“A Place of Bright and Blaring Color”: New York City at Night

“In New York the first lights start to come on at night long before the last light has gone out of the sky.”

In August 1946, Life magazine featured a series of photographs taken by Andreas Feininger of New York City at night.

In New York the first lights start to come on at night long before the last light has gone out of the sky. The skyscraper workers, scurrying toward the end of day, turn the tall office buildings into bright honeycombs whose illuminated blobs seem to drop down to the darkening rivers around the island. Then the advertising signs taken over the streets of the city, competing so violently with each other that they throw on the sky a glare seen 60 miles at sea. Their clutter is thickest in the streets around Times Square where, in the world’s greatest neon gallery, the enormous acreage of blaring tubes and bulbs and the unashamed piling of color on garnish color make a confusion which is dizzying, outrageous and always wonderful.

Click here to read the original article, available on Google Books.

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