Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
Sacha Brewer spent a good part of her senior year at the University of Cincinnati on top of a ladder, hoisting a methane sampler over gaslights in various city neighborhoods.
The stately lampposts are a local landmark. When she perched next to one with a tinfoil funnel, people tended to notice. “We got some strange looks,” she says.
The city of Cincinnati still has 1,126 of these gaslights, the last remnants of a once-sprawling system. Many are from the 1890s. The oldest might be from the 1850s. No one really knows anymore. Along with some cobblestone alleys and a few underground water mains, the gaslights are the oldest functioning pieces of public infrastructure in the city.
The fact that they’re still burning is impressive. But it’s also a concern. The outdated lamps run on natural gas, and since the 1950s, have been turned on 24 hours a day. It’s why Brewer was on the ladder in the first place, looking for leaks in the superfluous system.
The research project is led by Amy Townsend-Small, an environmental studies professor in UC’s newly formed School of Environment and Sustainability who primarily focuses on emissions and the environmental impact of the oil and gas industry. The flickering lamps down the hill from UC’s campus caught her attention.
Natural gas also fuels stoves and water heaters across the city, but there’s one major difference, says Townsend-Small: “A stove isn’t on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
To some, the gaslights’ flickering flames and low hiss add charm, elevate property values, and define certain city neighborhoods. To others, they’re dim, dangerous, and relentless round-the-clock polluters. Townsend-Small and her team aimed to test the city’s lamps and quantify the emissions. The gaslights are part of the fabric of the city, but is the mood lighting worth the constant release of methane?
Map by Jessica Dunham
Gaslights pop up all over Cincinnati, not just in Clifton. They aggregate in Avondale and cluster in College Hill. They line side streets linking Hyde Park Square to Oakley Square. Gas Light Café in Pleasant Ridge sits in the middle of a square mile of gaslights. There’s even a lonely strip in East Westwood.
The total of 1,126 gaslights may seem slight compared to the city’s 30,000 electric street lights, but they make Cincinnati one of the last metropolitan holdouts of this old-town tech in the world.
Globally, Berlin is the gaslight kingpin with 43,500 lights. Dusseldorf has around 14,000, Boston 2,800, and London 1,500, though those cities are actively navigating modern-day calls for replacement. The last serious pushback against Cincinnati gaslights was the late 1970s.
Prior to the dawn of gaslights, city streets were generally dark and dangerous after sunset. Lights provided safe navigation and security against crime. Gaslights first illuminated the streets of London in 1807 and then swept across Europe. Baltimore was the first American city to form a gas utility, installing its initial lamps in 1817. Public gaslights were in Pittsburgh, Boston, Louisville, and Philadelphia soon after. Cincinnati didn’t establish its gas utility until 1837, 20 years behind the times.
That’s not entirely fair. Industrious Cincinnatians quickly capitalized on the technology. There are records of William Green installing a set at his flour mill in 1816. In 1825, Thomas Lawson designed bird- and elephant-shaped lamps to illuminate the street outside his tinsmith shop. These early lamps were powered by coal gas, which had to be burned close to the source. But gas lamps were a huge leap forward over the stench and inconvenience of kerosene.
In 1837, Cincinnati Gas Light & Coke Co. incorporated to burn coal and deliver fuel to the city’s growing gaslight demands. The company would later become Cincinnati Gas & Electric, predecessor to Duke Energy. The company built its first gas works in 1842 at Rose Street and today’s Mehring Way, near where the Bengals’ indoor practice bubble now stands.
Cincinnati’s first set of 100 public street lamps ignited on September 27, 1843. There was no on/off switch. Lamplighters spread across the city igniting the bulbs each night and extinguishing them each morning. Many gaslights still have a crossbar where early lamplighters would rest their ladders.
The city was on the rise at the time, which may help explain the popularity and proliferation of gaslights today. “The Cincinnati high water mark, as far as its relationship to urban America, would be in the 1840s and early 1850s,” says David Stradling, a professor of urban and environmental history at UC and a collaborator on the gaslight project. Cincinnati had 46,000 residents in 1840, and by 1850 its population was 115,000; it was the sixth largest U.S. city in both census rankings. There weren’t suburbs at the time, Stradling says. Everyone lived either in the city or the country, and gaslights were a clear delineator between the two.
