From March to mid-April of 2002, two squares of searchlights located at the Ground Zero site in Lower Manhattan were directed into the nighttime sky. Appearing at sunset and fading at dawn, they were two luminous ghosts standing in for the missing World Trade Center towers. Disagreements over memorialization of the site have been vociferous and nasty in recent years, yet The Tribute in Light was greeted with an outpouring of positive press and public reception. There was near unanimity about its fittingness. Perhaps because of the elemental associations of light and the sheer simplicity of the form, Tribute could be a point of identification regardless of political, religious, and aesthetic differences.

A history of representations of the Empire City at night, William Sharpe’s thoroughly researched book New York Nocturne provides a compelling historical justification for the sense that Tribute was uncannily apropos. Since the mid-nineteenth century, painters, illustrators, poets, novelists, and photographers have depicted New York at night, illuminated first by gas and later by electricity. As Sharpe demonstrates, the rich metaphoric possibilities offered by lightness and darkness as, among other things, signs of good and evil as well as enlightenment and ignorance, found their way into a broad range of urban representations. However, with the advent of artificial illumination and rapid urbanization in a previously agrarian nation, these seemingly timeless qualities came to have a set of newly contradictory associations: on the one hand, spiritual and romantic, and on the other, brashly mechanized and modern. For Sharpe it is the nocturne’s ability to rectify pictorially these tensions through darkness that makes it such a potent and resilient genre in art and literature about New York of the past two centuries. To picture New York at night has always been to conjure conflicting emotions and ambivalence.

In chapter 1, “Gaslit Babylon,” Sharpe uses George G. Foster’s sensational best-seller New York by Gas-Light (1850) as an entry point to examine gas lighting as a sign of New York’s technological savvy and sophisticated, if at points louche, nightlife. Gaslight became synonymous with the enticements and entanglements of the city: shop windows, the bustling thoroughfare of Broadway, and a seedy nightlife of dancing, gambling, and prostitution. Indeed, the light cast by a streetlight revealed, according to Foster, “many a man whose daily walk and conversation is held up to the admiration of the community as a ‘model’ of virtue and propriety” (58), but whose nocturnal activities are suspect. As such, gaslight comes to signify the latest advances in urban amenities, moral turpitude, and scandalous revelation.

Although James A. M. Whistler never painted New York, the nocturne, his invention, is central to Sharpe’s book. Whistler’s nocturnes partially counteracted what German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has dubbed “disenchanted night,” by which he means that night became another aspect of industrialized life during the nineteenth century as gas and electricity scrambled diurnal patterns (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995). In Whistler’s hands, night once again became mysterious and murky, requiring clarification. A painting like Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (ca. 1872–75) also re-enchanted by hiding Victorian London’s industry and squalor. Through Whistler’s exhibitions in New York and admirers, like the illustrator Joseph Pennell who moved to New York after time abroad, the nocturne quickly gained root and “gave New Yorkers the tools they needed to make graceful art out of an angular adolescent [city]” (113).

In literature and visual art, the nocturne could look forward, depicting the artificially illuminated night, and backwards, effacing the gritty realities of urban life by finding a formal harmony that existed only in the imagination. As Sharpe demonstrates, the nocturne was the form adopted by the most bracingly experimental artworks dealing with New York, starting with Childe Hassam’s Fifth Avenue Nocturne (ca. 1895), and continuing with photo-nocturnes, like Alfred Stieglitz’s An Icy Night, New York (1897) and William A. Fraser’s A Wet Night, Columbus Circle (ca. 1897–98). All three artists utilize streetlights’ glare off wet pavement or haze to turn sidewalk puddles into lakes of uncertain depth. Brick, steel, and glass dissolve into reflections and indeterminacies. However, as Sharpe shows, it was the curious relationship between form and content in the nocturne—its putative rejection of narrative and straightforward moral message as well as the tendency to deemphasize but not eliminate subject matter—that makes this chapter essential for understanding why it became a privileged means for picturing New York. Entranced by the lights, dramatic architecture, and supernatural shadows, but avoidant of the filth, physical and social, of New York City, the nocturne became, as Sharpe shows, a genre that both embraced and eschewed urban subject matter.

The nocturne dulls the city’s assault on the sensorium, but, as the remaining chapters bear out, the operation is only partially successful. The fantastic set-piece of the skyline that has been nearly scrubbed of any socio-political content nonetheless contains links to a real and knowable city. Sharpe argues for nighttime visions of New York as harboring anxieties about racial purity and depersonalizing anonymity rather than as simplistic celebrations of New York’s ascendancy in the first half of the twentieth century.

