“The City and Memory”

I chose The Water Tower (originally The Pine Street Water Tower) at 806 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL Chicago 60611 in what is now called the Water Tower District Landmark District, North Side, Gold Coast, between E. Chicago Avenue and E. Pearson Street, in downtown Chicago.

“. . . real places were invested ideas in memorable ways, able to be read” (Professor David Mayernik, “A Modern City’s Memory: Grant Park in Chicago, Illinois, United States”).

What makes this building memorable?

First, it was originally built with the Chicago Pumping Station along Lake Michigan to serve a specific civic need and provide water to a growing population. These two buildings stood alone in an undeveloped area north of the center of town.

Aerial Photo from the 1920s

Looking North on Michigan Avenue

Even today, standing between a bunch of modern skyscrapers, the tower reminds us that this Water Tower served an important function.

The standpipe held water for firefighting and helped equalize water pressure from the nearby pumping station to control water surges in the area. Both facilities were using clean water from water cribs in Lake Michigan. Technology surpassed the need for the standpipe and in 1911 it was disconnected from the city’s water works but the Pumping Station is still in use today. And visually, the striking architecture of the tower is memorable.

“Its intricate design serves as a perfect illustration of the value and importance the city put on infrastructure and water supply during the late 19th century. Today it’s seen as an investment made to solve crucial water supply issues brought about by the city’s rapid growth”. (2)

And again from the Chicago Tribune,

“. . . Surely no pipe was ever so ornately wrapped as this one, clad in a pale golden limestone carved from quarries around Lemont. Boyington's tower, completed in 1869, became a near-instant object of great affection for Chicagoans and visitors alike.” (4)

Secondly, the Water Tower gained notoriety as one of the few buildings to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the fire, the famous disaster that was pivotal for architecture in Chicago.

Bill Kurtis says, “Chicagoans measure time from the Great Fire.  In countless ways, they still live with decisions made in the days that followed the city’s greatest crisis. Within a month, the city elected an extremely able mayor, Joseph Medill, publisher of the Chicago Tribune.  In his inaugural address, he set the course for strong architectural development by discouraging paper and tar roofs, urging instead ‘materials as incombustible as brick, stone, iron or slate’.” (7)

Here, it's important to explore the concept of “memory” in urban form because when it comes to an event like the Chicago Fire, everything that existed before the fire was destroyed.

“. . . there is yet another aspect to this recovery of the city”s identity . . . ; a quite new sensibility for the reuse of what remains of the historic fabric of the city. In a city like Chicago, which saw its center destroyed by a gigantic fire in 1871, the notion of ‘historic’ is of course rather pushed forward in time, up to the 1930s at least”. (6)

This explains in part why the Water Tower, “as one of the few buildings to survive the Chicago Fire of 1871, also became a civic symbol of the city's will to survive.”. (4)

Thirdly, the Water Tower impacted the development of North Michigan Avenue.

North Michigan Avenue bends to the east at Chicago Avenue(5) because the Water Tower was structurally too fragile to move. The Chicago Historical Society and other preservationists rallied to convince the city to complete its restoration and in the process agreed to maintain the building in its original location while growth along this corridor has continued.

“Today it has the character of a museum piece and is kept by Chicago on its most prominent avenue, “the Magnificent Mile” in conscious commemoration of the past”. (1)

Memory in this case is definitely an active process. The striking architectural tower from 1869 recalls the past and then leaps into the future as the perfect capstone to the view northward along Michigan Avenue. It becomes a very modern day focal point, and a clear destination for visitors walking north. As a prescient example of adaptive reuse, the Water Tower became a Visitor Center with free admission in the 1970s. A use of the past to inform the future.

Essential History of The Chicago Water Tower.

1867-1869.

Architect William W. Boyington (1818-1898) designed the two buildings- the Chicago Avenue Pumping Station (**) and the building across the street, the Chicago Water Tower, in his signature castellated Gothic Revival style. His designs look like miniature versions of medieval castles with saw-toothed towers and turrets, corner buttresses, angular parapets, battlements, lancet windows, piers and spires.

Visually, the Water Tower and the Pumping Station make an unmistakeable pair and when they were originally built they were separate from the major buildings of the then populated downtown.

In modern day Chicago both buildings sit in the middle of the major North MIchigan Avenue shopping and tourist area.

In its description, The National Parks Service compared the Water Tower design to the Cloth Merchant’s Hall in Bruges, Belgium from the 12th century.

"Boyington’s water tower, seen in its theme and concept, bears a likeness to this renowned Gothic tower.  In both buildings, the exterior detailing of the structure — corner buttresses, lancet windows, slotted battlements, projecting turrets, wall piers, angular parapets, tower spires — all tend to conceal the underlying simplicity of the design.  In both structures, the first floor was seen as a grouping of four cubes into a square, to serve as a pedestal for the tower.  Two additional cubes, similar in size, were placed vertically on the base.  On this standing, the octagon tower was built.  The surface elements, seen on the facade of the building, provide the orchestration for its perspective view, an are essential to this Gothic masterwork.  The various frontal elements have the capacity to coalesce into a unified whole, and few American landmarks can project an image so graceful as this simple candelabrum format". (1994, National Parks Service).

The design critique of Lady Duffus Hardy, a British novelist and travel writer who toured the city in 1880, was very positive when she wrote: "The new water works are the most beautiful illustrations of the vagaries of the architectural brain. . . . Never were so many cupolas and buttresses, pinnacles and towers grouped together on one spot; none but a true artist could have arranged them into so harmonious a whole."

And the design critique of Oscar Wilde who visited Chicago two years later was not positive when he called the structure a "castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it" and wondered why anyone would make a water tower masquerade as a miniature medieval castle. (1).

