Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles

EVENT DETAILS

Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles explores one of the city’s most overlooked design legacies—its streetlights.

Today, we may not give streetlights much thought; after all, they’re virtually everywhere. But Los Angeles was once known for its remarkable array of innovative designs: products of an active civic imagination and a well-timed real estate boom. Much more than devices that illuminated the roads, streetlights helped instill pride and a sense of place within a rapidly expanding metropolis, bringing the heavens to human scale. Timeless and modern, venerated and mundane, streetlights connected parochial interests to universal beliefs. They were public art before we had a name for it.

SPEAKER

India Mandelkern

Los Angeles native India Mandelkern is a writer and historian whose work explores the intersection of infrastructure, architecture, culture, and place. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Vice, Curbed, Roads & Kingdoms, Wine & Spirits, Eater, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Her interest in the built environment began during a fellowship with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she authored Chris Burden’s Urban Light: A Field Guide (2018), a reference book that quickly sold out. She later expanded that research into Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting (Hat & Beard Press, 2023), a history of how artificial light transformed cities and everyday life. In 2026, she published Wilshire Subway, a photographic essay documenting the construction of Los Angeles’s D Line Subway Extension, and organized an accompanying exhibition at the Miracle Mile gallery 1301PE.

PARKING

Street parking is available. Please be mindful of the signage. And please do not park in the lot of RLA Church or other local businesses.