Keep Austin Weird: Moonlight Towers & Roadside Curiosities

In the 1890s Austin bought a set of enormous cast-iron light towers — 165 feet tall, each throwing a cold glow said to mimic moonlight over several blocks. Seventeen of the original towers still stand and still work, found nowhere else on earth, and they've become a beloved civic oddity, from the giant "Zilker Christmas Tree" to the tower Richard Linklater made famous in Dazed and Confused. This driving loop strings a few of the surviving towers together with the murals and roadside curiosities that fuel the "Keep Austin Weird" spirit — the postcard walls, the singing frog, and a backyard cathedral built entirely of junk. It covers a good stretch of the city, so it's a drive; the payoff is the strange, specific stuff that makes Austin Austin.