Recent scholarship about Jerusalem in the nineteenth century contributed immensely to our understanding of the major transformations of the period and yet, these were mostly examined in broad daylight, leaving half of the city's history quite literally in the dark. This study seeks to illuminate different aspects of the nocturnal in Jerusalem from the return of the Ottoman authorities in the 1840s, until the British occupation of the city. Relying on a wide array of sources, from the registers of the local municipality, to newspapers, diaries and memoirs, the study shows that down to the end of the nineteenth century, nighttime in Jerusalem remained a "temporal frontier" that was only loosely regulated by the authorities, and strongly connected with fears of the criminal, the transgressional and the supernatural. As in other cities in the Ottoman Empire, street lighting was one of the measures employed to colonize the night and yet, from the very start, it was identified not only with the practical needs of the police, but with more general ideals of order, progress and civilization. From the early 1910s, street lighting contributed to the development of Jaffa street as the new heart of a self-consciously "modern" mode of public nightlife. Local journalists and politicians sought to develop night life in Jerusalem as part of their conscious effort to promote Jerusalem as a "tourist attraction," a thoroughly modern city in which the ancient and the disorderly is squeezed into historical sites and times (as in holidays). Intentions aside, the history of night in late Ottoman Jerusalem cannot be reduced to a "then there was light" story. Not only was the actual illumination of the city a piecemeal, incremental process; changes in social conventions associated with night time too were slow and gradual. In many areas of the city darkness persisted, hosting thieves, robbers and demons as it has for centuries. Even where street lanterns were installed, they did not simply "turn night into day." rather, they created a new temporal territory in which old and new, local and foreign and light and darkness interacted in complex ways, a territory for which new conceptual and moral maps were yet to be drawn.