The manifest importance of cities, and the advent of novel data about them are stimulating interest in both basic and applied “urban science”. A central task in this emerging field is to document and understand the “pulse of the city” in its diverse manifestations (e.g., in mobility, energy use, communications, economics) both to define the normal state against which anomalies can be judged and to understand how macroscopic city observables emerge from the aggregate behavior of many individuals. Here we quantify the dynamics of an urban lightscape through the novel modality of persistent synoptic observations from an urban vantage point