#moonlight tower

[holybagelsstuff]

the game is feelin' it today

also the grey man and opera singer (the textures were ruined)

[cloudselkie]

Moontowers sound like something out of Welcome to Night Vale, but they are real and they are in Austin.

A moonlight tower or moontower is a lighting structure designed to illuminate areas of a town or city at night.

The towers were popular in the late 19th century in cities across the United States and Europe; they were most common in the 1880s and 1890s. In some places they were used when standard street-lighting, using smaller, shorter, and more numerous lamps, was impractically expensive. In other places they were used in addition to gas street lighting. The towers were designed to illuminate areas often of several blocks at once, on the "high light" principle. Arc lamps, known for their exceptionally bright and harsh light, were the most common method of illumination. As incandescent electric street lighting became common, the prevalence of towers began to wane.

Moonlight towers in Austin, Texas, near TxDOT headquarters, served as inspiration for some of the first high-mast lighting towers in the US in the 1960s and 1970s.

- Wikipedia, "Moonlight Tower"

In 1894, the City of Austin purchased 31 used towers from Detroit. They were manufactured in Indiana by Fort Wayne Electric Company and assembled onsite. Some have claimed that Austin put up moonlight towers partially in response to the actions of the Servant Girl Annihilator, also known as the Midnight Assassin, but in fact the towers were not erected until 1894 and 1895, ten years after the murders took place.

When first erected, the towers were connected to electric generators at the Austin Dam, completed in 1893 on the site of present-day Tom Miller Dam. In the 1920s their original carbon-arc lamps, which were exceedingly bright but time-consuming to maintain, were replaced by incandescent lamps, which gave way in turn to mercury vapor lamps in the 1930s. The mercury vapor lamps were controlled by a switch at each tower's base. During World War II, a central switch was installed, allowing citywide blackouts in case of air raids.

- Wikipedia, "Moonlight Towers (Austin, TX)"

[inlunacythesavagedream]

moonlighttower1.jpg

[madcat-world]

Moonlight Tower - breath-art

[route22ny]

Remarkable circa 1910 bird’s eye view of Detroit at night, from a 4″ x 5″ glass negative taken by a family member of shorpy gallery contributor ‘mackinac’.  The bright light above almost everything, seen in the upper left of this image, is most likely one of the moonlight towers used in Detroit at this time.  Examples can be seen in earlier posts here and here.  I took the liberty of doing some digital editing to this photo to alleviate some exposure issues; the original is here.

[moonlighttower]

Zilker Park

1.29.2017

[route22ny]

Campus Martius Park, Detroit City Hall, and a Moonlight Tower

Photo taken circa 1905 by Lycurgus S. Glover via Library of Congress

[armandopares]

Austin TX Moonlight Towers