The decision to build a gasworks in Istanbul was part of a broader modernization of the Ottoman capital in the late 19th century — a period when European cities were already well advanced in gas lighting and the Ottoman court was investing in infrastructure that would announce the empire's modernity to the world. Coal gas, produced by heating coal in sealed ovens called retorts or coke furnaces, was the dominant technology before electrical grids became practical. The Yedikule plant was sited in the neighborhood by the ancient walls, at a location that had good access to the sea for coal deliveries and sufficient distance from the dense residential quarters of the historic peninsula to reduce fire risk. Once completed and handed to the Municipality of Istanbul to operate, the plant became the foundation of the city's public lighting network — a network that extended street by street through the 1880s and 1890s.

Yedikule in the late Ottoman period was already a neighborhood of overlapping identities: agricultural land given over to the famous market gardens, or bostans, that had fed the city for centuries; small industries pressed against the ancient walls; a mixed population that included Greek and Armenian communities alongside Turkish families. Into this texture the gasworks inserted itself as an industrial anchor — large brick buildings, furnace stacks, the smell of coal and gas. The districts that the Yedikule plant served — Eyüp to the north, Makriköy to the west along the Marmara coast (today called Bakırköy), and San Stefano to the south (today Yeşilköy) — were themselves changing rapidly during this period, absorbing new residents and new industries as Istanbul's population expanded. The gasworks was, in this sense, infrastructure for a city in the middle of becoming something different.

The Yedikule Gasworks operated from 1880 until 1993 — 113 years of continuous production during which the technology around it changed enormously. Coal gas gave way to other forms of city gas; electrical grids eventually made gas lighting obsolete for most street and residential use; wars, occupations, and the great demographic transformations of the 20th century passed through the city while the furnaces kept burning. By the time the plant finally closed, it was already an anachronism — but an anachronism with industrial heritage credentials that would eventually attract serious attention. After closure, the site fell into disuse and partial deterioration. Contemporary accounts from the early 2000s described the structures as increasingly derelict.

The fate of the Yedikule Gasworks after 1993 is still being decided. The site has attracted significant architectural and cultural attention — proposals have envisioned transforming the industrial buildings into a creative technologies center, a planetarium housed in the original gasometer, and a pedestrian cultural route connecting the gasworks to the ancient Theodosian walls. Istanbul has already proven the model works: the Hasanpaşa Gasworks in Kadıköy reopened in July 2021 as Müze Gazhane, a sprawling cultural complex with theaters, exhibition halls, and a climate museum, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors. Whether Yedikule follows a similar path depends on the slow machinery of urban planning and heritage protection. The site is protected as an industrial monument, the brick buildings still standing, the gasometer still visible from the Marmara shore. The infrastructure for reinvention is there. The reinvention itself is pending.

Even in its unrestored state, the bones of the Yedikule Gasworks are legible from outside: the brick arches, the scale of the furnace rooms, the industrial logic of how the buildings were arranged for efficient production. The site's location — between the Seven Towers fortress and the Marmara shore, within a neighborhood still defined by its closeness to the ancient walls — gives it a particular layered quality that planners and architects have found compelling. At Yedikule, the Byzantine, the Ottoman, the industrial, and the contemporary all occupy the same few blocks. The gasworks that once pushed back the dark has not yet been lit for visitors — but the city has not torn it down either, which in Istanbul's accelerating real estate landscape is its own form of preservation.