As New York City grows ever more vertical, sprouting fresh batches of breathtakingly high towers by the year, one of the casualties has been natural sunlight. Streets, stoops and parks are growing darker, and people’s apartments are too, which we explored in an article last month. We asked readers to submit their experiences of light and shadow in New York City, and discovered anew how deeply personal light, and its absence, is for people living in this space-deprived town.

One man (Jackson Taylor, Prospect Park South, Brooklyn) wrote about “a cherished beam” that fell midmorning across his living room. Another reader (Steve Gournay, Washington Heights) wrote about his determination to move into a bright apartment after leaving a sunless one – and a marriage. And another (Elizabeth Grainger, Upper West Side) told of her quiet joy in watching her rabbit, Rudi, eat his afternoon lettuce snack in a pool of sunlight, which he moved with as the light shifted through the year.

Several readers (Ed Grazda and Colin Welford among them) bitterly lamented the steady loss of light – along Elizabeth Street in SoHo, and in a West Village apartment adjoining the former St. Vincent Hospital site, which will house $3,500-per-square foot luxury condos. Others disclosed the healing, even transcendent power they drew from pockets of sunlight that spilled into their homes – making a cramped studio apartment seem bigger and less lonely (Danielle Levoit, Fort Greene, Brooklyn), or a nondescript building staircase spring to life (Victoria Bush, Park Slope, Brooklyn). “Shafts of light,” wrote one sun-deprived reader (Andrew Segreti, Brooklyn), who works nights, “are beams from the gods.”

More Readers’ Photos of Light in the City »