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
Why couldn't they use 4500K LEDs instead of 6500K?
NYC's LED streetlight actually are 3000K, they're one of the few cities to get this right. But they look much whiter than sodium lights, which are closer to 2000K. Even 2700K incandescent bulbs look white by comparison.