In chapter 3, Sharpe pairs the photographs in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) with Frederic Remington’s night paintings of the American West from the decade before his death in 1909. The former photographed the slums of immigrant New York, and the latter painted the night of the disappearing West and the Native American. Although the analysis opens with a story of the electrification of Manhattan, which was the first metropolitan area with extensive electrical distribution and street lighting, Sharpe is concerned with light as a metaphor for colonization. The exploratory penetration of cramped domestic-cum-workhouse spaces by Riis via the camera’s flash is contrasted with the “primal darkness” (167) of Remington’s ghoulish nighttime landscapes. Both the photographs and the paintings rely on lightness as sign of civilization and progress, and darkness as sign of atavism and decrepitude. In yoking together Remington and Riis, Sharpe sketches out the broad contours of progress on two frontiers—one, Western and distant; another, urban and local.

In chapter 4, “The Empire of Light,” Sharpe looks to the Great White Way and New York’s reputation as a place for revelry and nightlife, but he also considers the converse—the dangers and threatening power of crowds in a city and the dilution of a fictional racial purity by the mixing of classes and ethnicities. Opening with a brief analysis of the development of New York nightlife, generally, and Harlem as a focal point, specifically, in which whites, as they danced and drank, could identify with supposedly “savage” African Americans, Sharpe moves on to examine a Willa Cather short story, “Behind the Singer Tower” (1912). In the story, the Singer Tower, a skyscraper designed by Ernest Flagg (completed 1908; demolished 1967), is described by a character as a “Jewy-looking thing . . . when it’s lit up” (187). Briefly the tallest building in the world and a corporate symbol with a polychromed façade of red, white, and green, the building is something alien, racially tinged, and already outmoded. As another comment from the story suggests: the tower is “exactly like a Jewish high priest in the old Bible dictionaries” (187). Though supposedly an icon of the future, it is a fragment of the past. Sharpe’s chapter closes with an extended analysis of Joseph Stella’s The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted (1920–22). Sharpe recasts this polyptych as a “double vision of universal communion and individual torment” (206), rather than a rapturous vision of New York by a wide-eyed Sicilian immigrant. In this rereading, which utilizes the despondency expressed in some of Stella’s written descriptions of New York, The Bridge—one of the panels in The Voice of the City—transforms into a sign of loneliness. In the painting, the bridge spans an inhuman void, an image, for Stella, of a mechanized oblivion in which the person is insignificant.

Drawing upon materials from the teens through the thirties, the following chapter, “Skyscraper Fantasy,” examines gendered images of skyscrapers and the urban night. In this reading, the city is a “siren” who beckons artists, but offers up no assurances of purity or of reciprocation. Indeed, through an analysis of works by Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, and Georgia O’Keeffe, Sharpe argues that the recourse to gender is really a move by these artists to stabilize what they perceive. As he puts it, “the dazzled mind has no choice but to regard the city’s nocturnal body through seductive metaphors of its own making” (265). These projective fantasies exclude a great deal. As Carol Willis’s Form Follows Finance (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) has shown, for all of their sublimity skyscrapers were and are factories for squeezing out rent from a small plot of expensive real estate. What might it mean to tie a rhetoric of longing and lust, as Sharpe shows, to what was an architectural connivance for turning a tidy profit?

The last chapter shifts to questions of staging and voyeurism and is grounded by extended readings of etchings, paintings, and photographs by John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Weegee as well as Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. Sharpe’s most evocative points appear in the section on Weegee, whose photographs of onlookers in a “rubbernecking crowd” (302) give full force to the indifference and brutality with which urban spectacle was absorbed. Weegee’s photographs of draped corpses mark the distance between the living and the dead, a distance measured by the fact of witnessing. To see is to be alive, says Sharpe; and the crowds gathered around these bodies affirm their own lives with their impertinent gawking. Rather than positioning the viewer as a peeping tom in a Sloan rooftop scene or an intrusive interloper staring in on an ambiguous unfolding drama between a man and a woman in a Hopper interior, Weegee tugs at a viewer’s macabre fascination with death and sense of mortality.

Throughout, Sharpe’s book stays focused on the ambivalence of these representations. By the early twentieth century, New York was the modern city, its towers, bridges, subways, ports, and railroads the embodiment of U.S. industrial prowess, but artists and writers discussed by Sharpe were not mesmerized into an uncritical rendering of a technological sublime. In the pictures and texts considered in his book, there is a sense of the recrudescence of the past and of a future that brought with it the inevitability of decay and decline. In the case of Sharpe’s reading of Weegee, for example, death remains as a point against which life is measured. At its acme, Sharpe shows, the dimming of New York was already on the horizon of artists’ imaginations. To return to the opening of this review, Tribute in Light’s reverse silhouette of the missing Twin Towers was triumphant and hopeful even if it was, first and foremost, a sign of grief and mourning. Like the Tribute, imagery of New York’s night must be understood, Sharpe says, in similarly incommensurate and melancholic terms—an admixture that was made possible by the semantic flexibility and ambiguity of the nocturne.