The Street

There is a current controversy in our nation’s capital.  No, not the election, or inflation, or even about the two elderly—and perhaps mentally challenged—men who want to run for president.  It is about the city council’s recent decision to decriminalize public urination and defecation.

While the measure was intended to help the homeless and the mentally ill, I suspect that since both groups were already ignoring the previous restrictions, the only outcome of this legislation is that political protests are about to become bizarrely more interesting.  Perhaps everyone should immediately go to the Russian Embassy and take a dump just outside their gates.  (Conveniently located at 2650 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington DC.  Tell them I said, “Howdy.”)

But, the discussion about the streets of Washington did make me start thinking of a topic that I don’t think anyone has seriously written about.  The history of city streets and sidewalks.  If I were a history student thinking about writing a new master’s thesis, this might be fun.

I suppose that such a thesis would have to start with the Romans, who designed city streets complete with drainage, standardized street widths, and even with stepping stones set in the street at set distances so that carts could pass between them.  There is even some evidence that the set wheelbase the Romans established influenced the width of modern railroad gauges.  

The Romans did not have a systematic way of lighting their streets, but the wealthier citizens did light the front of the their houses with vegetable oil lamps or candles to help reduce crime.  There was even a special class of slave, the lantern slave, who was responsible for cleaning the lamps and insuring there was sufficient oil for the lamps to burn all night.  

In Western Europe, the fall of the Roman Empire meant an end to the orderly urban street scene for quite a while, at least until the late medieval period.  With the rise of the absolute monarch, there was also a tendency for the monarch to want to impose as much stability and order in society as possible.  A better way of putting it might be that once a monarch began exercising absolute power, he tended to use that power to regulate as much of other people’s life as possible.  

Some of the first regulations on the urban street concerned making sure that the thoroughfares were accessible to commerce.  The old medieval signs that partially blocked the street were removed by order of the monarch, with the new signs only extending no more than two feet from the side of the building.

Since orderly streets first appeared where there were absolute monarchs, it is reasonable that Paris was the site of all the modernizations of the urban street.  Early in the seventeenth century, homes and businesses were required to light the front of their buildings with oil lamps visible from the street.  The lamps were required to burn during the winter months or on moonless nights.  By the end of the century, these lamps were hung from cables between the buildings and directly over the street and the installation and care of the lamps were contracted out by the police, with the money provided by special taxes to the buildings.  If you were wealthy and wished to cross town at night, you could hire a torch bearer to guide you through the dark streets.  It was an open secret that these torch bearers operated as spies for the police, as they went everywhere and saw everything.

In London, with a more restrained monarch, there was no real attempt by the monarch to control the appearance of the streets.  There were no mandates for lighting, and while there were torch bearers for hire, it was an open secret they were taking bribes from the footpads and petty thieves who preyed on the unwary rich.  There were no organized police at the time, just a collection of inefficient watchmen and the occasional guard.  London was without organized police until Robert Peele created the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard in 1829.  (Which is why the London cops are still informally referred to as Peelers or Bobbies.)

It was in Prussia that lamps were first hung from posts specifically erected to hold lamps for lighting the streets.  These would slowly change over time into modern streetlights.  Then, as now, there was a constant fight over how far apart these lamps should be located.  Those worried about crime wanted more lamps while those concerned with the taxes imposed for the lighting wanted fewer.  

By the start of the 17th century, the lamps were producing much more light than a single candle.  Almost all lights for the street were burning oil and increasingly utilized reflectors and glass lenses to focus the light where needed.  In 1763, the Paris Police sponsored a contest to develop the brightest lamp, ultimately producing a multi-wick lantern with thick lenses that focused the light up and down the street, with a mirror above the flames to reflect the light downward.  This lamp, the réverbère, was quickly adopted across Europe.

At the same time, the Paris Police began contracting out the job of producing uniform paving bricks, each to be exactly nine inches square.  While these streets were still not as efficient as the old Roman streets, with each passing decade Paris became brighter with the new lamps, as well as the older lamps, torch bearers and the occasional building light lighting up the city.  Fully 15% of the police budget was spent on lighting up the night.  While Paris is called the City of Light because it was the home of the Enlightenment, contemporary accounts frequently linked the new age of reason with the brightly lit streets.

Since the lamps obviously represented order in Paris, it was simply human nature that smashing the new lamps became a small but dangerous sign of rebellion.  There is something perverse in the spirit of mankind that forever has Man pulling at the threads of his parachute.  Gentlemen walking home smashed the lamps with their canes when they could reach them.  When they could not, they cut the ropes supporting them, letting the lamps smash to the ground.

These rebellions against the King’s imposed order were treated as serious crimes.  If caught, the offender was sentenced to the gallies.  By comparison, in London where there was no association between street lamps and the authority of the King, smashing a public lantern meant the payment of a fine of only twenty shillings. 

The strict punishment in Paris only made the smashing of the lanterns even more attractive, and when the French Revolution began, the smashing became almost compulsory.  Perhaps this is why the French verb, lanterner originally meant to do nothing or dally around, but after a few years of the French Revolution, the verb changed to mean to hang a man from a lantern.  Years before the guillotine became de rigueur, the first two public executions of the revolution were the hanging of two representatives of the king from a lantern on the front of the Hotel de Ville.

Oh, I am tempted to go on and talk about the introduction of gas lighting and the furious debates that caused in London…. But, the original point of this lengthy, wandering diatribe was to talk about how public policy shapes protests on the city streets and how I think that the latest bizarre ordinance from the Washington city council will backfire on it and quite literally turn to shit.  The council needs to be careful as to what it turns into a symbol of its authority.

Wouldn’t it have been far easier and so much more sanitary to just construct a few public toilets?