The roster of gaslights increased incrementally street by street and block by block. By 1860, nearly 2,000 gaslights flickered in Cincinnati. By 1892, there were 9,512. That was the likely peak.
In the 1880s, cities started to invest in electricity technology and shift away from natural gas. San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter now runs on electric. Baltimore extinguished its final 55 lamps in 1957; some of its lampposts now stand on Main Street U.S.A. in the heart of Disneyland.
Not Cincinnati. Builders kept adding the now-outdated technology to 20th century neighborhoods like Pleasant Ridge. By World War I, however, electricity was so cheap and widely available that it made no sense to keep plugging into the gas network, Stradling says.
The lamps have been on a steady retreat ever since. The last lamplighters turned in their torches in 1930. The city experimented with timed automation instead, but by 1956 it was cheaper to keep the natural gas flowing than to maintain the timers and hire someone to check every night.
“I think a lot of people have no idea they’re actually just on all the time,” says Stradling. “That’s an indication of how cheap natural gas is, but it’s also an indication of just how much natural gas is wasted.”
There’s an environmental expense to our neighborhood ambiance. Natural gas began replacing coal gas in Cincinnati in 1907, providing cheaper rates and wider supply networks—but natural gas is mostly made of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s particularly good at trapping heat in the atmosphere. A large-scale reduction of methane—which also gets released from farms, oilfields, and landfills—could have major beneficial effects on the climate.
Cincinnati is on a gradual path to decarbonization. Between 2006 and 2015, the city reduced emissions from street lights and traffic signals by nearly 44 percent, thanks in part to replacing older electric lamps with high-efficiency LEDs. But signals and lights still produced 7 percent of all municipal emissions in 2015, more than all city-owned vehicles and Metro buses combined.
In the Green Cincinnati Plan 2023, the city announced its aim to be carbon-neutral by 2050. Removing gaslights would assist with those ambitious goals.
Photograph provided by Amy Townsend-Small
Townsend-Small decided to measure the methane footprint of Cincinnati’s gaslights. But first she had to find them.
When she asked the city’s Department of Transportation & Engineering for a list of lamps, they sent several yellowed maps from the 1970s. That was, until quite recently, the best available resource. After some Google-sleuthing and in-person investigating, Townsend-Small built a free digital resource on Google Maps that pinpoints every Cincinnati gaslight.
The map shows obvious clusters and intriguing outliers. There are hot spots like Avondale, Clifton, Roselawn, and Oakley. But as the city gradually replaced gaslights with electric, islands of orphaned illumination got left behind.
There’s a final trio still flickering on Francis Lane in Walnut Hills. The UC frat houses on University Court have an isolated handful as well. And there are curious cul-de-sacs like Lindell Lane in Mt. Lookout and Weron Lane in East Westwood, both nowhere near another gaslit street. There’s no historical context to explain why some streets kept their lights and others didn’t, says Curtis Hines, Cincinnati’s traffic engineering division manager.
Townsend-Small found gaslights dotting 10 different city neighborhoods and decided to sample emissions from each region. Throughout the school year, she’d meet Brewer and other students in UC’s Geology/Physics Building to calibrate equipment and head out for sampling.
On research days, they’d load up Townsend-Small’s little electric car with methane detectors and pile inside. They took back roads, driving cautiously with a 10-foot ladder poking out of the hatchback. They’d park near lamps they had randomly pre-selected, then unfold the ladder and set up their mobile methane testing shop.
First, a student—often Brewer—would climb a few rungs and turn on a gas rover, the same handheld tool used to look for home gas leaks. One end of a long rubber hose faced the gaslight vents. The other end connected to a digital device, roughly the size and shape of a ping-pong paddle, that provided a readout of methane.
If the device detected elevated methane, the team moved to step two: the beefier high-flow sampler. Brewer placed a steel funnel and tinfoil over the lamp, which was connected by a long vacuum tube to the sampler, housed in what looks like a metal-sided suitcase. The sampler is an industry tool which captures the gas emitting from a source and determines its emission rate.
