These are the last ones anywhere. In the 1880s and 1890s a number of American cities tried lighting themselves from above, with arc lamps hung on towers tall enough to wash a whole neighbourhood at once, and every one of those cities pulled its towers down by about 1910 in favour of streetlights at street level. Austin kept going, and seventeen of its towers survive, fifteen of them standing. The city bought thirty one of them second hand from Detroit in 1894. They had been manufactured in Indiana by the Fort Wayne Electric Company, and they were shipped down and assembled on site through 1894 and 1895. Each one is a hundred and sixty five feet of guy wired steel truss on a foundation sunk fifteen feet into the ground, and each originally carried six carbon arc lamps that lit a circle fifteen hundred feet across brightly enough, by the usual claim of the period, to read a pocket watch under. Only six of them are still on the corners where they were first raised. The towers went on the National Register of Historic Places in July 1976, and Austin Energy still maintains them; a restoration programme approved by the city council in 2014 has worked through the whole system, finishing the conversion to LED lamps in January 2026. The one in Zilker Park gets strung with lights every December and becomes the Zilker Holiday Tree.
Getting there
30.2719, -97.7453
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
