Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles by India Mandelkern

Hardcover6.75" x 9.5" | 236 pagesPhotography by Tom Wayne Bertolotti Los Angeles is known for many things: its traffic jams, its taco trucks, the palm trees, the sunshine. Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles explores one of its most overlooked design legacies––its streetlights.  Today, we may not give streetlights much thought; after all, they’re virtually everywhere. But Los Angeles was once known for its breadth of innovative designs: products of an active civic imagination and a well-timed real estate scramble. Much more than devices to illuminate the roads, streetlights helped instill senses of pride and place within a rapidly expanding metropolis, bringing the heavens to human scale. Timeless and modern, venerated and mundane, streetlights connected parochial interests to universal beliefs. They were public art before we had a name for it.  In Electric Moons, India Mandelkern examines the art and politics of street lighting in Los Angeles from the 1