven the nightlife in an area known as the Flats. In Oklahoma City's historic Putnam Heights neighborhood, antique-style street lights were installed this year to help return the residential area to an early-20th-century look. And in San Francisco, historic lights with teardrop fixtures are part of ongoing reconstruction of the Embarcadero waterfront. Still, says Benjamin Prichard, market manager for a vendor whose antique light sales are growing rapidly, no place has been "as sophisticated about how they go about it as Chicago."

It is fitting that Chicago is leading the renaissance of urban lighting because in many ways the city pioneered its use in the first place. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago wowed the crowds with electric searchlights and illuminated palaces that appeared "etched in fire against the blackness of the night," according to an observer. In the 1910s, Chicago embarked on what was then the world's largest street lighting project, installing some 10,000 electric lamps throughout the city. And when President Coolidge threw the switch for new lights on State Street in 1926, it became the longest continuously lit stretch of road on the planet.

Until World War II, Chicago, like virtually all U.S. cities, lit the streets with ornamental lamps that aimed only to shed enough light for pedestrians to feel safe after dark. With the automobile's rise after the war, however, the art of street lighting became the domain of traffic engineers. They stripped ornament from the poles and redesigned lights to reach high over the street, in order to saturate the roadway with so much light that drivers could zip by safely. It was also assumed that brighter was always better, in terms of pedestrian safety. The design that evolved into what is now widely known as the cobra head performed that specific task exceptionally well, and these days, cobra-head fixtures dominate the streets of nearly every city in the country. "Unfortunately, the amount of light has been thought of as more important than how you deliver the light," says Christopher Hill, Chicago's planning commissioner.

In the past decade, as Hill and his colleagues looked for ways to revitalize downtown Chicago, they began to wonder whether cobra heads had swallowed the pedestrian experience whole. They wanted to strike a new balance between cars and people. And they got a shot at it in 1996, when the city set out to rebuild State Street, which at the time was dying from a failed experiment as a pedestrian mall.

They revived State Street's original 1926 double-acorn light design, modifying it to suit both foot and vehicular traffic. For cars, they used bright modern bulbs and designed the fixtures so that they direct light downward at the street. For people, they added little touches, like those small blue lights, and pedestrian-level globes that were intended to provide a "safe haven" on the sidewalk. The design not only proved more attractive than cobra-head lights, but sensually engaging. People once again came out to stroll on State Street, and retailers' receipts shot up. "State Street really opened a lot of eyes to the power of street lighting," says Alicia Mazur Berg, the city's point person on historic street lighting.

Around the same time as the State Street renovation, Mayor Daley went to France. Like many travelers, he came home smitten with Paris and was especially enamored with how the Parisians light up their monuments and finest buildings. Daley, who some describe as a closet urban planner, ordered his staff to write a plan to light up Chicago. In 1997, with the help of the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Chicago lighting designers Schuler & Shook, staffers delivered to him the Downtown Lighting Master Plan.

The 63-page master plan is an extraordinary document, and not just because it ties downtown's street lighting, building lighting and bridge lighting all together. In an era when the cobra head's utilitarianism still rules the day, the judicious selection of a "palette" of historic lighting styles appropriate for different street environments in Chicago is staggering. The master plan clearly reflects that balance of purpose--between cars and pedestrians--that had been discovered on State Street.

It also reflects a bureaucratic balance. Three different agencies in Chicago have a stake in street lighting, and each came to the table with a different agenda. The planning department was most interested in aesthetics--how the new lights would blend with the architecture and how they would feel to pedestrians. The transportation department was focused on traffic safety and wanted to make sure that lighting levels on the roadway weren't sacrificed for the sake of attractiveness. And the Bureau of Electricity, which does maintenance on street lights, wanted to limit the number of different pole and fixture types in order to hold down the cost of replacing parts.

As Chicago set out to implement the lighting master plan, this bureaucratic tug and pull required some compromises. The electrolier fixtures on Michigan Avenue, for example, are popular with pedestrians, but the bulbs are too low to light the street much. So towering "davit arm" fixtures, which are a sleeker version of the old cobra head, had to be installed sporadically to increase the light level for traffic safety. While the davit arms are painted black and are nearly invisible at night, they detract from the electroliers' charm during the day.

