This is partly true, but it’s also partly historical theatre. Beginning in the 1880s, Buffalo’s major streets were, even by modern standards, quite well-lit.

Streetlights (or street lamps as they are sometimes called) go back a long way—many centuries—though at first they were indeed rather feeble, powered by tallow, beeswax, or spermaceti candles, and later relying on whatever light wicks fed by whale oil, burning oil (turpentine mixed into alcohol) kerosene, or gasoline could provide. With that said, most lighthouses in the 19^th century employed the same primitive methods of lighting, but they also employed large and expensive Fresnel lenses to amplify and direct the resulting beam. While this saved countless lives from shipwreck, a Fresnel lens was far too expensive an optic to be affordably installed in low-cost street lighting.

Buffalo jumped on the new technology quickly, installing the city’s first electric streetlights in 1881 along Ganson Street. In fact, Buffalo was so early that you will find quite a few articles online that claim that Buffalo was the first U.S. city to have electrically lit streets. Not so: While Buffalo has had many firsts, the electric streetlight is not among them. The first American test of electric arc lighting for street lamps was made in 1879, in Cleveland. The first U.S. city to purchase and install electric street lamps was Wabash, Indiana, in 1880; and in that same year twenty-three arc lights were installed along Broadway, in New York City.

Depending on their applied voltage, arc lights can produce between two and four thousand candlepower, compared to the approximately 125 candlepower of a 100-watt incandescent bulb. So the typical Buffalo street-lamp using arc lighting would be about as bright as a cluster of between sixteen and thirty-two old-school 100W bulbs.

Today, the brightest lights that illuminate our highways in that odd amber glow run on 480 volts, tops. So a 3000-volt, buzzing arc lamp is bright—very bright. So bright that many residents who lived near one complained about their inability to sleep for the glare coming through their bedroom curtains, and claimed that their eyes hurt in the morning. As it turns out, arc light emits a very high proportion of ultraviolet light, which is very hard on the eyes. (There’s a reason welders wear black goggles—the modern arc welding machine operates on precisely the same principle.) Some cities received so many resident complaints that they jettisoned arc lights entirely and returned to the more soothing gaslight.

The whole thing reminds me of the ‘Seinfeld’ episode where Kramer’s ‘rods and cones’ were seared out by the nearby neon sign for the Kenny Rogers Roasters chicken outlet.

(By the way, did you know that the word ‘electrocute’ was developed to describe the first electrical execution—of Buffalonian Walter Kemmler in Auburn Prison’s electric chair, 1890?)

If I consult my 1889-90 ledger from East Buffalo’s Eighth Police Precinct (see my related post), in 1889 there were, inside the precinct boundaries:

·      19 arc lights along Clinton Street between Jefferson and Babcock Streets;

·      19 arc lights along William Street;

·      18 arc lights along Broadway;

·      12 arc lights along Sycamore; and

·      19 arc lights along Genesee.

If we dig into the first item in the list–Clinton Street–we find that the distance in question is about 1.4 miles, meaning that there was a streetlight about every three hundred feet.

Since East Buffalo was more sparely lighted than the downtown core, we can take this as an approximation of at least how well-lit main streets were then. Today’s streetlight spacing depends on the application, but varies anywhere between fifty feet apart (in urban pedestrian zones) to five hundred (along highways). Thus while the Eighth Precinct wasn’t exactly Times Square, at least on the main streets it wasn’t dark, either.

That is—when the moon wasn’t full or close to it. In the 1880s, the cost of maintaining arc lights was so high that Buffalo officials did not light the streetlights at all on moonlit nights. (This was not only a Buffalo ‘thing’—frugal cities across the country reasoned that moonlight is free and that a quarter of their total lighting budget could be eliminated if one could rely on the moon a week a month.) Yet in my informal survey of the old papers—and in my Eighth Precinct ledger—there is a noticeable increase in the number of reported crimes in the week of a full moon. Now, I’ve heard for eons that full moons do crazy things to people and inspire them to commit crimes, but I wonder whether the practice of dousing streetlights during the week of a full moon is another possible reason for the supposed effect of the full moon on the psyche. It may just have been cloudy and the streets dark enough to allow criminals to operate unseen. Anyway, it’s a hypothesis.

Incidentally, all this antique lighting stuff has become something of a hobby with me, and I’ve given many demonstrations of whale oil lamps, kerosene lamps, arc lights, lime lights, and Welsbach mantle gas lighting. If I’m in town and your group (Scout groups love this stuff!) wants to see Gilded Age lighting in action–and the fire marshal’s otherwise occupied–just let me know.

You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.