Darkness strips urban anonymity and makes strangers interact as people

Evidence

It seemed to me that the blackout quite literally transformed the people of New York. Ordinarily smug and comfortable in the high hives of the city where they live and work, they are largely strangers to one another when the lights are on. In the darkness they emerged not as shadows, but far warmer and more substantial than usual. Stripped of the anonymity that goes with full illumination, they became humans conscious of and concerned about the other humans around them. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 999

Categorization

• XREF: Directly illustrates the reader’s core question about anonymity and the observing self — Simmel’s blasé attitude dissolving when the visual/illumination cues that sustain civil inattention collapse. The 1965 blackout is a natural experiment in de-anonymizing public space.
• ADDENDUM: Pertinent to the trees-as-infrastructure piece’s theme of what makes urban lifeways legible vs. illegible — here light is the infrastructure that sustains anonymity, and its sudden absence is what exposes it.
• CANDY: The detail that the 1965 NYC blackout made strangers sing calypso and dance in subway cars is a vivid, tweetable anecdote.