Historian studies American cities at night
Photo: Melissa Arbo |
| Peter Baldwin, assistant professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, is conducting research on how night life evolved in U. S. cities. |
There is a fascination with the night and all it can represent—romance, adventure, mystery, fear. It provides plenty of fodder for writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists who use the night as inspiration for their creative works.
UConn history professor Peter Baldwin is also drawn to the night—for the interesting scholarship it can provide. The world is a different place at night than during the day, particularly in American cities as they developed in the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. Baldwin’s interest is in investigating why this is so and how it came to be this way.
Although scholars previously have examined how streets, parks and other parts of “public space” came to be used after dark, most center on the history of lighting or are about commercial entertainment. Baldwin is studying how and why new patterns of activity evolved at night—the new temporal order of the metropolis after the sun goes down. “My focus is on what groups use the night; how it is that the night somehow becomes legitimized for certain people but not for others,” says Baldwin, a former newspaper reporter who is writing a book on U.S. cities at night, which he worked on in part during a fellowship with the UConn Humanities Institute.
Baldwin says the time period that he is examining is when the greatest changes in American city nightlife occurred, transforming from a small number of workers who prowled the darkened streets often doing menial work to a brightly illuminated streetscape populated by a cross-section of classes. The historic period of the 19th and early 20th centuries is important because it was during that time period that artificial lighting—first gas lamps and then electricity—changed the behaviors of people being out at night. At the same time, the rise of labor laws and unions provided workers with more leisure time, even as advances in technology enabled factories to add overnight work in manufacturing industries in the United States, such as papermaking, glass making, oil refining and steel.
The historian’s previous book, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930, covered much of the same time period and won the Urban History Association’s prize for Best Book in North American Urban History.
“The difference between the first and second book is that the first one focused on creating a system to use space, and my research now is essentially about creating a schedule for urban activities at night,” Baldwin says.
In the early part of the 19th century, sanctioned night work fell to “night scavengers,” who emptied privies between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m., and night watchmen, who served as constables before the introduction of professional police forces. Both were official jobs listed in city directories of the day.
One of the key jobs of the night watchman was to be alert for fires that might have started in homes or barns because of neglected fireplaces or lamps. The night watchman would sound the alarm for the bucket brigade of the local fire company.
Nightlife in the cities began to evolve as a contrast of extremes, Baldwin says, with the very rich reveling in well-kept mansions and the very poor partying in saloons. Then, a woman out at night without an escort was most likely a prostitute, and men slinking through the dark alleys usually were up to no good.
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“In the 1820s, when gas lighting was installed in cities, you could see a lot better, and it became more appealing for people to be out on the streets,” Baldwin says, noting that the burgeoning labor movement provided increased income and decreased working hours to give the middle class more time to spend on entertainment after work. It was mostly a male-dominated scene in pool halls, concert saloons and brothels. As improved lighting was developed near the turn of the century, respectable working and middle class people—including women—began to attend vaudeville shows and dance halls, until the explosion of movie theaters in the early 20th century.
The issue of children working at night also played a role in attitudes and culture at night, particularly the large number of young boys, usually under 16 years old, who hawked newspapers in American cities. “Selling newspapers allowed boys to spend their evenings free of adult control,” Baldwin writes in a draft chapter on working children. There were growing concerns about the blurring of good and evil at night, and eventually U.S. labor laws cut down on children’s ability to work certain jobs.
Baldwin uses a variety of sources in his research, including diaries, newspaper and magazine accounts, labor documents and organizational records such as those from the Boy’s Clubs, as well as descriptions of city life found in period novels.
He says the evolution of American nightlife changed as the Roaring 20s began. “The complete illumination of the cities and the Depression upset the timeline,” Baldwin says, noting that World War II further changed the landscape of nightlife and that by the 1950s, television, amusement parks and professional sports were beginning to influence American night life.
— Kenneth Best