Austin's Moonlight Towers Are the Last in the World — Here's Where to Find All 17 Tonight

Quick answer: Austin has 17 surviving "moonlight towers" — 165-foot cast-iron light towers the city bought secondhand from Detroit in 1894 to build its first public electric grid. They're the only working moonlight towers left anywhere in the world, they're scattered across Austin neighborhoods from Hyde Park to Travis Heights, and Austin Energy quietly finished converting every one of them to LED bulbs in June 2024.

What Are Austin's Moonlight Towers, Exactly?

Look up on certain street corners around Central Austin — West 9th and Guadalupe, MLK and Chicon, the middle of Zilker Park — and you'll see a spindly, six-armed iron tower rising 15 stories over the rooftops. That's a moonlight tower, and according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Austin Energy's own utility records, Austin is the only city on Earth that still operates any. Cities from Detroit to Indianapolis to Aberdeen, South Dakota, put up hundreds of these towers in the 1880s and '90s as an early, brute-force alternative to street-by-street lighting — one tall tower with carbon-arc lamps instead of dozens of individual lampposts. Every other city eventually tore theirs down. Austin didn't.

The towers are protected today as a National Register of Historic Places site (listed 1976), a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, and a Texas State Antiquities Landmark — city ordinance bars anyone from demolishing one.

Why Did Austin Buy Used Streetlights From Detroit?

In 1894, Detroit was upgrading to a more modern street-lighting grid and had 31 moonlight towers to get rid of. Austin — which had just built the Austin Dam on the Colorado River specifically to generate electricity for the city — bought all 31, shipped them south, and had the Fort Wayne Electric Company assemble them on site. In May 1895, the city threw the switches and lit all 31 towers at once. According to Austin Energy, that moment is the literal birth of the utility now known as Austin Energy: the moonlight towers weren't decoration added to an existing grid, they were the grid's public debut. A dedication celebration followed that July.

Each tower originally carried six carbon-arc lamps bright enough to read a wristwatch by, throwing light across a 1,500-foot radius. For a town that had been lit by oil lamps, it was described at the time as turning night into day — Catherine Cordeiro Gabb, the UT-Austin preservation graduate who wrote the towers' National Historic Landmark nomination, told the National Trust it was "the first time" many residents experienced electric light at all, and that suddenly "you could do things after 7 o'clock in the evening."

Where Can You Actually See One Tonight?

Of the original 31, 17 survive — 15 still standing over city streets, two more in storage — according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and confirmed at 17 in the City of Austin's own May 2026 planning records. Only six still stand in their exact 1895 spots; the rest have been relocated over the decades as the city's street grid changed, and three (at 4th & Nueces, 1st & Trinity, and West 22nd & Nueces) have come down since 2004 to clear room for new buildings, with no confirmed return date.

Here's where to find some of the towers still lit tonight, according to Austin Energy and Wikipedia's tower-location survey (verify locally before a special trip — a few have moved since this was last checked):

The Zilker Park Tower Has a Secret Second Job

Here's the detail most Austinites who've stood under the Zilker Holiday Tree every winter don't know: that "tree" isn't a tree. It's one of the original 1895 moonlight towers, temporarily wrapped in more than 3,000 colored bulbs each fall and switched back to a bare iron tower every January. Austin Energy crews — about 25 people, working with contractor MasTec — spend a full day each October climbing the tower to string the lights and mount the 10-foot double star on top, a tradition that started in 1967 and ran its 59th year in 2025. It's the same pole that, decades earlier, was moved to Zilker from what's now Emma Long Metropolitan Park. Come December, thousands of families take photos under it without realizing they're standing beneath a piece of the city's original power grid.

What Just Changed About Them?

The towers aren't just museum pieces — Austin Energy still maintains them as working infrastructure, and that maintenance made real news in 2024. Since 2014, the city has run an ongoing, city-council-funded restoration and repair program (the National Trust puts the commitment at $3.9 million), and in June 2024 that work reached a finish line: the last of the 17 towers, at MLK and Chicon, got its bulbs swapped from a 400-watt fixture to an 80-watt LED. According to Austin Energy's Paul Peterson, supervisor of the utility's Illumination, Construction & Maintenance group, that swap isn't just about the electric bill — it changes the maintenance math entirely. "To be able to go from doing this every five years to maybe every 20, that's going to be another substantial savings as well," Peterson told FOX 7 Austin at the time. Getting a crew 150 feet up requires a specialized transmission-department bucket truck; fewer bulb changes means fewer of those climbs.

What Locals Should Know

• 17 towers survive of the original 31 Austin bought from Detroit in 1894 — the last working moonlight towers anywhere in the world.
• All 17 now run on LED bulbs, a project Austin Energy finished in June 2024, roughly 129 years after they first lit up.
• The Zilker Park tower moonlights (pun intended) as the Zilker Holiday Tree every winter — same 1895 structure, different costume.
• Only six towers stand in their original 1895 locations; the rest have moved at least once, and three have come down since 2004 with no confirmed return.
• They're protected by city ordinance and listed on the National Register of Historic Places — nobody can legally take one down.
• The famous "party at the moon tower" scene from Dazed and Confused wasn't filmed at a real tower — the production built a mock-up at Walter E. Long Park east of the city, since climbing a real one wasn't an option.

The Moontower Comedy Festival, which takes its name from these towers, normally fills the Paramount Theatre downtown — a building currently mid-restoration and closed until 2027, per ATX Things' reporting on that project. Worth watching for where the festival lands while its usual home is dark.

FAQ

How many moonlight towers does Austin have left? Seventeen survive of the original 31 the city bought from Detroit in 1894 — 15 still standing over city streets and two more in storage, per the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the City of Austin's own count as of May 2026.

Are Austin's moonlight towers the only ones left in the world? Yes. Multiple U.S. cities put up moonlight towers in the 1880s–90s, but Austin is the only one that still operates any as functioning infrastructure, according to Austin Energy and the National Register of Historic Places nomination.

Is the Zilker Park moonlight tower the same one used as the Christmas tree? Yes — Austin Energy and contractor crews disassemble its usual iron-tower look each fall and re-dress it with more than 3,000 lights and a 10-foot star for the Zilker Holiday Tree tradition, which began in 1967, then restore it after the season.

Can you climb a moonlight tower? No. They're active electrical infrastructure maintained by Austin Energy using specialized bucket trucks; there's no public access to climb one, despite what the Dazed and Confused legend implies (that scene used a movie-set mock-up, not a real tower).

Were the moonlight towers built to stop a serial killer? No — that's a popular myth. The towers went up in 1894–95, roughly a decade after Austin's unsolved "Servant Girl Annihilator" murders of the 1880s, and historians who've studied the towers say the timeline doesn't support the connection.

For more of the city's history hiding in plain sight, ATX Things has also gone inside the Austin History Center's 2026 comeback and Scholz Garten's 160th year as Austin's oldest bar. And if you're the type who drives past a landmark daily without clocking it, that's basically our whole Hidden Austin beat — follow @austintexasthings for the next one.