In 1879, the American inventor Charles Francis Brush installed a system of arc lights powered by his own dynamo design in Cleveland's Public Square, creating one of the first demonstrations of electric street lighting in the United States. The twelve brilliant arc lamps, each producing a light equivalent to thousands of candles, dramatically illuminated the center of Cleveland, Ohio, attracting thousands of spectators. Brush's Cleveland installation demonstrated that electric lighting could practically replace gas lighting for public spaces and helped establish his company as a major force in the early electrical industry.

Brush's arc lights in Cleveland represented the beginning of the electrically illuminated American city that would become the defining environment of American literary modernism. The transformation of a Midwestern public square by artificial electrical light prefigured the electrified urban landscapes of Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems and the neon-lit streetscapes of twentieth-century American poetry. Cleveland's place in American literary culture, as the home of poet Hart Crane and a setting in the works of Sherwood Anderson, connects directly to this moment when electrical light first reshaped the city's public spaces.