Abby Hildebrand

AMST 180
November 29, 2009

How Lighting Changed the Face of the National Mall

In 1922, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Carl Sandburg published a new collection

of poetry. Of the more than thirty poems, one in particular is highlighted in an article, a

poem called “Washington Monument by Night.” Sandburg, inspired by the nighttime

view of one of the most famous landmarks in the nation, writes:

The stone goes straight.

A lean swimmer dives into night sky,
Into half-moon mist

Two trees are coal black.

This is a great white ghost between.
It is cool to look at.
Strong men, strong women, come here.1
The massive structure, standing at 555 feet high and 55 feet wide, jets out of the ground

straight into the sky, a “lean swimmer” against the “night sky.” Color contrast of the

brightly lit white stone against the dark expanse of sky, overwhelms visitors of the

Monument, a sentiment echoed in the use of “coal black” trees and “great white ghost.”

The “great white ghost” refers to the history behind the monument, to the man and legend

for which it is named. Sandburg successfully captures the experience of viewing the

Washington Monument on a clear night in this poem.

While sharing a visit to the monument is important, Sandburg’s decision to depict

a nighttime visit is telling. What was it about the nighttime images that inspired

Sandburg? And what is it that keeps people inspired by night skylines? There is

something indescribable or inexplicable that gives an after dark visit meaning. Perhaps

1
“Washington Monument by Night.” Carl Sandburg in Current Opinion, Oct. 1, 1922.
American Periodicals Series Online, 526, (accessed November 27, 2009).
there is more serenity and quiet, allowing for a better environment for introspection and

consideration of what’s being viewed. Perhaps the nighttime makes us feel smaller

somehow, or at least insignificant in comparison to the grand structures at which we gaze

in awe. There may be no way to articulate the feelings of people as they stand in front of

modern temples to fallen soldiers or great men, but there is one thing that makes it

possible to view such scenes: the electric light.

Electrification allowed for a complete transformation in American life at the turn

of the 20th century. As technology progressed, it gave way to incredible uses of light,

especially in urban areas. The emergence of the electric displays at large fairs in urban

America contributed to electricity’s use in the creation of spectacles. These spectacles of

large scale dazzling displays attracted sightseers with their bright lights seen from great

distances; in the same way lighted skyscrapers were able to enhance the nighttime city

skyline to draw tourists. Spectacles, as David Nye argues, were also so attractive because

they were able to transport Americans away from the harsh living conditions of cities at

the turn of the 20th century and allow them to imagine a bright future complete with

electric lights.

The Monuments on the National Mall, at first with the Washington Monument,

were turned into spectacles as well, illuminated by bright, harsh lights. With the

development of new technology though, the Washington Monument, Abraham Lincoln

Memorial, and Thomas Jefferson Memorial have been lighted with increasing attention to

detail, allowing for a more stylistic lighting schemes that have evolved along side

technology. As lighting became more commonplace, it also became taken for granted,

people no longer remembered a time when streets were dark. People do not view grand
displays of electricity as spectacular in the same sense that they did in the late 19th and

early 20th century but the aforementioned monuments fit as spectacles; however, instead

of using light to transport people into the future, the monuments use light to transport

visitors back into history.

We will revisit the monuments, but first we must look at a little history of

electricity in the United States as well as the emergence of spectacles.

The Edison light was first demonstrated in 1879 in Menlo Park by Edison

himself, and four months later, the little town of Wabash, Indiana lit up its streets. One

of the first spectacles was simple lighting of shop windows and streetlights. Wabash

welcomed trainloads of visitors who were “overwhelmed with awe, as if in the presence

of the supernatural” when the lights turned on.2 Residents of another small Indiana town,

Muncie, similarly felt this experience when one resident installed a coal-burning Edison

plant and lit several stores. To these residents, illumination in its most basic form “was

ideally suited to staging a spectacle.”3 The spectacle created by lighting only continued to

amaze people as electrification of cities progressed.

As David Nye contends, while lighting does have functional purposes, like safety

and visibility, lighting also performs “symbolic expression”—that is, that the use of

lighting went well beyond necessity and became spectacle. An early instance of such

grand displays was the first lighting of the Statue of Liberty in 1886, which placed at the

bottom of the statue incendiaries with the power of eight thousand candles.4 Also in New

2
Wabash Plain Dealer, Feb. 7, 14, 21, 28, 1880, quoted in David Nye, Electrifying
America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 2-3.
3
David Nye, Electrifying America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 4.
4
David Nye, Electrifying America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 32.
York City, the headquarters for the Edison Company celebrated the one hundredth

anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington in 1889 by covering the building

in fabric and placing several stars on the building as well, each made of a few light

bulbs5. This all occurred in a time when electric lights not only were scattered in New

York, but also throughout the rest of the country.

Once fairs became popular starting with the 1894 Chicago World’s Fair and

continuing until San Francisco in 1915, the spectacles became bigger and brighter.

“Electricity buildings” were among the main attractions that allowed those in attendance

to escape their daily trappings and imagine a totally industrialized and electrified future.

