White Way lights to glow in Coral Gables again

For four years, Coral Gables city staff has been working on bringing back home historic White Way Lights from Broward County.

The city was able to negotiate with the entity that owns the light poles in Broward and bring back 12 of them to the city, said Mayor Vincent Lago during last week’s city commission meeting.

“When you talk about preservation of the City of Coral Gables, you’re talking about exactly this,” he said. “Everybody talks about the City Beautiful, George Merrick, and actually preserving our history. What you see here right now is a project that for four years we worked on, and it means a lot.”
Currently, there are about 40 preserved White Way Lights throughout the city, the mayor said.

“They have so much beauty to them even in the current state they are in. They just have minor rust that needs to be treated. Some of these are even 100 years old,” he said. “There’s currently eight more in Broward that are in pristine shape and they’re up and operational. They actually have the crystal on top, and we’re also getting those.”

No one really understands or has an answer to how they ended up in Broward, Mayor Lago said, but he thinks it had to do with maybe an FPL executive who lived around there, and the White Way Lights were basically a surplus.

“I just wanted to show the commission this is a project that just like a lot of other projects that we’ve embarked on that take years and years to come to fruition and with persistence,” he said, “our team has been able to deliver something that takes us back to what made our city so special.”