Floodlighting was popular in American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, all the more so as electricity prices dropped by more than half. It made cities look like a "fairyland" or a "dream city"; and it edited out ugliness, such as the power station at Niagara FallsJakle, p. 184. or "poor or unsightly sections" which at night became "now unimportant blanks" in a "purified world of light".David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1990, , p. 60, quoted in Neumann, "'Architecture of the Night' in the U.S.A.," p. 62. In addition to the World's Fairs, light festivals were popular in Europe beginning in the second half of the 1920s, the most important being Berlin im Licht in October 1928.Neumann, "Lichtarchitektur and the Avant-Garde," pp. 40–42.Dietrich Neumann, "Leuchtende Bauten—Architekturen der Nacht" / "Luminous Buildings—Architectures of the Night," in Leuchtende Bauten: Architektur der Nacht / Luminous Buildings: Architecture of the Night, pp. 16–21, 24–29, pp. 17, 25.
