99% Invisible - 150- Under The Moonlight

Episode Date: January 28, 2015

In 1885, Austin, Texas was terrorized by a serial killer known as the Servant Girl Annihilator.  The murderer was never actually found, but he claimed eight victims, mostly black servant girls, all attacked in the dark of night. The very, very dark night of Austin in 1885. After … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. We begin with an unsolved murder mystery. Actually a series of unsolved murders. Perhaps the work of the United States first serial killer. Before Jack the Ripper terrorized London, before H.H. Holmes stocked the Chicago World's Fair, Austin, Texas, was haunted by the servant girl, a narrator.

Producer Avery Truffman would like to reiterate that these murders are unsolved. So, it's possible that these were individual murders rather than the work of one man. The hard-fast fact is this. In 1885, eight women, mostly black servants, were brutally murdered in the dark of night. And the night was very dark in Austin in 1885. There was essentially no street lighting. The darkness of just life after sundown in the 19th century is something that modern people are just completely unfamiliar with. This is Bruce Hunt. He's an associate professor of the history of physics and technology at the University

of Texas, Austin. Basically, there was no outdoor lighting. There was moonlight. When the moon was out, that was about it. And in 1894, the city of Austin decided to buy more moonlight in the form of towers. They're called moonlight towers because they were supposed to approximate a full moon. Austin adopted moonlight towers, which really worked towers. There were 15 stories high, very industrial looking, made of metal scaffolding, and each was crowned with a circle of six lights, soaring way, way high above the city.

Austin wasn't the first to implement tower lighting. In the 1800s a lot of major cities had them. Arc-like towers illuminated streets in New York, Baltimore, LA, San Jose, and Detroit. Detroit had a very huge system of much larger than Austin ever had. And that's actually where Austin got their Moonlight Towers. In 1894 the city purchased 31 of them from the city of Detroit. And despite their romantic name, the absurdly tall moonlight towers were actually a very practical design. They're not meant to look cool, they're very functional.

And their height was meant to accommodate the lighting they used. They're arc lights, they were initially arc lights. Carbon arc lights, the precursor to the incandescent bulb. Arc lights are basically a continued spark between two carbon electrodes. They're extremely bright. A lot of glare. They're the sort of thing you use in a search light. And if you put arc lights at street level, that's blinding.

Well, the solution to that was to put it up high enough that you'd spread the light out. But even on their high tower, the arc lights were still so bright. I mean, they'd be bright by today's standards, but then imagine what that would look like to you. If you were an austenite in the 1890s, a custom-coupich black streets and gas lamps. A gas lamp has the power of about 15 candles, and arc light has the power of a couple thousand.

It was a very intense light, almost two months' light. People would go out and enjoy the light, but they would bring umbrellas in order to shield themselves from the glare. This is Ernest Freberg, head of the history department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. He's also the author of the book The Age of Edison, Electric Light and the invention of modern America. And the glare was just one of the problems with our glights. There were a few other downsides. One was that it sounded like a swarm of angry bees. It would buzz and they would a swarm of angry bees. It would buzz and they would, as these carbons burned, they would drop shreds of ash burning ash down on people down below. So there's a drawback.

Even with their blinding glare and nefarious hum and deposits of molten ash, carbon arc lights were still so exciting. They created a whole new world for people accustomed to dim and dark cities. Because bright electric light can highlight certain things that you might not even notice in the full light of day. So it was a lot of great discussion about seeing the grass in a totally different way. People loved to look at their hands under the arc light in the dark and they were seeing the details of their hands in new ways. Duh-huuur. So it was really a change in perception that was thrilling and also the thrilling feeling of being out at night

and feeling safe because visibility equals safety. Some cities thought that these new fangled streetlights were gonna cut back on the need for police or even eliminate law enforcement entirely. If you could set up an arc light in the middle of a town square, you'd sort of be returning the square to the public and take it away from criminals and nared wells who were hanging around in the shadows by driving out the shadows.

People called the arc lights policemen on a pole and they allowed for a whole new kind of nightlife. Many people were very excited to go out and attend a fancy ball under the arc light. But once they got there, they realized that this harsh blue light highlighted every one of their imperfections. So every gray hair and wrinkle, many people found that they would never again go near electric light. Vanity aside, everyone was kind of nervous about the general idea of light at night.

Twas unnatural, they decreed, the towers could cause sleeplessness, cast eerie shadows, crops would overproduce, hens would overlay. There were stories that the arc lights lured restless alligators to the shore and attracted biblical proportions of crickets, according to the Austin statesman in 1921. Egypt has nothing on central Texas when it comes to scourges. After the recent flood came the crickets, tempted by the beams of light to settle in illuminated vicinity. Bruce Hunt suspects that these reports were overblown.

Eh, you know, I think a lot of that was kind of newspaperman joking around. Oh, journalism was so much fun back then. But the biggest problem with the towers was that their height made them a drag to maintain. The arcs burned down the carbon electrodes very rapidly, so you had to go up and change them about once a day. And I cannot emphasize enough how super tall these things are, as tall as a 15 story building. And if you look at one of Austin's moonlight towers, there's a rickety little pulley-type thing in the center of it.

It's like a dumb-waiter apparatus. Supposedly the guy would stand on that and pull himself up to go up and change the carbon electrodes every day. That's a nuisance and an expense. And so as soon as they could, really, by the 1920s, the city replaced the art lights, the carbon arcs, with big, incandescent bulbs, which were not as bright, but were a lot easier to maintain. But while Austin was fudging around with different bulbs, most other cities had already removed their tower lights completely. Every place also banned them by about the 1920s, but Austin kept them.

