(MH) – Moonlight Towers Traditional Cache

Michigan History: From 1882 until about 1915, Detroit had an extensive system of Moonlight Towers. When finished, the city had 122 of these lighting towers that reached 165 feet into the sky. Each tower had six carbon arc lamps, and lighted an area of 1,500 foot radius. Detroit's system lit 21 square miles.

City Hall and Campus Martius Park

Moonlight towers are lighting structures designed to illuminate areas of a 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, were 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. 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.

Panoramic – tower in foreground

This is a fascinating piece of Detroit's history:

Washington Square

Eager to be deemed “best lighted in the world”, Detroit struck a deal with the Brush Company to (originally) install 70 light towers, each measuring 150 feet in high.  Brush, recognizing the publicity that could come with lighting the world's best-lighted city, offered to install the mini-moons at no cost to Detroit. Brush promised Detroit and its citizens not just the awe of cities that still toiled in the dark, but "a light equal to first-class moonlight."

Woodward in Winter

During the hot summer of 1882, the installation of the new moon towers became its own kind of brilliant spectacle. People gathered to witness the building of structures that represented Progress and Ingenuity and, in a very real sense, The Future. They also gathered to witness some drama. Since electrical engineers were just learning their trade -- that trade, in Detroit's case, being the erection of 150-foot-tall poles anchoring 500 pounds worth of lights -- accidents were, perhaps, inevitable. And falling towers -- thin metal, plus gravity -- had an uncanny way of slicing through roofs as they toppled toward the ground.

The lights also brought unanticipated complications along with their steady illumination. Animals, for one thing, were unaccustomed to the newly extended daytime. Chickens and geese, unable to sleep in this new state of omnipresent light, began to die of exhaustion.

The Majestic Building

In the end, the many costs of the artificial moonlight outweighed its beauty and poetry. Detroit's newspaper, the Free Press, finally declared the city's celestial lighting scheme "a flat failure." Echoing advice given to city leaders of San Jose, California -- which had attempted its own moonlight grid in hopes of becoming the West's "tower of light city" -- the journalists recommended the system we have today: low-slung lights distributed at regular intervals. The electric light the citizens believed in, the paper wrote, "is one that will light the streets, not a few spots here and there, a back yard or two, and the firmament above."

Woodward Avenue and Adams Street

So the moon towers were replaced, eventually, by a more modular solution. But Detroit's farewell to its moonlighting was a long one. Some of the towers were dismantled. Some were felled by high winds. Some were brought down by "a rash of runaway mules that, in their 'fury,' accidentally knocked down towers."

Down Woodward

Detroit's remaining towers, for their part, moved south: They relocated to Austin, Texas, where city leaders, having newly constructed a dam on the Colorado River, were eager to make use of their harnessed electricity -- both for convenience's sake and for the prevention of crime. In 1894, the City of Austin purchased 31 of Detroit's used lighting towers. Seventeen of those structures survive today. (You may remember the teenagers from Dazed and Confused assembling kegs for a "party at the moon tower.")

17 of Detroit’s original Moonlight Towers are still being used
in Austin and are over 130 years old!