They’ve gone by many names: yellow lamps, for their warm glow; turtle lamps, after their distinctive shape; island lights for their tendency to show up on traffic islands across the city.
For as many names as they have, relatively little is known about the lamps themselves. Cincinnatian Christopher Fellerhoff is one of the (few and) foremost experts on the topic, and even runs a Facebook group called “Cincinnati Yellow Lamps.” But he only stumbled upon their story by happenstance.
Fellerhoff was driving around the city with his mother and an out-of-town friend, who saw one and asked what it was. Fellerhoff didn’t know, but, according to Fellerhoff, his mom — born in 1931 — quickly chimed in: “Oh, no, those come from the streetcar days. That used to mark where a streetcar stop was.”
Thus began Fellerhoff’s search to uncover the origins of these quirky Cincinnati landmarks.
“I found some pictures from, say, the 1930s or so … that show variations on a lamp in that position that is not overhanging meant to illuminate the street, but really something to highlight the presence of something,” Fellerhoff said.
There are not even many records that directly tell us what the lamps were used for, just anecdotal evidence and reasoning based on where these lights were found.
Like other cities across Ohio in the 19th century, Cincinnati became home to a sprawling public transit system spurred on by the advent of rail technology. The presence of light rail modes of travel like streetcars, cable cars and interurbans created a bustling network, and people could reliably take a train or tram to places near and far quickly and often cheaply, according to Jeffrey Jakucyk, who runs the website Cincinnati Traction History.
This system began with horse-drawn streetcars in 1859, before transitioning into the electric streetcars we may be more familiar with today.
“Starting in 1888, 1889, when electric power transmission became essentially kind of standardized, that’s when they started electrifying existing lines. They started expanding farther out,” Jakucyk said. “The streetcars kept operating, with a few exceptions, until the late 1940s, and the last of it was gone in 1951.”
The Cincinnati streetcar returned in 2016 with the Cincinnati Connector, but the island lights remain a relic of the island platforms that served as streetcar stops.
“In a lot of the wider streets, they did build little platforms, … raised curb[s], 6, 8, 10 inches high, whatever, so that people could stop and wait right where the streetcar was going to stop,” Jakucyk said. “And as automobiles started coming on the scene, they would hit them and either damage their car or, heaven forbid, run people over who are waiting for a streetcar to come.”
The yellow lamps served as “a warning of sorts,” according to Fellerhoff.
“Its function as a traffic control device is to warn people that there’s some sort of vertical obstruction in the road in the form of an island,” he said.
Since there has been little historical work done on these oddities, Fellerhoff’s efforts and the help he has crowdsourced from over 1,000 Facebook followers since March 2012 have been instrumental in recording the lamps’ history.
“It just kind of stuck in my head … but I also kind of realized that they seemed to be diminishing in number,” Fellerhoff said. “I could just at least document my own particular interest in these things and maybe see if there’s other people who care about them or could document them.”
What began with one man’s curiosity has spread into a network of hobbyists whose contributions range from documentation of which island lights still stand to archival research into former lamps’ locations. Visitors to the page can expect a welcoming community and plenty of love for those turtle lamps that remain.
Working as a public historian and not a professional, Fellerhoff runs the page and its ancillary materials in his free time. One such tool is a Google Map he created for documenting current and former sites of the yellow lamps.
Many places across Ohio are host to Facebook groups like Fellerhoff’s, documenting local histories both well-known and obscure. These digital spaces aim to retrace memories of the physical world in an accessible way. They are not necessarily about the formal practice of history (although some are very well-researched), but about preserving memory — and much of it has to do with transportation and the infrastructure of our communities.
“Ohio happens to have cities that really came of age in the first half of the 20th century or before, and so there’s just a lot of the urban fabric in terms of material stuff and infrastructure that are just these hanging-on artifacts that aren’t part of what would be installed new, but they’re still hanging around,” Fellerhoff said. “It’s all land use and transportation. Everything changed when everybody had a car.”
Today, the lamps are slowly disappearing from Cincinnati streets. According to Fellerhoff, the city is not necessarily actively taking them down, but they are also not repairing any that are damaged in accidents.
“Up until about 2012, I can see evidence that there were still a lot, and it’s been a while since I looked at it, but I would say close to 125, maybe 110, 115 that were around the city at that point,” Fellerhoff said. “When the radio reporter contacted me three years ago, someone from the city told them there are only 36 left at that point.”
Fellerhoff’s Google Map, published in 2023, lists more than 36 lights still remaining, and the Facebook community continues to advocate for the lights. Fellerhoff recalled one incident in which he heard that members of the page formally requested that the city restore a felled island light.
“And they have actually had success in the city — rather than hauling it away, replacing it or repairing it — putting it back up. So I mean, it’s very modest, the impact.” Fellerhoff said.
Still, the city won’t be putting up any new yellow lights soon. In 1935, the Joint Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices published a manual for traffic control devices that standardized traffic control methods, and consequently discouraged locally grown methods like the yellow lamps.
“[Now,] you just have a white plastic stick with yellow reflective tape on it that’s called a flexible delineator. And they use those all over the country. They’re a lot cheaper to replace. They won’t hurt anybody if they hit them in their car. If they go flying, they shouldn’t impale or kill anybody,” Fellerhoff said.
There are good reasons why Cincinnati residents can’t rely on the yellow lamps as a safety feature, but their loss as a weird wonder of the city is still disappointing for many Cincinnatians, as evidenced by Fellerhoff’s loyal Facebook following.
In fact, a lot of transportation history relies heavily on the work of everyday people who may not be professional historians, keeping archives of images and information online. Take Jakucyk’s own website.
“My thought was, if I can get it on the web, then at least other people who are really interested in it could also save it for themselves and I just think it helps make it a little bit more available and approachable,” Jakucyk said. “This is a medium that can be updated whenever I want to, but it can be updated easily and fixed. So, it’s a nice living document, in a way.”
The community efforts to preserve transportation history both physically and digitally are immense undertakings often done in these public historians’ free time. For many, the effort is worth it to make sure that pieces of history, especially local oddities like the yellow lamps, don’t go unnoticed or forgotten.
Walking down the street in the 1950s, many Cincinnatians probably thought little of the yellow lamps that were just another fixture in the background of their lives. Now, though, they point to both a lost history of local transit traditions and a future of preserving history through digital communities. The distinct yellow glow lives on, in one form or another.
