It's driving me crazy.
"City’s antique lanterns to sport a greener tint; Device will have gas lamps burning only when it’s dark" by Brian R. Ballou, Globe Staff / June 6, 2011
For decades, they have been Boston’s eternal flames, burning bright day and night — vintage gas lamps strung along narrow, twisting streets of Beacon Hill and Charlestown, Bay Village, the North End, and the Back Bay. Hardly beacons of energy efficiency, the 2,800 lamps are environmentally retro in a world turning greener.
But 600 gas lamps will soon be fitted with automatic igniters that make them flicker on at nightfall and off at daybreak, and save the city roughly $140,000 a year in fuel bills while reducing carbon emissions.
It's always about pushing the agenda.
The $450,000 cost of the devices — which work much the same as a grill igniter, by creating a spark — will be covered by an energy efficiency grant awarded by the state’s Department of Energy Resources.
I wonder which well-connected firm won that contract.
“Those gas streetlights are so important for the character and history of Boston,’’ City Councilor Matt O’Malley said. “But right now, it is so counter-intuitive that they are left on during the day.’’
The first gas lamps came to life at Haymarket Square in 1828, installed by the Boston Gas Company as a demonstration. Six years later, they appeared around Faneuil Hall.
By the late 1800s, electric lamps were in vogue, supplanting their quaint gas forebears. And so it re mained until 1962, when the city, hoping to recapture the charm of an earlier era, reverted to gas lamps in Boston’s historic neighborhoods, a back-to-the-future transition that continued through the 1990s....
Something starting to stink.
--more--"
