No, the weird shape that Concord saw in the sky over the weekend wasn’t an alien spaceship or a four-sided portal to another dimension, despite its appearance. It was just a projection from the new legislative parking garage.
The glowing rectangle seen by many and mentioned all over social media was caused by up-pointing exterior lights around the outside of the new building as they bounced off low-lying clouds. The interior lighting on the top floor of the garage faces down, which is why only the building’s perimeter was visible above.
The new parking garage between the State House and Concord City Hall opened three weeks ago, replacing the decrepit garage on Storrs Street. Last weekend was apparently the first time atmospheric conditions have drawn so much attention to its lighting.
“Honestly, it wasn’t anticipated,” said Terry Pfaff, chief operating officer for the General Court of New Hampshire. The exterior lighting, he said, “was designed that way by the lighting engineers to accentuate the structure, provide some ambient lighting for the streets.”
Pfaff said the General Court, which owns and operates the new garage, will take a look at the lights and discuss whether to change their operation as they learn how to control them better: “We’ll be looking at tapering the intensity down as the night goes forward.”
If you wonder why the design was allowed by Concord planners, who often spend hours at public meetings debating minor lighting details, the answer is that they weren’t consulted. While the Concord Planning Board has considerable say over the design of external lights on private buildings in the city, the garage is owned by the state government, which is immune from city oversight.
“We want lighting to accentuate parts of a building, the parapets or the window frames or whatever is being called out. We don’t particularly want it to go up into the sky and create what is being created there,” said Richard Woodfin, chairman of the city planning board, when asked about the new garage lights. “This is a little over the top: Everything is highlighted, as opposed to subtle lighting to highlight certain aspects.”
State law discourages what is known as up-lighting as part of its Dark Sky Policy. Title 1, Chapter 9-E, encourages but doesn’t require municipalities to pass ordinances and regulations “to conserve energy consumed by outdoor lighting; to minimize light pollution and glare; and to preserve dark skies as a feature of rural character wherever practicable.”
Downtown Concord, of course, isn’t very rural, so that may not apply.
One group that would undoubtedly frown on the new parking garage is Dark Sky International, a global organization that tries to stop light pollution leaking into the night sky to blot out stars and planets. It discourages the use of any up-facing outdoor lights at all.
