Moonlight Towers

Austin has 17 surviving moonlight towers — 165-foot cast-iron towers topped with clusters of arc lights, installed in 1895 to light the city from above. They are now a National Historic Landmark, unique in the world: Austin is the only city that still uses its original Victorian-era lighting towers, which were repaired and converted to mercury vapour in the 1930s and restored again in the 1990s.

The best-known tower stands at the intersection of 9th Street and Guadalupe, in the West Campus neighbourhood. You can walk up to the base and look straight up the tower — the scale is genuinely impressive for what is essentially a 130-year-old streetlight. Other towers are scattered across the Hyde Park, North Loop, and Mueller neighbourhoods. A moonlight tower appears in Richard Linklater's 1993 film Dazed and Confused, shot entirely in Austin.

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Austin's moonlight towers were installed in 1895 to illuminate the entire city at once — the arc lights at the top of each 165-foot tower were bright enough to cast shadows from 1,500 feet away. The towers were intended partly as a response to a series of unsolved murders in 1884-85 (the "Servant Girl Annihilator" killings), on the theory that better city lighting would prevent crime. Austin is the last city in the world to still use its original moonlight towers.

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