Beacon Hill’s iconic gas lamps are in a state of limbo, with no clue as to whether they will be repaired, retrofitted with more modern components or replaced altogether.
Beacon Hill boasts over a thousand gas lamps helping to light up its streets. They help set a historic atmosphere but require their own distinct infrastructure and parts, making it difficult to keep all of them in service.
The issue of maintaining them garnered some public attention in early 2021, when a survey sponsored by the Beacon Hill Civic Association (BHCA) cataloged almost all of the lamps and their state of repair.
Since then, however, planned public hearings to address the majority of lamps that were nonfunctional or damaged never happened. “We’re still keeping track of the lamps to the extent we can, although it’s not as thorough as it was with the study,” said BHCA Chair Robert Whitney.
“We presented them with a detailed spreadsheet identifying the location of every damaged gas lamp with the idea of making it as easy as possible to update and repair the lamps.” There is some evidence that the city is gaining ground in its struggle to keep the lamps operational. A boost to the gas lamp repair fund in the budget has made it easier to buy replacement parts, the largest obstacle the public works department cites as slowing down the repair queue.
Beacon Hill currently has 86 extant repair cases, but without more data it’s difficult to say how that translates into upward or downward trends.
The discussion on lamps, however, isn’t limited to just their upkeep. Gas lamps have a disproportionate environmental impact, making the switch to green energy a driving force in the debate around them.
Bay Village, which has much fewer gas lamps than Beacon Hill, recently sparked controversy when the city’s lighting division moved to prevent gas lamps on new developments without consulting residents. That has people in other neighborhoods nervous about the city’s radio silence. “The Bay Village Neighborhood Association was originally objecting because there was no public process, no town meetings, no advance notice,” said Whitney.
“We want to have a discussion in Beacon Hill involving neighborhood residents well before anything happens. We don’t want to just wake up one day and find that our lamps have been replaced.”
The Department of Public Works confirmed that the city does not currently have any plans to replace the gas lamps in Beacon Hill with modern streetlights, or retrofit them internally to run on LEDs.
Talks are ongoing in Bay Village, where discussion has shifted away from outright replacing the lamps and toward retrofits that would update the technology while maintaining the aesthetics of the original fixtures.
The kind of compromise has supporters.
Whitney saied that most of the residents he’s talked to care about both the environment and the connection that lamps encourage with their neighborhood, supporting retrofits as a neat solution to both issues.
City Councilor Kenzie Bok suggested something similar when asked, noting that social connections can have material impacts on neighborhoods.
“We know that the intangible value of our historic district can be measured to some extent in the strong desire to live here, the strong desire of visitors to come to this district,” she said. “We’ve navigated updates to technology throughout the entire history of the historic district. Folks on Beacon Hill care about both history and the environment, and there are solutions here that allow us to cherish both.”
