Dark Streets on All Hallow's Eve

My friend lives about a mile from us, and I have walked these streets many times. They were almost unrecognizable last night.  (Toward the end, they literally WERE unrecognizable, and I had to ask my husband to shine his flashlight on the street signs to be sure we hadn't passed the correct turn-off.)  The entire walk was in darkness, with the few pedestrians mainly carrying flashlights--if they were not, they would loom suddenly at you out of the darkness like Halloween-appropriate ghosts. Crossing streets was slightly hazardous, since no traffic lights were in effect, but the cars were well-behaved and so were we.  Once or twice in the mile-long walk along Bleecker, we ran into a restaurant or a deli operating under candlelight and selling food for cash; otherwise, every storefront was darkened, and almost every apartment window was dark as well, though a few showed the faint yellow glow of candlelight within.  It was rather beautiful, actually, and strikingly quiet, and it made me imagine that this -- dark, curving streets, some paved with cobblestones; brick buildings of only a few stories lining each side; pedestrians few and far between, each carrying his or her own light -- must have been very much what the Village was like in the  early nineteenth century, before the advent of streetlighting. One resident getting out of his taxi with his groceries and hurrying to his front door remarked to us in passing, "I'm getting kind of used to the dark."  I could see what he meant.