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Philip Spiess
Wow! What can I say, Dale! I'll have to look it up!
Meanwhile, an historical note on the Cincinnati Gas Lights (another of Paul's great pictures, from Lafayette Avenue in Clifton):
Although I grew up with the gaslights on many of the streets in Clifton -- Lafayette, Middleton, Morrison Avenues, and Lyleburn and Wirham Places, among others (the lights of which, I am convinced, turned me into the dyed-in-the-wool Victorian I still am today), other suburbs have them as well: Hyde Park (St. Charles Place, Zumstein, Burch, and Astoria Avenues, for example); North Avondale (e.g., Rose Hill and Marion Avenues); the Kennedy Heights/Pleasant Ridge area (e.g., Dryden Avenue and Kimberley Court); and East Walnut Hills (e.g., Keys Crescent). Other suburbs are dotted with them as well: Walnut Hills, College Hill, Fairmount, Mount Lookout, and Roselawn. As of April, 1977 (when I did the research for my 1978 book, The Industrial Archeology of Cincinnati, Ohio: A Guide for S. I. A. Tourists [i.e., the Society for Industrial Archeology], 1978), there were 1,117 gaslights remaining on about 170 residential streets in Cincinnati, but every so often, on petition by residents, a few more get removed and replaced by electrical fixtures.
The gas lighting of Cincinnati streets was first introduced into Cincinnati in 1841, with the gas originally controlled by the Cincinnati Gas, Light & Coke Co. (now the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co.). In 1875, maintenance service of the gaslights was established by the Globe Light Co., at a cost of $29 per lamp per year; by 1879, there were 6,000 gas lamps in Cincinnati. Many of the cast iron poles are marked with the name and patent date of the manufacturer. Some of the poles are relatively plain; some have winding ivy cast into them; some still have the cross-arm supports for the lamplighter's ladder -- at least eight different styles of lamp posts remain in use. Some lamps will be seen to have a circular black metal disc hung from one side of the shade; this disc could be purchased by an adjacent homeowner, who hung it on the lamp to keep the light from shining in through a bedroom window. Around the turn of the century, suburbs on the outskirts of the city, such as Oakley and Montgomery, had naptha lamps which were being serviced by the Sun Vapor Street Light Co.
The currently existing gaslights were all furnished with the Welsbach gas lamp burner in the 1890s (mostly around 1895). Welsbach, an Austrian, had invented a superior type of gaslight mantle and glass-enclosed burner that prevented the wind from blowing out the light, as so often happened. Some of the original patents indicate that most of the Welsbach burner development was done in the 1880s and 1890s. The Welsbach Gas Light Co., now the Welsbach Lighting Products Co., was founded in 1877 as the Pennsylvania Gaslight and Globe Co. For 98 years it was located in Baltimore, Maryland; it now resides in New Haven, Connecticut. The Cincinnati-style gaslight became a trademark fixture of the company's; it was not made before 1890.
Until about 1966, Cincinnati's gaslights were equipped with automatic dimmers, small brass clocks attached to each lamp's gas valve; these automatically turned down the gas during the day and turned it up again at night. They were wound every few days by employees of the Welsbach Gas Light Co., on contract with the city to maintain the lights; Welsbach employees had regular routes of daily rounds, checking, cleaning, and repairing the lamps and winding the clocks. The clocks were finally removed to save the city the cost of the clock-winding service and -- irony of ironies -- to burn more gas! Now [1978] with a gas shortage, the city would like to reinstall an automatic dimmer device! The Welsbach Gas Light Co., however, left Cincinnati in 1972.
Cincinnati's gaslights are now maintained [1978] by the Cincinnati Gaslite Co. (616 Delhi Ave., Cincinnati), which is under contract to the city. It is paid $47.65 per lamp per year for this service; company employees make regular rounds, washing the globes, about 99% of which are now made out of polyethylene plastic, rather than glass (this was obviously not the case in 1962, when I was learning to drive: I was dropping off our classmate Rob St. John at his home at the end of Lyleburn Place in Clifton, and, backing up to turn around, I heard a sudden sound of falling glass -- I had bumped into the cast iron post of the gaslight at the end of the street, and its glass shade -- perhaps already broken? -- had come crashing down), once every sixty days, and doing other maintenance. The city itself now stockpiles replacement parts, and the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co. bills the city for the gas used by means of an estimate based on "the laws of physics, the size of the orifice, and the gas pressure"; the bill is currently [1978] $73,000 a year.
For years there has been an ongoing struggle to save the Cincinnati gaslights. (This has perhaps now ended, as a number of areas of Cincinnati, such as Clifton, are now designated as "Gaslight Districts.") In 1959, the city first considered assessing property owners on gaslit streets for the difference between the cost of their lighting and that of standard electrical lighting; the city currently [1978] claims this difference is $66,000 per year. The city's official policy [1978] on removal is that a majority of residents on any given block rules as to whether the lamps go or stay. In 1978 many of the various local neighborhood councils and associations were fighting to save the lights, which would otherwide have been replaced by mercury vapor electric lights on ordinary wooden poles with overhead wires, or by boulevard lamps, glass globes on metal poles with underground wiring. Defenders of the gaslights claim that their undeniable aesthetic charm adds to the desirability of residential areas that have them, which results in higher property taxes that offset the gaslights' operating costs; those who wish to see the gaslights replaced think that they are great wasters of needed energy resources, and that crime is higher (or at least the potential for crime is higher) in gaslit areas because of darker streets at night. There is no hard data at present to support the claims of either side. As of my writing in 1978, there was a move afoot to place all of the gaslights on the National Register of Historic Places (this has probably now been done, via historic districts, such as Clifton), but also as of my writing in 1978, the matter could well have become moot, as there was a bill at that time before the Ohio General Assembly (then already passed by the Ohio House of Representatives) designed to outlaw gaslights altogether!
Anyone care to update this?
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