5/17/2023 0 Comments Moonlight towerWhile they were commonly referred to as “moonlight towers” by the 1930s, the towers’ lunar connection was referenced as early as 1894. The structure was disassembled for repairs last April and reinstalled after four months of work.Ħ carbon arc lamps were originally fitted to each tower, giving off a blue-white light that reached 3,000 feet in diameter. In 2014 the Austin City Council passed a resolution authorizing an ongoing $3.9 million project to repair, restore, and maintain the towers, which are managed by Austin Energy.ģ,159 colored lights adorn the city’s most iconic moonlight tower in Zilker Metropolitan Park each December, when it is converted into the Zilker Park Holiday Tree. Fifteen (shown in blue) are standing, and two are in storage. The trimmer would ascend all 31 original towers each day to maintain and replace the arc light lamps’ carbon rods.ġ7 moonlight towers still exist. $2.50 was the daily salary of the city’s first “tower trimmer” in the years after the structures were built. The towers originally used electricity from the city’s first power plant on the Colorado River. There are 17 'Moonlight Towers' remaining in Austin, each 150 feet tall, supposedly built to thwart a 19th century serial killer named The Servant Girl Annihilator, and made famous by their appearance in the film 'Dazed and Confused. ![]() Material: Rust-proof wrought iron from the Star Iron Tower Company A single tower casts light from six carbon arc lamps, illuminating a 1,500-foot-radius (460 m) circle brightly enough to read a watch. They are 165 feet (50 m) tall and have a 15-foot (4.6 m) foundation. "All of a sudden, you could do things after 7 o'clock in the evening." At a Glance The moonlight towers in Austin, Texas, are the only known surviving moonlight towers in the world. "For many people, it was the first time they experienced electric lighting," says Catherine Cordeiro Gabb, a 2016 alum of UT-Austin's historic preservation graduate program and the writer of a National Historic Landmark nomination for the moontowers. A 19th-century precursor to now-standard streetlights, the towers were once popular throughout the United States-but today, only Austin’s remain. Even before Matthew McConaughey’s character David Wooderson announced a party “out at the moontower” in the 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, the moonlight towers of Austin, Texas, symbolized the city.
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