New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xvii Introduction The Dream Site 1 Seeing in a New Light 10 Dark Arts and the Urban Sublime 14 Getting Acquainted with the Night 26 One Story of the Night 32 Chapter One: Gaslit Babylon 37 New York Lights Up 39 Walking the Night 42 Terror and Taming 46 Morality and Light 55 The Country and the City 60 Night People, Night Prowling 63 The Devil, the Moralist, and the Voyeur 66 Police Take Note: The Fl"neur Flummoxed 70 Gaslit Barbary 73 Lullaby for Babylon 76 Chapter Two: The Nocturne: Moonlight, Metamorphosis, and Modernism 80 Contemplating the Moon 82 The Softer Satellite in Eclipse 86 No More Than I Wish 91 As with a Veil 97 Fireworks in Court 100 Everywhere I Looked I Saw Whistlers 105 Unrecorded Miracles 112 The Photo-Nocturne 118 Chapter Three: Colonizing the Night 132 Conquering Some Realms for the Night 136 A Mighty Woman with a Torch 138 Armies of the Night 143 Lightning Powder 148 Living Like the Other Half 157 The Poor En Masse, the Rich One by One 161 Moonlight Reservation 165 Chapter Four: The Empire of Light 170 The Lesson of the Moth 171 Nightlife Goes Native 177 Beneath the Singer Tower 184 Electric Eden 189 Empire of Signs 194 Picturing the Imperial City 199 The Apotheosis of Electricity 208 Chapter Five: Skyscraper Fantasy 217 Lights, Height, Sex, Romance 222 Manhattan, the Night-Blooming Cereus I Am Seeing Great Things 230 The Body of a Skyscraper 240 Down-Gazing I Behold 243 I'll Make Them Big: O'Keeffe's Exhibitionist Androgyny 249 Nobody to Say: Pinholes 257 Lame with Lights 262 Chapter Six: Staging the Night: Theater, Voyeurism, Violence 266 Night Windows 272 The Feel of the Night 277 Nighthawks 285 Balcony Seats at a Murder 292 Darkness Invisible 304 Then See It! 313 Epilogue Night Now 319 Whose Night? 321 Fairyland Still? The Aerial View 330 The City of Dreadful Light 340 Notes 349 Index 393

William Chapman Sharpe is professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of "Unreal Cities" and the coeditor of "Visions of the Modern City".

"New York Nocturne is a tour de force of scholarship and an instant classic. I cannot think of another book that so convincingly shows the connections between technological innovation, spatial transformation, and cultural change."--Steven Hoelscher, University of Texas, Austin