The dazzling lights lured many Americans; as Nye finds, about “one-third of the

population of the United States saw the electrical displays” at the Chicago, Buffalo and

St. Louis fairs between 1894 and 1904.6 These staggering numbers are a testament to the

draw electric spectacle’s possessed. It also supports one of Nye’s major points that

people needed an escape from the world around them. Before the turn of the century,

America was in a turbulent period, full of corrupt politicians, plagued by strikes and

unfair labor laws that allowed for rapid industrialization, as well as massively expanding

cities thanks to large amounts of Southern European immigrants.

The fair’s use of electric lighting leads to another important development:

specialists who could use their skills to plan how to light attractions with theatricality and

employ other special effects, like colored light. These specialists are the ancestors of

modern lighting designers and technicians. While technology limited the scope of their

expression, the lighting specialists of the early 20th century were able to create spectacles

5
David Nye, Electrifying America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 33.
6
David Nye, Electrifying America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 33-34.
at fairs that awed Americans. The types of lights, like arc lights, which lack the dimming

capabilities of their more modern counterparts, were not as easily controlled as later

models.

A question of when the Washington Monument was first lit exactly remains

unanswered. Sandburg’s poem clearly proves that the Washington Monument was lit in

1922. Lighting this early is supported several other pieces of information. In an article in

Congressional Digest giving interesting facts about the Monument, it mentions that its

“gleaming white beauty, obvious by day, is enhanced at nightfall, when a gentle play of

electric light, it appears, a slender silver shaft, ever pointing upward.” 7 In a collection of

historic photographs of Washington DC, four early postcards of the Washington

Monument are grouped together. The first three show the monument with the reflecting

pool in the foreground, and two of them date back to 1905 and the other to 1907. The

fourth depicts the scene at night with no reflecting pool in the foreground but is not given

a specific date by the editor of the book. The simple floodlighting depicted in the

sketched postcard, in addition to its grouping with postcards from early in the twentieth

century, support the notion that the lighting began around 1907. Additionally, the

knowledge that the Statue of Liberty was first lighted in 1889 means that lighting the

Washington Monument in a similar fashion was feasible.

The first mention of lighting and the Washington Monument mentioned by the

Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) is from 1955. There is some significance to this

information, since the Commission needs to approve any proposed changes to lighting, or

any aesthetic aspect, of buildings, streets, or parks in Washington DC. That means if

7
1931. "The Washington Monument." Congressional Digest 10, no. 5: 130-132.
Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed November 16, 2009).
there had been no mention of lighting from 1922 to 1955, there had been no attempts at

changing whatever previous lighting existed.

The Washington Monument, like other large-scale displays of bright light before

it, certainly created a spectacle. Although unlike previous displays of light, the

Washington Monument did not need darkness to appear spectacular; it could awe any

American during the day just as much as the night. However, as we see from Carl

Sandburg’s poem, the nighttime view of this monument evokes inspiration, and a return

to history. The second part of the poem delves into the history of the man who inspired

the monument.

The wind bit hard at Valley Forge one Christmas.

Soldiers tied rags on their feet.

Red footprints wrote on the snow…

…and stone shoots into stars here
…into half-moon mist to-night.

Tongues wrangled dark at a man.

He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone.
In a snow storm, red holly berries, thoughts,
he stood alone.8
The poet is transported back to one of Washington’s most challenging and famous

moments as general of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, the freezing

nights spent in Valley Forge over Christmas. The nighttime view of the Washington

Monument evoked thoughts of the nights Washington spent with his troops; Sandburg

connects the present to the past in the lines “red footprints wrote on the snow” and “stone

shoots into stars here.” He also ties this verse to the first one by repeating the phrase

“half-moon mist.” The imagery of the man standing alone also fits with the imagery of

the monument standing alone against the night sky. The lighting of the monument in
8
“Washington Monument by Night.” Carl Sandburg in Current Opinion, Oct. 1, 1922.
American Periodicals Series Online, 526, (accessed November 27, 2009).
1922 when the poem was written, although not modernized yet, leaves visitors inspired

and wrapped up in the history of George Washington, just as visitors to fairs viewed

elaborate electric light displays to imagine the industrialized future.

With the old style of lighting that Sandburg would have seen when composing his

poem, the lighting was “inadequate” and “spotty,” possibly not even fully light from top

to bottom.9 In 1955, the CFA proposed a new plan for the Monument that would

gradually increase the candlelight power to be four times the previous lights’ strength and

also suggested using hydraulic lamps that could be in the ground during the day and rose

at night. With this, we a prime example of how new technology impacted the lighting of

the monuments; early lighting could not have allowed for lights that retracted into the

ground, or the even lighting the Commission found desirable. The Monument’s original

lighting had inspired Carl Sandburg to recall Washington’s troubled nights at Valley

Forge but shifts in the lighting would inspire visitors to recall another part of history

associated with the Washington Monument.

