CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Flap Over Street Lights’ Color Flares Up : San Diego merchants and homeowners say the yellow-orange lamps are dangerous. Astronomers claim that the switch to white lights could hurt their research into the cosmos.

In the beginning there was light and it was white light and people were happy.

But as the homes, shops and mini-malls multiplied, the white light spread heavenward and soon the learned astronomers from Caltech and San Diego State said they were being night-blinded by “sky glow.”

So the City Council, to protect the interests of science and maybe save some money, decreed a decade ago that San Diego street lights would use bulbs emitting a yellow-orange light.

The astronomers were happy because their giant telescopes can filter out the yellow-orange light far better than the white light. Homeowners and business people were not happy, and the political issue of science versus aesthetics, astronomy versus property values has refused to go away.

Other cities also changed their street lights to accommodate the needs of stargazers--among them Tucson, San Jose and suburban cities in San Diego, Riverside and Orange counties--but none changed as quickly or completely as San Diego. Possibly as a result, no place has endured as much controversy.

After considerable turnover among its roster, the City Council is poised to acquiesce to unhappy shopkeepers and homeowners, mostly from blue-collar and middle-income neighborhoods, who complain that the new lights give off a glow that is ugly, eerie, science-fictionlike and, here’s the clincher, dangerous.

Carl Sagan, astronomy’s best-known star, replies that any discomfiture is insignificant compared to the discoveries that have been made at world-renowned Palomar Observatory, run by Caltech 45 miles north of San Diego. Among those discoveries are the existence of quasars, gravitational lenses and numerous asteroids.

“OK, so complexions appear sallow (under the yellow-orange lights),” Sagan said. “But by looking sallow as you go from your car to your house at night in San Diego, you can contribute to human understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. It seems a small enough price to pay.”

That is not an argument that is making many converts.

“The astronomers have done a good job of making anyone who is against them on the light issue feel like a barbarian, anti-science, a flat-earther,” said Michael McDade, a San Diego lawyer and chief of staff to former Mayor Roger Hedgecock. “I’ve always hated those lights.”

Next week, the council will consider the unanimous recommendation of its Public Services and Safety Committee to return traditional street lighting to certain business districts and high-crime neighborhoods.

“The astronomers have had everything their way, but I’m convinced that crime would decrease if we had the white light back,” said Patrick McLoughlin, who owns a gift store north of downtown. “The yellow light is eerie and I think it’s conducive to people hanging out and causing trouble.”

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The light flap flared in 1984 when the City Council was persuaded to convert the city’s 27,500 street lights to the yellow-orange lights.

The goal was to protect Palomar’s 200-inch telescope and more modest telescopes at the Mt. Laguna Observatory, 45 miles east of downtown and operated jointly by San Diego State and the University of Illinois.

Astronomers hoped Palomar and Laguna could avoid the fate of Mt. Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena. Its value to science was severely undercut by light from the sprawling megalopolis below.

In fighting the light issue, the astronomers have had economics on their side. The yellow-orange lights--called low-pressure sodium lights--are cheaper to buy, install and service.

The problem is that the orange-yellow lights have a monochromatic glow that makes everything and everybody look gray. “Like they’ve just climbed from a crypt,” said a redevelopment agency official.

If the world is gray, identification of criminal suspects at night becomes dicey. Was that a white guy wearing a red shirt breaking into a house and driving off in a blue car? Or a brown guy with a blue shirt and a green car?

San Diego police say they have learned to compensate and that there is no provable link between the switch to new street lights and a rise in crime. Still, it remains an article of faith among the anti-light contingent that the lights make them more vulnerable.

“You can debate it on the basis of foot-candle power ad nauseum, but the fact is that perception is reality, and people think with the (low-pressure sodium) lights it’s dark and less safe,” said Wayne Raffesberger, chief of staff to Deputy Mayor Tom Behr.

Sagan said he wishes politics were more like science, with conclusions reached on the basis of facts not emotion.

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If the merchants and homeowners have populist passion on their side, the astronomers are not without political weapons.

From the beginning, they have enlisted the services of Paul Peterson, a well-connected lawyer-lobbyist whose firm is known for helping council members raise money for their election campaigns. “Paul has done a very good job for the astronomers,” said Raffesberger.

The astronomers and their lobbyist have played on San Diego’s self-image as not just a tourist and Navy town but also as a center of scientific exploration.

Sagan has sent letters and placed strategic phone calls. In 1984, just as the council vote drew near, Hedgecock received an urgent call from Sagan asking him to do the right thing for the observatories.

Astronomy purists warn that any backsliding will lead to public clamor to replace the yellow-orange lights in other San Diego neighborhoods, as well as possibly encourage anti-light activists in other cities.

“If San Diego decides that cosmetology is more important than cosmology, many other cities might decide the same thing,” Sagan said.

Still, some San Diego business leaders say the yellow-orange lights are hurting attempts to revitalize the downtown because they scare away crime-conscious suburbanites from venturing to shops and restaurants at night. In a sluggish economy, that has proven a powerful argument at City Hall.

“It’s an issue people really care about,” said Gail MacLeod, president of the Greater Golden Hill Development Assn. “We did a survey and got numerous responses from people that all said the same thing: ‘We don’t want those damned lights!’ ”