Sometime last year, my block in Crown Heights started turning orange. When the sun set, our windows burned in the apricot tones of the old sodium-vapor lamps. The shift began with one window (rental building, paper lantern), but the spread was swift — up and down the block, across the stately Queen Anne townhomes, and along the busy corridor where, on my nightly commutes home, I watched for shades of marigold and poppy, Werther’s Butterscotch and Gatorade. From the West Village to Williamsburg, I photographed windows of safety-vest orange. In Bed-Stuy, a friend reported that her entire walk home from Pilates had turned cantaloupe. Her own windows had too, long ago. “I’ve really been an evangelist,” she says.
“I’ve been noticing the same thing,” says Paola Pietrantoni, a lighting consultant who lives in Bed-Stuy. She has picked bulbs for Madison Avenue jewelry stores and the TWA Hotel at JFK, and she calls me between fêtes at Milan Design Week to explain that home lighting has been trending warmer for years, but the move toward darker, deeper oranges is so recent and so local that she wonders aloud if it is due to our particularly “horrible winter” — snow
