The Water Tower and Pumping Station buildings were constructed in the late 1860s to collect and distribute municipal water. These structures supported the new two-mile long intake tunnel, which was built underneath Lake Michigan to draw clean water from offshore and transport it back to the city. Finished in 1866, the tunnel was the answer to the city's concerns about water and public health.

At that time, the Chicago River emptied into Lake Michigan, sending sewage into the lake and polluting the water closest to the shore-- the same lake water used and ingested by many Chicago residents. The Chicago Board of Sewerage Commission, which had been formed in 1855 to address these issues, hoped that the new intake tunnel would solve water-related public health crises by providing residents with water drawn from cleaner parts of the lake. Their efforts were successful and the city built seven additional intake tunnels over the next sixty years.

Designed by William W.Boyington, the Water Tower and Pumping Station were constructed in a style known as castellated gothic. The builders used dolomitic limestone mined from nearby Lemont, Illinois. Many early Chicago buildings and structures were constructed using dolomitic limestone extracted from local quarries.

These buildings are among the few to have survived the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. Today, the Water Tower serves as a welcome center for the city of Chicago but the Pumping Station continues to serve the purpose for which it was built almost 150 years ago. It is one of twelve stations supplied by Chicago’s Jardine Water Purification Plant. The plant opened in 1968 next to Navy Pier and is the largest of its kind in the world.

Both the Water Tower and Pumping Station buildings are designated Chicago Landmarks and belong to the Old Chicago Water Tower District, which is listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. They are also listed on the National Register as individual historic properties.

Cain, Louis P."Sanitation in Chicago: A Strategy for a Lakefront Metropolis."Encyclopedia of Chicago Online.Accessed July 2016.http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/300017.html

Chicago History Museum. "Water Tower." Accessed July 2016.http://www.greatchicagofire.org/landmarks/water-tower/http://www.greatchicagofire.org/landmarks/water-tower/

Hill, Libby.The ChicagoRiver: ANatural and Unnatural History.Chicago, IL: Claremont Press, 2000.

McClendon, Dennis. "Tunnels."Encyclopedia of Chicago Online.Accessed July 2016.http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1275.html

National Park Service."Chicago Avenue Water Tower and Pumping Station." Accessed July 2016.https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/chicago/c4.htm

Historic image courtesy Library of Congress and the Historic American Buildings Survey

Text by Hope Shannon, Loyola University Chicago