She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America’s White Imaginary, and reported the following:
On page 99, there is a historical discussion of one electrographic sign: The “Leaders of the World” sign (aka “Roman Chariot Race” by Ellwood E. Rice; 1909, NYC). It describes how the sign took three months to complete and was so large, it needed to be shipped from Dayton to New York City in eight railroad cars, the leading chariot requiring a car of its own. Once installed, the infrastructure was so elaborate, its concealment behind a complex of steel bars formed the physical equivalent of a three-story house (remember, this was 1909). The front of the sign was positioned on the south-facing side of the Hotel Normandie’s roof on Broadway and 38th Street, doubling the hotel’s height.Learn more about Electrographic Architecture at the University of California Press website.
Page 99 is a good test. It offers a strong example of a New York City ("spectacular") which the book is concerned with analyzing––i.e. the historical development of large-scale electric signs in New York City in Las Vegas over the last century.
The book analyzes how, over the course of the last century, a white imaginary developed in America, fueled by entrepreneurial success, technological and scientific innovation, and an emergent polychromatic landscape of light and color previously unimaginable. Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America’s White Imaginary charts this history by focusing on the technical and aesthetic development of large-scale illuminated signage in New York City’s Times Square and Las Vegas’s Freemont Street, with special attention to the understudied role whiteness has played in these transformations.
While polychromatic, electrographic architecture may seem an unlikely candidate to allegorize America’s white imaginary, it is precisely for this reason—and for the claims to diverse and democratic color in places like Times Square (in the most ethnically diverse metropolis on the eastern seaboard)—that it is a prime candidate. Drawing on technological histories of illuminated light, architecture, and aesthetics, the book interrogates one of the most untapped questions of our times: How do the visual diversity, unpredictability, and heterogeneity of American urban centers like New York City also perpetuate historically entrenched legacies of Western chromophobia, running alongside the proliferation of urban capital?
--Marshal Zeringue
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