Landscape Lighting
Installation in
Morgantown, WV

Morgantown has more vertical range inside its limits than almost anywhere else in the region. The land runs from about 800 feet at the Monongahela River to 1,398 feet at Dorsey Knob, with the city's nominal elevation at 1,161 feet, all inside 10.19 square miles. Zackquill Morgan chartered the town in 1785, thirteen years after it was settled, and the street pattern has been arguing with that topography ever since. The city lies in Monongalia County close to the Pennsylvania line, served by Interstates 79 and 68 and US Route 19.

On a steep lot the lighting plan is mostly a plan for steps and walls. Riser lighting, where the source sits under or inside the tread and washes the step below it, is the technique that actually prevents falls, because it makes the edge of each tread visible rather than lighting the general area around the flight. A single bright fixture at the top does the opposite and puts every tread into the observer's own shadow.

Slope also means retaining walls, and a wall is one of the most useful surfaces on a hillside property. Light skimmed along its face from close range shows the coursing and the texture, and more usefully it tells anyone crossing the garden exactly where the level changes. Wall light also stays out of sightlines, which matters when the neighboring house is at eye level with your garden because it sits twenty feet further down the hill.

The Monongahela runs along the city, with Hazel Ruby McQuain Riverfront Park, the Caperton and Deckers Creek Rail-Trails and Dorsey Knob Park attached to it, and the Core Arboretum carries 3.5 miles of walking trails. Properties above the river get long views out, and long views reorder the priorities. Light placed between a seating area and the view will erase the view, because the eye adapts to the nearest bright object. Keeping the foreground dim is what preserves what people are actually looking at. The Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit system runs 8.65 miles across five stations, a piece of infrastructure that exists because moving around this terrain on the level is not an option.

The median age was 23.0 years at the 2020 census, held down by the roughly 30,000 students at West Virginia University in a city of 30,347 people. That means a great deal of rented housing and a great deal of turnover, so the settled owner-occupied streets are a distinct minority of the stock and they read differently from the blocks around them after dark. The Morgantown Marathon, first run in September 2015, covers 26.2 miles of the same ground.

The Old Stone House of 1795 and the Metropolitan Theatre, which opened in 1924, anchor the Downtown Morgantown Historic District. Older stone and masonry are the best surfaces there are for grazing light, because the light has something to catch. On a wall with real relief, the source belongs within a foot or so of the face. Move it out to three or four feet and the shadows that made the texture visible flatten away.