Where Edison Switched On the City

At 255 and 257 Pearl Street, just south of Fulton Street, Thomas Edison's company built its first commercial central power station. On September 4, 1882, the switch was closed, and coal-fired steam engines began turning dynamos that sent 110-volt direct current through wires laid under the streets. On the first day the station lit about 400 lamps for fewer than a hundred customers in the surrounding blocks, a district bounded roughly by Spruce Street, the East River, Wall Street and Nassau Street. Within a couple of years it was lighting more than 10,000 lamps for over 500 customers. A fire in January 1890 badly damaged the plant, but service was back within about eleven days. It ran until 1895, when larger and more efficient stations nearby took over. One surviving dynamo is now at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The block itself has long since been rebuilt.