But culture also plays a role in lighting appreciation. In China, dim incandescent lighting is still associated by older people with the poverty and hardships of the recent past. A bright home was a mark of wealth through much of Chinese history, while demons like the nian were believed to lurk in dark corners—to be flushed out with lanterns and fireworks at Lunar New Year. Illumination was thus both a prophylactic against evil and a status symbol, which explains why brilliantly lighted shops and restaurants—even upscale ones—are still common in China. Most Westerners (and younger Chinese, less beholden to tradition and with little memory of Mao-era privation) expect low dim light in a fashionable restaurant—light that evokes the ambience of a candle-lit dinner. It is no coincidence that Edison bulbs deliver a color temperature almost identical to the flattering light of a candle flame.
The Edison bulb revival began quietly in the 1980s, when entrepreneur Bob Rosenzweig began manufacturing reproductions for collectors. Sales were thin for years, until CFLs began replacing incandescent bulbs on store shelves. By the mid-aughts, Rosenzweig's products were all the rage with restaurant designers in New York. Then came the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which unintentionally kicked the Edison revival into overdrive. Its new standards for energy consumption effectively banned most “general service” incandescent light bulbs, which became illegal to manufacture or import after 2014. But there were exceptions—bug lights, black lights, three-way bulbs and “decoratives” such as Edison bulbs. [...]
Just how accurate a marker of affluence and gentrification are Edison light bulbs? Very, it would seem. I recently walked most of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue at twilight looking for the bulbs. The borough’s original Main Street, Flatbush makes a 10-mile plunge from downtown Brooklyn to Floyd Bennett Field—Gotham’s failed first municipal airport. Much of the route is an unspoken boundary of sorts between majority-black neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and East Flatbush to the east, and the mostly-white enclaves of Park Slope, Ditmas Park, Midwood, and Marine Park to the west. That line has blurred in recent decades, as creative-class elites moved east to reclaim white neighborhoods—Prospect Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Prospect Park South—that emptied after World War II.
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