The Wisconsin Gas Building (originally Milwaukee Gas Light Building) is a classic stepped Art Deco tower located in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin at 626 East Wisconsin Avenue. It was designed by architects Eschweiler & Eschweiler and completed in 1930 using differing materials on the exterior to graduate from dark to light.
Locally distinct light colored brick called Cream City brick crowns the high-rise. Copper panels adorn the spandrels, while organic foliage patterns and terracotta designs decorate the façade. The building stands 250 feet tall and has 20 floors. Demolished to make room for the building in 1930, a Prohibition-era speakeasy was formerly on the site. [1]
Wisconsin Gas was purchased by Wisconsin Energy in 2001. During the consolidation of Wisconsin Gas into Wisconsin Energy's neighboring downtown corporate headquarters, the Wisconsin Gas Building was sold to a developer in 2004 who converted it into leased office space.
A weather beacon shaped as a natural gas flame was added to the top of the Wisconsin Gas Building in 1956. It indicates the weather forecast by its color and flicker. The flame was turned off in 1973 because of that year's energy crisis. It was turned on again in 1985. The flame stands 21 feet tall and weighs four tons. In 2013, the neon tube lighting system was replaced with an LED lighting system. The new LED system allows millions of colors and various other lighting schemes outside the traditional red-gold-blue system, including charity efforts and sports team colors. [2]
There is a rhyme created to help remember the colors. Most of the rhyme is consistent, with variations in the final line:
and
The light has been used as a harbor marker and navigation aid by mariners in Lake Michigan over the years.
A fluorescent lamp, or fluorescent tube, is a low-pressure mercury-vapor gas-discharge lamp that uses fluorescence to produce visible light. An electric current in the gas excites mercury vapor, which produces short-wave ultraviolet light that then causes a phosphor coating on the inside of the lamp to glow. A fluorescent lamp converts electrical energy into useful light much more efficiently than an incandescent lamp, but is less efficient than most LED lamps. The typical luminous efficacy of fluorescent lighting systems is 50–100 lumens per watt, several times the efficacy of incandescent bulbs with comparable light output. For comparison, the luminous efficiency of an incandescent bulb may only be 16 lumens per watt.
Port Washington is the county seat of Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, United States. Located on Lake Michigan's western shore east of Interstate 43, the community is a suburb in the Milwaukee metropolitan area 27 miles (43 km) north of Milwaukee. The city's artificial harbor at the mouth of Sauk Creek was dredged in the 1870s and was a commercial port until the early 2000s. The population was 12,353 at the 2020 census.
A strobe light or stroboscopic lamp, commonly called a strobe, is a device used to produce regular flashes of light. It is one of a number of devices that can be used as a stroboscope. The word originated from the Ancient Greek στρόβος (stróbos), meaning "act of whirling".
WISN-TV is a television station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Hearst Television. The station's studios are located on the west end of the Marquette University campus, and its transmitter is located at Lincoln Park in the northeastern part of Milwaukee.
Neon lighting consists of brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases. Neon lights are a type of cold cathode gas-discharge light. A neon tube is a sealed glass tube with a metal electrode at each end, filled with one of a number of gases at low pressure. A high potential of several thousand volts applied to the electrodes ionizes the gas in the tube, causing it to emit colored light. The color of the light depends on the gas in the tube. Neon lights were named for neon, a noble gas which gives off a popular orange light, but other gases and chemicals called phosphors are used to produce other colors, such as hydrogen (purple-red), helium, carbon dioxide (white), and mercury (blue). Neon tubes can be fabricated in curving artistic shapes, to form letters or pictures. They are mainly used to make dramatic, multicolored glowing signage for advertising, called neon signs, which were popular from the 1920s to 1960s and again in the 1980s.
The WITI TV Tower is a lattice communications tower located in Shorewood, Wisconsin, which transmits the signal of several television and radio stations in the Milwaukee area, including its namesake, Fox owned-and-operated station WITI, along with cellular and wireless communications. The structure is owned by WITI's parent company, Fox Television Stations. The 1,081 feet (329 m) tower built in 1962 was for many years the tallest free-standing tower in the United States until the Stratosphere Tower was built in 1996. It remains the tallest lattice tower in the country and the tallest 3-side lattice tower in the world.
Gas-discharge lamps are a family of artificial light sources that generate light by sending an electric discharge through an ionized gas, a plasma.
SS Milwaukee was a train ferry that served on Lake Michigan. It was launched in 1902 and sank with all hands off Milwaukee on October 22, 1929. Fifty-two men were lost with the vessel.
WISN is a commercial AM radio station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It broadcasts a news/talk radio format and is owned by iHeartMedia, Inc. The studios are on Howard Avenue in the Milwaukee suburb of Greenfield.
WMSE is a non-commercial radio station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, playing a wide-ranging eclectic music format run by volunteer DJs. The station is part of the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE).
WEC Energy Group is an American company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that provides electricity and natural gas to 4.4 million customers across four states.
Calvary Cemetery is the oldest existing Catholic cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Owned by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, it is the final resting place for many of the city's early influential figures. The cemetery was designated a Milwaukee Landmark in 1981.
John Irvin Beggs was an American businessman. He was associated closely with the electric utility boom under Thomas Edison. He was also associated with Milwaukee, St. Louis, Missouri, and other regional rail and interurban trolley systems. Beggs is also known for developing modern depreciation techniques for business accounting and for being one of the early directors of what became General Electric.
Alexander Chadbourne Eschweiler was an American architect with a practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He designed both residences and commercial structures. His eye-catching Japonist pagoda design for filling stations for Wadham's Oil and Grease Company of Milwaukee were repeated over a hundred times, though only a very few survive. His substantial turn-of-the-20th-century residences for the Milwaukee business elite, in conservative Jacobethan or neo-Georgian idioms, have preserved their cachet in the city.
The Great Circus Parade is a parade of marching bands, circus wagons, clowns, performers, and animals. Between 1963 and 2009, it has been held 30 times in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a few times in Chicago and Baraboo, Wisconsin. A fundraiser for the Circus World Museum, the parade typically draws hundreds of thousands of attendees. The parade recreates how people in the late 19th century and early 20th century gathered along stops on a circus's route to see whether a circus was worth viewing.
The Milwaukee Athletic Club, is a private, social and full-service athletic club.
The Central Library is the headquarters for the Milwaukee Public Library System as well as for the Milwaukee County Federated Library System. Designated a Milwaukee Landmark in 1969, the building remains one of Milwaukee's most monumental public structures.
The Couture is an under-construction high-rise apartment building in Downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 507-foot, 44-story high-rise will become the state of Wisconsin's tallest residential building when completed in 2024, and will feature 322 high-end apartments, 50,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space, and an 1,100-space parking structure with hundreds of public parking spaces.
Edison light bulbs, also known as filament light bulbs and retroactively referred to as antique light bulbs or vintage light bulbs, are either carbon- or early tungsten-filament incandescent light bulbs, or modern bulbs that reproduce their appearance. Most of the bulbs in circulation are reproductions of the wound filament bulbs made popular by Edison Electric Light Company at the turn of the 20th century. They are easily identified by the long and complicated windings of their internal filaments, and by the very warm-yellow glow of the light they produce.
The Blue Flame Building or the El Paso Natural Gas CompanyBuilding is a skyscraper in El Paso, Texas. It was briefly the tallest building in El Paso upon its completion in 1954. The building housed the El Paso Natural Gas Company until 1996 when the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) housed employees there for a few years. The Housing Authority of the City of El Paso (HACEP) recently completed a $52 million major renovation in 2021 that includes retail spaces, offices, and low-income apartments.