Derby Gisclair, a local author and historian, will speak on “moon towers” at 7 p.m., Tuesday, March 19, at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W. Napoleon, Metairie.

This event is free of charge and is open to the public. There is no registration.

A moontower, also called a moonlight tower, 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. They were most common in the 1880s and 1890s.

In some places, moontowers 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.

Towers were erected in New Orleans, starting in the early 1880s. One set of towers illuminated a section of the Mississippi levee, aiding in loading and unloading ships at night in the busy port. A tower at the intersection of Canal Street, Bourbon Street and Carondelet Street was constructed with a set of four water pipes to aid in fire-fighting.

Derby Gisclair most recent book is titled New Orleans Steamboat Stories – The Brief Lives of Mississippi Riverboats. A lifelong resident of New Orleans, he is a member of the Society of American Baseball Research and its 19th Century, Minor Leagues, Deadball Era, Oral History, and Pictorial History Committees. He heads the Schott-Pelican Chapter of SABR in Louisiana and is on the Nominating and Selection Committees for the Greater New Orleans Professional Baseball Hall of Fame.

He is the author of several books including Baseball in New Orleans, Baseball at Tulane University, The Olympic Club of New Orleans – The Epicenter of Professional Boxing, 1883-1897, and Early Baseball in New Orleans – A History of 19th Century Play. His most recent book, The Dixie Series, 1920-1958, was released on May 1, 2023.

He is working on a history of horse-racing and racetracks in New Orleans, a history of the New Orleans Pelicans, and a pictorial history of boxing in New Orleans.

For more information regarding this presentation, contact Chris Smith, Manager of Adult Programming for the library, at 504-889-8143 or wcsmith@jefferson.lib.la.us.