Moonlight Tower
Moonlight towers are lighting structures designed to illuminate areas of a city at night.
The structures were popular in the late 19th century in cities across the United States and Europe; they were most common in the 1880s-1890s. In some places they were used when standard street-lighting systems — using smaller, shorter, and more numerous lamps — were impractically expensive. Other times they were used in addition to existing gas street lighting. The towers were designed to illuminate areas often of several blocks at once. Arc lamps were the most common method of illumination, known for their exceptionally bright and harsh light.
As incandescent electric street lighting became common, the prevalence of moonlight tower systems began to wane.
Read more about Moonlight Tower: Moonlight Towers in Austin, Texas, Detroit, New Orleans, San Jose, California
Famous quotes containing the words moonlight and/or tower:
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away.”
—Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864)
“Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building—like Tower Bridge—or a classical front put on a steel frame—like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living—not something added, like sugar on a pill.”
—Eric Gill (1882–1940)