The Water Tower was built to house a 138-foot-tall standpipe, three feet in diameter using limestone block construction- yellowed Joliet limestone quarried in Illinois rather than the more typical and prevalent Indiana limestone. The tower rises in five sections from the square ground-level base with battlement pillars at each of its four corners. Each of the 40-foot-wide-sides has a stately doorway flanked by two grand windows.

The second and third sections are similar in design to the first section but diminish in size as they progress higher in elevation. Together all three sections make up the base. The octagonal tower is centered and set back from the top of the third section capped by a cupola of steel. The steel and copper roof construction offset the limestone.

The National Parks Service measured the tower in 1994 and it is 182 feet, six inches to the tip of its spire above the ground level (it is listed at 154 feet in most literature).

In Boyington’s design, a grand spiral staircase encircled the interior standpipe.

The cupola of the Water Tower held the main control station and because the controls required around-the-clock observation, the tower included a sleeping room with distinctive window openings.

One article described the architecture as an “imitation of architecture so naive that it seems original at points, as in the cut-stone battlements at the top of the tower wall sections. (1)

The Chicago Water Tower was built at a specific location to meet a civic need and engineered to provide water to a growing population. By the time it was built in the 1860s, Chicago’s water supply was inadequate. Most water came from the Chicago River which was also the city’s sewer; it tasted bad and carried diseases like cholera and typhoid fever as well as tiny silver fish that found their way into homes. To solve the problem, Chief Engineer Ellis S. Chesbrough looked to Lake Michigan. "Near-shore lake water was too polluted to beused because of runoff from the Chicago River. Chesbrough designed an innovative solution- a water supply tunnel system running nearly two miles offshore to an intake crib. When the tunnel was completed in 1867, lake water was pumped back to shore through a pumping station. Because the original pumps produced pressure surges and pulsation in the water, a standpipe system was added in 1869.” (2)

“The ground-breaking on this date for something as prosaic as a new water tower was understandably the occasion for civic jubilation.” (Chicago Tribune)

“The Old Water Tower looks like an oversized set decoration from some Elizabethan play. But this isn't knights slaying dragons, this is the city slaking its thirst. Before electric water pumps were invented, the city's drinking water came ashore from Lake Michigan thanks to inventions known as Corliss engines”. (3) 

1871.

The building survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 because of its limestone block construction but the magnificent Gothic decoration was heavily damaged.

1913.

One of two major renovations. Renovation architect, W. Kallet.

The city started a lackluster restoration project to make the unsightly and disused tower slightly less unsightly by replacing every limestone block. This process took close to three years.

1918.

Pine Street was widened and plans were altered to give the Water Tower a featured location.

Michigan Avenue originally ended at the Chicago River and what is now Michigan Avenue north of the river was originally called Pine Street. The concept for “The Magnificent Mile”- a broader thoroughfare- was part of the 1909 Burnham Plan for Chicago and in the 1920s Pine Street which had been lined with factories and warehouses near the river and luxury homes and rowhouses further north was renamed Michigan Avenue. The North Michigan Avenue Bridge opened in 1920 creating a viable commercial district and now the name “Magnificent Mile” is a registered trademark of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association. Today, the “Magnificent Mile” extends from the Chicago River to 900 North Michigan Avenue.

1934 Aerial Image

Chicago Water Tower and Pumping Station

Looking north on Michigan Avenue

1960 Image

Chicago Water Tower and Pumping Station

Looking north on Michigan Avenue

1969.

The Chicago Water Tower was designated the first  American Water Landmark.

The original foundation of the Water Tower is still intact and consists of 168 piles filled with concrete and capped with 12-inch oak timbers. Massive stones laid in cement complete the base up to six feet below the grade. The water tower is the second oldest water tower in the United States, after the Louisville Water Tower in Louisville, Kentucky.

1970s.

The Water Tower becomes a visitor information center for the city.

1971.

The Chicago Water Tower was designated a Chicago Landmark.

1978.

The second of two renovation efforts.

Minor interior renovations included adding a movie screen and a small viewing area in a room off to the right of the main entrance to update the Visitor Center. Some minor exterior repairs were completed as well.

The Water Tower is also home to City Gallery, Chicago’s official photography gallery which is open year round and offers multiple free exhibitions.

2014.

The small park around the tower was named for former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne.

(1.) Chicago’s Famous Buildings, A Photographic Guide, Second Edition Revised and Enlarged, edited by Arthur Siegel, descriptive text by J. Carson Webster, The  University of Chicago Press, 1969 (Pages 48-49)

(2.) Chicago Architecture Foundation website, www.architecture.org, "Chicago Water Tower"

(3.) www.chicagoarchitecture.info/Building/374/Old-Water-Tower.php

(4.) “Old Water Tower (Also known as Old Chicago Water Tower”), Charles Leroux, The Chicago Tribune. News/Nation & World/National Politics, 2016 

(5.) Chicago Architecture Blog- Throwback Thursday, Chicago Water Tower Edition, Editor Daniel Schell, Artefaqs Corp., March 15, 2015.

(6.) Beyond The International Style, New Chicago Architecture, A cura di/edited by  Maurizio Casari, Vincenzo Pavan, 1981, (Page 15).

(7.) Chicago Photographs, Santi Visalli, 1995, (Foreword).

(**) And as a final note,The Chicago Avenue Pumping Station, 821 North Michigan Avenue, has its own series of renovations and historic designations including recent awards for adaptive reuse. It reopened most recently in 2003 as the main location for Lookingglass Theatre Company. Though Oscar Wilde was not a fan of the architecture of the Water Tower when he visited in 1882, he did praise the pumping machinery as “simple, grand and natural”. :)