More recently, lighting designers decided to take the connection of the

Washington Monument to the past further and create a more visible link between the

viewer and history. In 1986, the lighting of the monument was decided to be

“increasingly spotty” and “unsatisfactory in several other respects” by the CFA.10 The

fixtures that had been installed in 1957 were no longer functioning properly and the

Commission came up with a three light system so that light fixtures would block no view.

This new system also would include illumination on the east and west sides of the

9
Commission of Fine Arts meeting minutes, April 13, 1955, p. 13. Commission of Fine
Arts, Washington DC.
10
Commission of Fine Arts meeting minutes, January 15, 1986, p. 3. Commission of Fine
Arts, Washington DC.
monument as to increase the three-dimensional look of the obelisk.11 The new design

when installed in 1988 also coordinated the color and intensity of the lighting of the

Capitol Building, Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. Advances in

technology and style, like the development of smaller but stronger fixtures, as well as use

of lights to enhance the monument’s shape, helped to create a better lighting scheme for

the Washington Monument that would continue to inspire Americans.

The most recent of lighting renovations on the Washington Monument took place

in 2004. In a presentation to the CFA, landscape architect Laurie Olin told the

Commission he wanted to “make clear how the obelisk was built, its material, and the

phases of construction.”12 As opposed to the history of man behind the monument, Olin

wanted to highlight the history of the monument itself. It was built in two stages, first

between 1848 and 1856, interrupted by a lack of funds and the uncertainty of the nation’s

future, and then completed in 1884.13 During these two periods, different types of stone,

Maryland and Massachusetts white marble, were used and a visible line about one

hundred and fifty feet up the monument delineates the shift. Olin also wanted to use

uplighting on the monument to control the shadows to enhance “the details of the stone

construction.”14 These techniques that enhance the features of the monument bring an

additional history to light.

This use of light to promote the history of the monument brings into question the

11
Commission of Fine Arts meeting minutes, Exhibit B, January 15, 1986, p.3.
Commission of Fine Arts, Washington DC.
12
Commission of Fine Arts meeting minutes, November 18, 2004, Commission of Fine
Arts, Washington DC.
13
“Washington Monument.” National Parks Service.
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc72.htm (accessed November 22, 2009)
14
Commission of Fine Arts meeting minutes, November 18, 2004, Commission of Fine
Arts, Washington DC
motivations for this technique. Olin’s motivations may have simply been to show visitors

the disparity in the stone color so they may question it and learn about the history of the

monument. His technique certainly enriches the history behind the monument by adding

another layer of which many visitors are unaware. This technique becomes significant

when considering that people think of certain pasts when viewing the monument; for

Sandburg, it was Valley Forge. For another visitor it may be when Washington warned

against the two party system in his farewell address. Yet, when the lighting purposely

promotes the history of the monument instead of the man to whom it was made, the

visitor’s perception of the monument may change. We are naturally drawn to the

brightest part of our field of vision15, and in this case, the line where the color shifts

becomes central; Appreciating the architecture and structure becomes the central focus of

the viewer’s eyes, as opposed to the symbols the structure represents. Technology has

changed the way in which the monuments are perceived by allowing more attention to

fall on the details of the monument, thus, adding to and altering the history that people

connect with the Washington Monument.

Like the Washington Monument, nighttime views of the Lincoln Memorial also

inspired poetry. Completed in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was temporarily lit as a test

but architect Henry Bacon disapproved.16 In 1927, “quiet and subdued” illumination of

the Lincoln Memorial started, and remained unchanged until 1962. In 1955, poet

Langston Hughes was inspired by the nighttime view of this memorial in his poem

“Lincoln Monument: Washington,” released on recording in 1955.

15
Christopher Cuttle, Lighting By Design (New York: Architectural Press, 2008), 74.
16
Commission of Fine Arts meeting minutes, Sept. 22, 1921 & Nov. 11, 1922,
Commission of Fine Arts, Washington DC.
 Let’s go see Old Abe
Sitting in the marble and the moonlight,
Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight,
Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe.
Quiet for a million, million years.

Quiet—

And yet a voice forever

Against the
Timeless walls
Of time—
Old Abe.17

Since I didn’t have time to finish this part, here’s a brief outline of the rest of the paper:
A. I plan on finishing out this section by anaysing Hughes’s poem in a similar
fashion as Sandburg’s. I will also lay out the changes and new lighting designs
outlined in CFA minutes. Then I will discuss how the new lighting designs have
shaped perceptions of the monument and which histories are associated with the
memorial.
B. The Jefferson Memorial section will proceed a bit differently. There has been a
lot of change with this memorial and I will detail it from the CFA minutes as well
as several articles from architectural magazines. The designer’s intentions will be
analyzed as well as their impact on perceptions of the monument.
C. The final section of the paper will discuss how the Vietnam and Korean
memorials are the anti-spectacle. Both are low the ground, made of dark
materials, and lit dimly. They, like the other 3 memorials, do promote the history
of these events, and I will discuss how they do so using their lighting, with
information from the CFA minutes as well as several outside articles.

17
“Lincoln Monument: Washington by Langston Hughes” Old Poetry.
<<http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/38986-Langston-Hughes-Lincoln-Monument--
Washington>>>