The team tested 82 lamps across the 10 neighborhoods and found that Cincinnati’s average gaslight emits 1.7 grams of methane per hour. In comparison, water heaters typically release 0.2 grams and gas stoves release only 0.07 grams per hour. While the team’s research is not yet peer-reviewed, they presented their findings at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in December and are now working on having it published in an academic journal.
Spread across the city’s system, that means the gaslights could be emitting a total of 16,700 kilograms of methane. That’s the equivalent emissions of 468 tons of carbon dioxide or 1.1 million miles driven by a gas-powered car, according to the EPA.
The team also found that Cincinnati’s gaslights had an average loss rate of 4 percent, meaning that 96 percent of the natural gas is most likely burned and 4 percent is emitted as methane. Three lamps emitted zero methane; they successfully converted all of the natural gas into less potent pollutants like carbon dioxide. In contrast, the highest-emitting lamp wasn’t even burning; natural gas was leaking straight into the atmosphere instead.
That range didn’t surprise Townsend-Small. “In every segment of the oil and gas supply chain, a few sources are responsible for the majority of emissions,” she says.
Unlike homes, Cincinnati gaslights aren’t metered. “The city just pays one gas bill for all 1,126 gaslights,” she says, so officials don’t know which light is using more gas than another.
Cincinnati pays a fixed fee with Duke Energy, Hines confirms. Any gas leaks or anomalies would be included in that citywide usage report.
Gaslights receive special attention, however, to prevent leaks. For maintenance, the city contracts with the Cincinnati Gas Lite Company, an Erlanger business that sells and services gas products like grills and fireplaces. Technicians evaluate each gaslight every two months, replacing burned-out burners and damaged globes. Then, every three years, city staff complete an extra inspection to see which lamps need painting or stabilizing. Any citizen can report a burned-out lamp by calling 311 or using the 311Cincy mobile app.
The gaslights require a bit more time and attention than typical electric lights. They also come at a higher cost. According to the Department of Transportation & Engineering, last year the city spent $2,153,000 to keep 30,000 electric streetlights running; that’s roughly $71 per light. The annual natural gas budget for gaslights is $136,500, or $124 each.
Those costs are spread across all city taxpayers. “It’s an amenity that some get an advantage from and everyone has to pay for,” says Stradling.
So gaslights are dimmer, dirtier, and pricier than their electric companions. But, Townsend-Small notes, “there’s a lot of identity in them,” which makes sweeping changes unlikely.
The last major push to remove Cincinnati gaslights was the late 1970s. The city episodically replaced lamps as needed, with little public pushback. In renter-heavy neighborhoods like Westwood and Over-the-Rhine, residents were more concerned with street safety than property values, says Stradling, and replacing the gaslights was a net benefit. But in other neighborhoods, “people got up in arms,” he says.
Resistance was fierce in Clifton, home of today’s Gaslight District. Stradling found dozens of letters from Clifton-based boosters in UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library protesting replacement in the 1960s.
Residents wanted to keep the lights on because they provide character and charm, the letters argued. They separate the city from car-focused suburbs that were draining Cincinnati’s population at the time.
“Maintaining gaslights becomes a way of staking a claim to staying in the city,” says Stradling. “The lamps themselves become emblematic of a type of neighborhood that’s quaint and middle-class and urbane in a way that no other kind of street lighting could have.”
During his research, Stradling found letters from City Hall addressing “misunderstandings” and “rumors.” “It is the stated policy of the Council that the gaslights will not be removed unless we are petitioned to remove them by residents on a street and to replace them with electric lights,” wrote Councilman John Gilligan, later governor of Ohio, in a letter to a concerned Cliftonite in 1962. The city had no deal with Clifton to preserve the lamps, but also no intention of removing them.
That basically remains the case today. The gaslights were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 partly in response to community interest, but also to preempt clean energy legislation from the Ohio Statehouse and federal government. The city, as owners of the lights, supported the historic listing. When a pole is hit or damaged today, the city will attempt to salvage material and weld it back together to keep the existing pole intact, says Hines. “We try to maintain the infrastructure as best as we can, considering the fact that it’s more than a century old,” he says.
