City: Austin, TX

Category: Tours & Attractions

Description: At this location, which features a historical marker, visitors will find just one of the 17 Moonlight Towers that remain in Austin from 1895, when the towers provided the city’s first public electric lights. Austin is the only city in the world to preserve its earliest electric street lamps. And they still work. At 165 feet, they’re the city’s tallest street lights and a truly unique attraction. The City of Austin contracted the Fort Wayne Electric Company to install 31 towers with carbon arc lamps, believing they would be easier to maintain than many small street lamps throughout the city. Some residents of Hyde Park, however, weren’t so sure. They feared that the lights, sometimes called Austin moonlight, would trick the vegetables in their gardens into growing day and night. The 17 towers that remain, now with mercury vapor lights, can be found around downtown, in Hyde Park, and in Clarksville. The Moonlight Tower in Zilker Park, moved to the park from Congress Avenue in the 1960s, is used every Christmas to support the 3,500 multicolored lights on the Zilker Park Christmas Tree.