Basement Office

Muddled history

From the City of Wahpeton’s Facebook photo album is this gem of our recently reconstructed main street, Dakota Avenue:

There are so many things that I don’t like about the way this project was done, but I’d really like to focus on the street lights and point out the absurdity of the “Period lighting” caption that accompanies the picture. I’m pretty sure that when lampposts of said undefined “period” were used, they weren’t 20 feet tall (for scale, notice the woman crossing the street under the Jiffy Lube sign). And, Haussman aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find many old-timey streets that are 72 feet wide. This street is about as authentically “period” as a Phoenix strip mall. The light poles are an empty gesture — a halfhearted attempt to draw attention away from the banality of the rest of the street.

If we had an actual downtown residential population, one would hope that this decision to super-size the light poles would have been quashed by apartment-dwellers who don’t take kindly to the thought of conducting their evening activities by the greenish-orange glow of a sodium vapor light burning directly outside their living room window. However, the decision to erect these poles has all but ensured the lights will continue to illuminate unused space.

It’s not like examples of better lighting don’t exist around here. All one needs to do is look 23 miles east to Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

Bringing the lights down closer to the people who are walking underneath them makes a substantial difference, both in the utility of the lighting and the human scale of the space.