Manufacture, maintenance, and repair Some modern pavement lights are quite different from historic ones, While some cities have preservation measures for vault lights, others actively remove them and fill areaways. Damp areaways may corrode the steel load-bearing elements supporting the pavement roof. Moisture may come from leakage from above or from groundwater from below. •
Astoria, Oregon, has a community program for restoring vault lights, funded by the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association. A volunteer plan to replace broken glass with squares of
Lexan, topped with
resin embedded with glass teardrops, was prevented by legislation. •
Chicago, Illinois, has extremely extensive sidewalk vaults, but many of them do not have vault lights. There is no inventory of them. The city is filling in all vaults, as some are structurally unsound. •
Dunedin, New Zealand has well-preserved Luxfer and Hayward Brothers vault lights. •
London, England has many vault lights, many made by the Hayward Brothers.
Historic preservation legislation encourages a market in new pavement lights. •
New York City has large numbers of vault lights, mostly in the SoHo district. More than half of the subway stations originally had vault lights, but these had mostly been blocked off. Installing and restoring vault lights has become part of modern construction practices. It has no preservation project for its prisms, however, and fills those that break with concrete. See also
Portland Underground. •
Pretoria, South Africa has Hayward vault lights. •
Sacramento, California has "hollow sidewalks", which originated when the city
raised its street level to combat floods; some of these spaces are lit by vault lights. There are many stories told about these areas. Most of the lights have been removed. •
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan has had sidewalk prisms. They have been used in music videos, and a Facebook group fought to save them. They were scheduled to be infilled in 2015. •
Seattle, Washington raised its street level, by up to 22 feet in some places, in the aftermath of the
Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Previously, the Pioneer Square area had flooded tidally. Seattle replaced some of its sidewalk vault lights in Pioneer Square with new pre-purpled ones in 2002. Seattle runs tourist trips through
its underground. •
Tijuana, Mexico has armoured unsolarized vault lights in the 1919 Casa de la Cultura. •
Toronto, Ontario once had many vault lights, but the last known remaining example were in front of the shops at 2869 Dundas Street West (near Keele) until 2011. •
Vancouver, British Columbia has an unofficial policy of requiring any applicants for development permits to fill in areaways, although some have been paved over or made sufficiently load-bearing to support a fire engine. Some of the remaining areaways have restaurants built into them. A walking map of the sidewalk prisms has been produced. There are ~130 remaining areaways, the records of which are not digitised, and no measures exist to promote their preservation. •
Victoria, British Columbia has more than eleven thousand sidewalk prisms in seven locations (as of 2006), including an underground gallery running around an entire block outside the Yarrow Building. More than 670 of the prisms are missing or filled with concrete. Sidewalk prisms have been heritage-registered since 1990. Originally, there were hundreds of thousands of prisms. The city has some panels in storage for restoration, but is having difficulty finding a glass supplier. There are city plans to light the galleries below at night, creating glowing purple sidewalks in the downtown core. While they are protected, there is no funding for the preservation of sidewalk prisms. == Gallery ==