But the National Register doesn’t promise protection. Just like in the 1960s, any citizen can ask the city to remove their gaslights today. When City Hall receives a request, officials send postcards to property owners and poll the neighborhood. If enough people on the street vote to remove the gaslights, the city meets the request, so long as it has support from both community and city councils as well. The last time that happened was 2007, on Kirkup Avenue in Kennedy Heights.
It’s pragmatic preservation. “Currently we’re maintaining gaslights unless a neighborhood or street petitions to remove them,” says Hines.
The UC team met so many strangers while sampling gaslights, it almost seemed like they were sampling public opinion, too. Brewer recalls a conversation with a woman in Clifton. “We told her a little bit about the project, and she was shocked to find out it was burning on natural gas,” she says. The woman had recently replaced her gas stove, an environmentally friendly move that reduced her home’s emissions. She said she actually wished for more gaslights to better illuminate her driveway.
That’s a stark contrast to an interaction in Roselawn, where a woman hoped the team was removing the gaslights completely. “It’s dangerous out here, and we need better lighting,” Brewer recalls her saying.
Another conversation popped up in Mt. Adams when a curious stranger approached and Townsend-Small asked the woman if she knew of any other gaslights in the area. “Oh yeah, the next street over, the whole street has them,” Townsend-Small recounts her saying. When they walked over to investigate, everything was an electric replica. In fact, only three of Mt. Adams’s lampposts still run on gas.
“People really love the gaslights,” says Townsend-Small, “but I don’t know if people really know what they are.”
The decoys in Mt. Adams are called decorative post-top lights, and they pop up across the city, says Hines. That includes Ludlow Avenue, the business anchor of Clifton’s Gaslight District. That streetlight outside the neighborhood’s Gaslight Bar and Grill? It’s electric. The city has a responsibility to brightly light high-traffic corridors, says Hines, and Ludlow Avenue would be too dark if it was still lit by gas.
If you’re not actively looking, you might not notice the difference between a gaslight and a decoy. If there’s anything she wants people to take from her study, Townsend-Small says, “I hope that people understand this is natural gas.” It’s a limited resource providing a limited light source.
Brewer learned a lot from her talks with strangers on the sidewalk. When she moved to Cincinnati for college, she was startled to discover the gas-burning lamps. She’s now more surprised how little people know about natural gas, where it comes from, and what it’s made of. “I really started to understand natural gas in a different way and started to understand how to communicate to people about it,” she says.
Brewer graduated in May 2024 with degrees in environmental studies and Spanish and hopes to continue studying methane in graduate school. Townsend-Small’s project provided hands-on research and direct mentorship. “It was a great experience for so many different reasons,” says Brewer.
Stradling, the historian, thinks the gaslights are here to stay. Natural gas is the most efficient and cost-effective way to heat homes in the region, he says, so the grid will remain intact. And it’s unlikely city managers will advocate for the wholesale removal of a prized city treasure. “Getting rid of all the gaslights would be a terribly expensive endeavor,” he says, adding that streets would need underground electric cables and completely new hardware. “My guess is that they’ll persist for quite some time.”
The fact that these landmark lamps, some of which could be nearing 175 years old, are still functional is a testament to generations of support. Yet electrification would provide a big step toward meeting the city’s stated climate goals. City Hall has long known the lamps are expensive and inefficient, though in the big picture of government infrastructure the yearly cost to pump natural gas to them is .00007 percent of the city’s annual budget.
The gaslights remain an emblem from another era, when Cincinnati was a cultural and economic powerhouse. “Gas lamps take on this romantic aura of when Cincinnati was prosperous and sophisticated,” Stradling says. “Few cities would ever think about tying their identity to archaic technology, but Cincinnati managed to do it.”
The gaslights symbolize Cincinnati, regardless of your perspective. For supporters, they’re a throwback to the glory days, a proud memento of our earliest successes. For detractors, they’re a totem to the city’s begrudging reputation. Cincinnati was behind the times installing the lamps in 1843 and seems behind the times in removing them. What could be more Cincinnati than that?
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