Who built the moontowers?
Fort Wayne’s once-crumbling General Electric plant, which built hundreds of moonlight towers in the late 1800s, including Austin’s, is being saved from the rubble.
If you’ve lived in Austin for long, you’ve probably stood in awe of a moontower at least once.
These 165-foot-tall tower lights aren’t quite as iconic as the bats that live under the Congress Avenue bridge, but here’s the case for why they should be. More than a dozen of these still-standing moontowers, as we call them, date back to 1894, when the city wanted to find a way to bring light to the quickly growing capital.
Ten years earlier, the town that had been rattled by the so-called servant girl murders, and as it faced a new century, Austin was on the cusp of electrification from the construction of a dam on the Colorado River.
I love telling newcomers about the moontowers because nobody can believe they were installed nearly 130 years ago. Of the 31 original towners, between 13 and 17 are still standing today, with several under repair at any given time. Immortalized by the 1993 movie “Dazed and Confused,” where one of the scenes takes place at a “party at the moontower,” these towering lights are on the National Register of Historic Places and are the only working examples of this kind of street lighting anywhere in the world.
But this year, I learned something new about them: Austin’s moontowers were built at a massive electric works facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana that is in the midst of a once-a-century renovation that will keep nearly 20 historic brick buildings from crumbling into oblivion and preserve an important piece of American technological history.
Fort Wayne isn’t known for much outside Indiana, but it is working hard to change that. The second-largest city in the state has a population of about 300,000. Once known only for its industrial contributions to the country (thus, the moontowers), it is now a creative hub between Chicago and Detroit whose downtown has been undergoing a revitalization for the past decade to include an art museum, ballet company and dining district. The city is also home to Sweetwater, an internationally renowned online (and brick-and-mortar) music store and recording studio with more than 3,000 employees, half of whom are musicians. (Can you imagine if Austin had a single company that employed 1,500 musicians?)
For eighty years, the dominant employer in Fort Wayne was General Electric, whose 39-acre campus employed a third of the working population in Fort Wayne at one point.
But back in the 1880s, the electric company was much smaller, and it was operated by a man named James A. Jenney, who invented the arc light that was on top of those original moontowers. In June of 1883, Jenney installed a ring of those lights around a baseball field in Fort Wayne and advertised the country’s first night baseball game. Some 2,000 people attended the event, which is considered the first public display of the technology even though the lights all burned out before the end of the game. A year later, Jenney’s arc lights were used at the New Orleans World’s Fair and then, in 1885, they were the first to illuminate the Statue of Liberty. Detroit had more than 100 of these moonlight towers in the 1880s and 1890s, but Austin was the only city to preserve them.
In 1888, the Jenney Electric Company became the Fort Wayne Electric Light Co., which is the company that sold the towers to Austin in 1894. A few years later, that company would be acquired by Thomas Edison’s General Electric Co., and in the following decades, GE’s Fort Wayne campus became an epicenter of electrical engineering for electric motors, transformers, superchargers for military aircraft and the parts needed to make household appliances. (The first ice-making machine — a predecessor to the household refrigerator — and the garbage disposal were both invented there.)
At its peak in 1944, the city-within-a-city employed more than 20,000 people. It had its own bowling alley and gymnasium and even its own newspaper and basketball league, but by the 1970s, the once bustling campus was starting to slow down. GE didn’t officially close the site until 2015, but by then, many of the enormous (and now empty) industrial brick buildings had become an eyesore.
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