San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Reader seeks help identifying old light
Some years ago, I acquired this streetlight and was told it was one of many from downtown San Antonio. If it has historical significance, I would like to see it in the hands of the appropriate agency. I would appreciate your assistance in helping in my donation of this light and researching to see if it is historically significant.
The light fixture in the photo you sent was made to illuminate a public space but it probably wasn’t a street light in the sense of a fixture at the top of a tall pole, placed at regular intervals to make streets safer.
San Antonio’s first streetlights date back to the late 1850s, “when the San Antonio Gas Co. was founded to manufacture methane gas to light the streets,” said Ed Gaida, author of “Sidewalks of San Antonio.” He’s been researching this topic for a possible new edition of the book about the early days of modern street features and other conveniences we take for granted. That gas, used only for lighting, was made from a special type of resin brought from Indianola by oxcart to a plant on West Houston Street near San Pedro Creek and the Santa Rosa Infirmary (later Hospital). “The area closest to the plant received the first lights,” he said, “then the more affluent areas like King William got gas to light homes.”
Gas-powered lighting started to give way to electricity in the 1890s, when electric arc lights were introduced, but gas was still used to light King William Street and the area around Travis Park until 1910 or later. Not everyone welcomed the change, said Gaida: “Residents around Travis Park mounted a protest when San Antonio Public Service Co. (now CPS) replaced the gas lights in their area, and the company reinstalled the gas fixtures.”
Gaida has scans of a catalog of gas-light fixtures that were sold to San Antonio, “and none of them resembles the one in your photo,” he said. “The original gas lights were not nearly that fancy. Glass globes (that covered) the flame were almost always clear.”
Electric streetlights looked about the same, at least through the 1920s. “All our street views show street lamps of various styles but with plain, glass globes,” said Tom Shelton, photo curator at the Institute of Texan Cultures.
“None looks similar to (Bird’s fixture).”
The consensus is that what you have was an exterior light fixture, mounted on a wall near an entrance doorway. It looks like “a commonly used design,” said local historian Maria Watson Pfeiffer, author of “School by the River: Ursuline Academy to Southwest School of Art” and several successful National Register nominations of downtown buildings. Shelton found several examples of fixtures that were close but not exact matches to yours — all in photographs of downtown San Antonio buildings completed in the 1920s — the former Federal Reserve Bank, Municipal Auditorium, the Nix Building, San Pedro Branch Library, Scottish Rite Cathedral and others.
In style, they add romantic details to Gothic- or Mediterranean-influenced buildings whose design harks back to a distant European past. Some of the fixtures original to these buildings are still in place, and others are not. Your fixture is on the plain side, compared to some of these beauties, so ornate, you wonder how any light managed to escape. It might have been salvaged during a replacement or could have come from a less-famous building that has been demolished.
Anyone with information on its origins may contact this column; all responses will be forwarded and may be published in a future column. Crafting the colors: Preserva-
Ron Bird
tion Fort Sam Houston is hosting a children’s crafts activity in red, white and blue 1-5 p.m. July 1 at its Stilwell House headquarters on Infantry Post at JBSA-Fort Sam Houston. Children 5 and older will be able to make patriotic pins, bracelets and paper crafts. The event is open to the public. For details and reservations, contact stilwellhouseevents@gmail.com.