The Last Word On Nothing

Last night I took a crowded elevator to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Not rattled or shaken, we were propelled to the top in 52 seconds, like being beamed up.

Doors opened and we all poured into a high-windowed space looking onto the electric-white boroughs of New York City. A revolving door turned us onto an outdoor viewing platform where hundreds gushed and posed at angled glass barriers tipped away from the building where one can lean over the edge more than a thousand feet above the ground. The Empire State Building with its colored spindle was not diminutive, but it didn’t reach our height, emerging like the tip of an awl from a crystalline sea. You can see it in the picture above, the spire in red.

The last time I was this high up in a piece of architecture was the late 90s in a bar on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. I came with a friend on a winter night and I recall the elevator taking minutes, rocking as it went, opening partway where we had to get out and switch to another elevator to continue the ride. That was the technology of the time, the only way to be taken up this kind of swaying height. We handed coats to the woman at the coatroom and walked into the bar, which was aptly called Windows on the World.

The nocturnal city at the end of the 20th century raged around us, more light coming from outside than from the soft bar fixtures. We got our drinks and walked together out of the dark pit, climbing up a few short steps to the main floor and its museum of windows. You could tell tourists from the bar crawlers. Tourists, like us, bought drinks because we had to, and walked to the windows with glasses in hand, not taking a sip, staring 106 floors straight down. The view went down to the tips of our shoes, no visual buffer where windows met the tight-weave carpet, and it felt like you were stepping off the edge. This was a peculiar sensation considering what happened a few years later when Windows on the World, fully staffed, crashed to the ground and all were lost. Our mouths opened slightly as if not believing what we were seeing, as if the bar crawlers had gone blind talking and laughing as if they weren’t suspended in the sky. Their voices drained away as we looked down on this transparent glass fish of a city, every tiny bone wired and glowing. 

It was a different kind of light back then, softer, more oranges and yellows. I can’t remember the difference exactly, but last night I saw a much brighter city pegging the blue-white end of the spectrum. This comes from the recent and ongoing revolution of light emitting diodes, the rise of the LED. Now the city meets the eye like an infinity of needles. In 2001 LEDs worldwide constituted 1 percent of all lights being sold, rising to 47 percent in 2019, then 66 percent in 2020. They came on the market as an environmental savior, cheaper and more efficient than the old gas discharge variety, promoted as a thing we could do to save the planet. It’s hard to find bad press on them. But the expected drop in energy use didn’t pan out. Instead, it increased. The lights are so cheap to buy and operate we’ve employed them to the point of overflowing. Over twelve years between 1992 and 2013, Air Force satellites picked up a 40 percent increase in artificial light worldwide, and some regions spiked by 400 percent.

The night sky has paid a price. Sightings from 51,351 citizen scientists worldwide were gathered between 2011 and 2022 showing an alarming decrease in how much night sky is visible. Each participant in the study, mostly from industrialized regions, was given a set of star maps and asked which best matches the view at their location. On average, if 250 stars were visible at the start of the study in 2011, 100 could be seen by the end, 18 years later. Almost 10 percent of skies are vanishing from our collective view every year, with LEDs leading the way.

As recently as 2020, Washington DC had not gone fully LED, while neighboring Baltimore already made the switch. From space, the two cities side by side had the appearance of an off-eyed dog, DC a honey color, Baltimore a magnesium fire. Here’s the picture from four years ago, DC on the left, Baltimore on the right:

The slogan for DC’s campaign to switch over to LEDs is “Better Brighter,” and now the city has joined the blue-white parade. This makes a crisper, more defined and less diffuse light across the city. A friend who lives in a DC neighborhood told me that when streetlights around his house were upgraded to LEDs, he had to start closing curtains and blinds.

From the top of New York last night, I can’t say I was horrified by what I saw. It was more a sense of awe, my eyes lost in a fluorescing maze. I do remember the lights being softer decades ago, easier on the eye. Now, I felt even more that I was up on my toes, nerves brought to attention. Ignoring the macular degeneration that comes from LEDs and the crash of circadian rhythms in our bodies, I felt like a cheerleader for civilization, taking pictures and waving my pom-poms as high as I could get them.

Top photo: CC