Austin had fallen on hard times, and the city couldn't afford to tear down the towers. And so they just stayed. Into this day, 17 of the original 31 survived. The last of the Moonlight Towers. Although today, without the arc lights, the Moonlight Towers have a kind of weak and distant glow. They're easy to ignore, but you might know them from a little movie called Dazed and Confused. Dazed and Confused is set in Austin in 1976.

In the movie, a bunch of kids party and drive around until they all gather at the end by a moonlight tower. There's a new fist in the making as we speak. It's out of the moon moon town. In the movie Dazing could use a Richard Lake later movie Matthew McConaughey says party at the moon tower, but they're moonlight towers. In real life people don't actually go there to party. Most of them are just in sort of like parking lots or something. I went to a moonlight tower on the side of a busy road on the corner of ninth and Guadalupe. It's not Guadalupe, it's Guadalupe.

Clearly, I needed a local's help. My name is Wiley Wiggins, I'm 38 years old, I was born and raised in Austin, Texas, and in the early 90s I was in a movie by a Richard Linklater called Dazed and Confused. He played the freshman Mitch Kramer, who wonders about the Moon Towers. What's it called the Moon couple though. In real life these Moonlight Towers would be really hard to climb, which is why for this scene, Richard Linklider made a fake Moonlight Tower. The one in the movie had a ladder, not the pulley thing, and it was nowhere near as tall

as a real Moonlight Tower. And I'm terrified of heights. Wily would have never tried this stunt. No one he knew actually did. When I was a kid, there was always somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who had climbed it. It's unclear how many times this was ever attempted, but in any case, stories abound. And there was a point when Austin considered finally taking these old lights down, just

like all the other cities had done. In the 50s and 60s, the attitude was, well, these are out of date, and we pull those down. In fact, I've got a video I found online that was a sort of little historical vignettes of Austin that was made by one of local TD stations in the 1960s. Tonight, progress report Austin presents the Legends of Austin. And is it? Here's the Moonlight Towers, and here they show... Now, they're out of date now and no doubt will soon disappear. Modern times and new improvements in lighting have made these inefficient for providing light to our city of night.

And it's a shame for anyone who has walked into their glow in a fall evening watching the shadows around him, knows the beauty they have provided. And there's that sort of tone that that's well and a little remnant of our past that we will lose soon. Well, people just said why should we lose it? Keep them up. So the towers were inducted into the National Registry of Historic Places in 1976. Some of the towers even have plaques.

And Austin's power provider, Austin Energy, funnels a lot of resources into maintaining the towers. Take it from Austin Energy Spokesman, Carlos Cordova. Right now it's really interesting about the Moonlight towers. Is there going to be going through a renovation? And this renovation is a total drag because these towers are in the national registry of historic places.

They have to be restored to their original form, so we can't go to Home Depot or Lowe's and buy bolts and nuts. The contractor has to cast bolts and parts that look exactly identical to the original, so you can keep its historic designation. That's what I love about these moonlight towers, man. I get older. They stay the same age. I'm an expensive project, isn't it? Yes, it's very specialized work that, of of course affects the price, but notice there wasn't

any uproar from the citizens about spending this penny on the Moonlight Towers. Ostenites are willing to put up the funds. The towers are this point of civic pride. Every year during the holidays, Austin Energy strings Christmas lights from the Moonlight Tower in Zilker Park, and Ostenites lovingly refer to that tower as the Zilker Park Tree. Austin also hosts the Moon Tower Comedy Festival and there's a local band called Moonlight Towers and at a restaurant I ordered a drink called a Moonlight Tower.

The towers have become part of the character and folklore of Austin. I mean there's all sorts of legends and stuff about them. When I was a kid of course there was always a legend that somebody had climbed up on acid and fallen off and died which is evidently not true. But then of course, the other legend is that they were built because of, there was a serial killer, like in the, what, like the 1800s. And that one, I think, is supposed to be true, right? Have we, have we verified this? The Serving Girl Annihilator story is not a myth at all they absolutely true it has nothing to do with the moonlight towers at least not directly that

was all over with well before they talk about the moonlight towers came up and I've never seen anything about a need for them being associated with a servant girl annihilator case still the servant girl annihilator became the genesis story that Austinites tell about these lights. And the story of the Servant Girl Annihilator does truly illustrate the limitations of 19th century nighttime. These carbon arc street lamps were chasing away darkness and fear.

And I think it's something we so easily take for granted how liberating this is, how much the darkness was a permanent form of limitation on free will and human activity for us. I mean, it had great benefits, of course, that we sometimes miss because we have too much light now. Moonlight towers were a strange offshoot, a sort of knee-and-rathol in the evolution of the street light. And in Austin, where a keep Austin weird is an unofficial slogan of the city,

printed on bumper stickers and scrolled on bathroom walls, you can't help but feel like the moon towers are doing their part. After every other city has torn their towers down, Austin holds on to theirs and preserves them. A reminder of the time when the Texas capital was just an oddball little town that bought the moon. To those who haven't looked closely, look closely soon. For the day of the artificial moonlight is ending, and this sight will one day disappear

from our city. The last in our nation with the moonlight glow from such talents. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Trouffleman, Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of KALW 91.7 San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine, an architecture andiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Special thanks to Josephine Hill and Mark Oppenheimer for help on this episode. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars if you follow me in either one of those two places you can be aware of all the things and talks and events we have coming up, including a free public talk

that I'm giving in a middle school gym about two miles from my house. So excited about that one. Plus we have a cool Tumblr, a Spotify playlist for an Instagram, but I encourage you to explore the entire world of 99% admissible at 99pi.org. Radio Topea from PRX.