Historical landmark
Chicago Water Tower
Limestone standpipe tower once holding a water-hammer shock absorber for the city's lakefront pumping system.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to the Chicago Water Tower starts underground in the mid-1860s, with miners chipping a brick tunnel by lamplight beneath Lake Michigan to solve engineer Ellis Chesbrough's problem of pulling clean water into a city whose shoreline was fouled by sewage and slaughterhouse runoff. It follows the pumping station his tunnel fed and the new problem its engines created once water started moving through the mains. Look for the yellow limestone cladding on the tower finished in 1869, wrapped around a structure with a very different job than its castellated look suggests.
This audio guide was created using AI.