In September 1882, Thomas Edison opened the Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan, New York City, the first central electrical power plant in the world. The station, powered by steam-driven dynamos, initially served 85 customers with 400 electric lamps in a one-square-mile area of lower Manhattan. Pearl Street demonstrated the commercial viability of centralized electrical generation and distribution, establishing the template for the electrical utility industry that would transform cities worldwide.

The illumination of lower Manhattan by Pearl Street Station marked the beginning of the electrically lit metropolis that would become the defining environment of modernist literature. The transformed cityscape of New York, now a place of artificial light that erased the natural rhythms of day and night, directly influenced the poetry and prose of the American modernists. Hart Crane's "The Bridge" (1930), with its visionary evocation of the electrically illuminated Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline, is the supreme literary monument to the world that Pearl Street Station created.