A moonlight tower or moontower is a lighting structure designed to illuminate areas of a town or city at night. The towers were popular in the late 19th century in cities across the United States and Europe; they were most common in the 1880s and 1890s. In some places they were used when standard street-lighting, using smaller, shorter, and more numerous lamps, was impractically expensive. In other places they were used in addition to gas street lighting. The towers were designed to illuminate areas often of several blocks at once, on the "high light" principle. Arc lamps, known for their exceptionally bright and harsh light, were the most common method of illumination. As incandescent electric street lighting became common, the prevalence of towers began to wane. Moonlight towers in Austin, Texas, near TxDOT headquarters, served as inspiration for some of the first high-mast lighting towers in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Austin, Texas Austin, Texas, is the only city in the world known to still have moonlight towers. They are tall with foundations wide. The towers were manufactured in Indiana by Fort Wayne Electric Company and assembled on site. In 1894, the City of Austin purchased 31 used towers from Detroit. A single tower cast light from six carbon arc lamps, illuminating a radius brightly enough to read a watch. In 1993, the city of Austin dismantled the towers and restored every bolt, turnbuckle and guy-wire as part of a $1.3 million project, the completion of which was celebrated in 1995 with a citywide festival. Detroit Detroit, Michigan, had a particularly extensive system of light towers inaugurated in 1882 with 122 towers, tall and apart downtown, shorter, less powerful, and twice as far apart elsewhere. The towers were masts secured with cables and were maintained daily by crews who hauled themselves to the top using a counterweighted elevator. The system covered about , but soon had to be supplemented with incandescent lighting in the city center, partly because trees interfered with the light, and by the turn of the century they remained only in Cadillac Square; the towers were soon removed there, too. Minneapolis In 1883, Minneapolis, Minnesota, built a single tall "electric mast" in the Gateway District to eliminate the need for 150 gas lamps in the vicinity at a cost of $500. The tower's eight 4,000 candlepower arc lights cast stark shadows and failed to illuminate