Conquering the Dark: Literature, Lighting, and Public Space in Rio de Janeiro in the Early 1900s

Abstract

In 1902, Francisco de Paula Rodrigues Alves took office as president of Brazil, and Francisco Pereira Passos began his term as mayor of the nation’s capital. A daunting task awaited them. The capital city, Rio de Janeiro, had earned a bad reputation. While the neighboring national capitals, such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo, already had been updated with major urban reforms, Rio de Janeiro remained a provincial port. City dwellers kept pigs, farmers led cows door-to-door selling milk, and the dark narrow streets were full of activities that would remind a passerby of Brazil’s strong rural and African traditions (Needell A Tropical 35). In short, it looked nothing like Paris. At a time when Paris was the epicenter of culture, this was a problem. Moreover, foreigners traveling to Brazil opted to enter the country via other ports to bypass Rio de Janeiro, due to the risk of catching yellow fever there. The capital’s streets aroused feelings associated with darkness: danger, deviance, crime, hardship, chaos, secrecy, and gloom. Public officials were eager to change this association. They wanted Rio de Janeiro’s public spaces to resemble the City of Light and thus be associated with the qualities that light conjures, such as safety, knowledge, goodness, cleanliness, freshness, modernity, beauty, functionality, and hope.