Of course, not everyone is fond of the Loop's new lighting scheme. Some people fault the project's multimillion-dollar price tag, arguing that the money could be better spent on something less "touchy-feely" than nicer looking lights. But the majority of complaints have come from architecture critics who argue that a dynamic city like Chicago, which defined the pace of change for much of the 20th century, should not be looking backward for inspiration in the 21st. Columbia University architecture historian Kenneth Frampton has derisively called Daley's beautification blitz--trees, flower pots, wrought-iron fencing and street lighting--the "Martha Stewartization" of Chicago. And Chicago Tribune critic Blair Kamin questioned in a review whether Mayor Daley is trying to transform the Loop into a 1920s stage set. "What's next," Kamin asked, "Model Ts?"

Kamin gives Daley higher marks for the second part of the master plan, which speaks more directly to the mayor's experience in Paris by plotting to light up Chicago's famous architecture at night. The master plan identified 107 buildings in the Loop, both public and private, whose architectural detail made them prime candidates. "How many other big cities in America are led by mayors who actually care about such arcane matters as nighttime building lighting?" he writes. "Surely you could count them on one hand."

While private building owners are left to light up on their own, the plan does lay out some dos and don'ts. For example, it calls for specific features such as arches and sculptures to be splashed with light at creative angles. And while the landmark Wrigley Building has long used full-frontal floodlighting well, owners are warned not to out-shine their neighbors or try to single-handedly dominate Chicago's skyline.

For the most part, however, the master plan hasn't sparked much interest among building owners. Almost every one of the 29 architectural gems along Michigan Avenue that it suggests lighting up remains dark, including the building that Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is in. Quite simply, the expense, which can run up to $300,000 for installation--plus electricity costs--is holding most owners back. As a prod, the master plan established a mechanism whereby building owners could write off lighting costs on their taxes, but only a handful of owners have taken the city up on it. Those who did light their buildings usually had other things in mind, such as raising property values. One manager who lit up a couple of buildings says that civic-mindedness played a part, but "it was good old corporate greed that drove us to do what we did."

Until recently, the 41-story LaSalle-Wacker Building was home mostly to law firms and financiers. When the owners renovated the building, however, they devised a colorful lighting scheme for the art deco skyscraper. A white shaft of light now shoots up the center of the building, with a blue crown at the top. Several white rings of light form the base of an antenna, which is outlined in purple neon and topped with a white flare. This nighttime image of the building as a monument to the communications age helped lure some 18 Internet start- up companies as tenants.

Meanwhile, city officials have lit up several public buildings downtown, including the Chicago Cultural Center and the Harold Washington Library. In the case of the Cultural Center's facade, light and shadows play to accentuate a row of ornamented arches, a row of ionic columns above and a decorative cornice at top. Now, the building is unquestionably more spectacular by night than by day. From now on, any structures built or renovated using city assistance or public financing are required to include exterior lighting. But city officials acknowledge that it will be a long-term process. "You can't redesign a city overnight," says Hill.

Chicago's next major step is to apply what has been learned about lighting in the Loop to the city's neighborhoods. Citizens like the streetlights they've seen downtown and are asking their aldermen to bring antique lighting to their residential areas and commercial districts. This, however, creates its own set of problems. Downtown, the master plan ensures a level of uniformity. But in the neighborhoods, lighting decisions are currently being made ad hoc. This not only makes it hard to avoid a slapdash look from one street to the next but it also raises maintenance costs because there are more styles of poles and fixtures to service.

To address this, a panel of planners, architects, traffic engineers and lighting consultants is now writing a new master plan for lighting outlying parts of the city. The group recently took a series of nighttime bus tours of Chicago neighborhoods to see how antique lighting is currently being used. There was universal agreement that Rush Street, a strip of hip restaurants and classy whiskey bars popular with Chicago's yuppies, ranks as the worst of the lighting projects they viewed. For one thing, the single-acorn lamp posts are short and fat. One panel member called the posts "proportionally challenged," but it was another nickname--"stumpy"--that stuck. And spaced only 25 feet apart, there are three light poles on Rush Street for every one that you might find elsewhere.

The aim of this critique process is to prevent another Rush Street from happening. Chicago is too big to dictate in one document the style of lamps that should go on every street, the way the original master plan did for downtown. But a set of general rules could help. So the panel is developing a matrix that would guide lighting decisions using objective criteria: How wide is the street? Are there any trees to diffuse the light or cast dark shadows? Is the street residential, commercial or industrial? Plug the answers to these and other questions into the matrix, and it will tell you which type of light to use. Although the light may not be perfect, it certainly won't look silly. "The whole purpose of the plan," says Alicia Mazur Berg, "is consistency over time."

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