That yellow stone castle marooned in the middle of Michigan Avenue is the Chicago Water Tower, and it is the most overqualified piece of plumbing in North America. Turrets. Battlements. Little pointed towers at every corner. It looks like something you'd besiege. What it actually did was keep the water pressure steady.
Inside that castle, running from the floor to nearly the top, stood a single iron pipe a hundred and thirty-eight feet tall. That's it. That's the building's entire job. The pumping station across the street shoved lake water into the mains hard enough to make the pipes shudder, and this standpipe rose and fell to absorb the surge, the way a pressure gauge does, just enormous and made of iron. William Boyington was hired to build a housing for it, and Boyington had exactly one architectural mood, which was Gothic. So the city got a limestone fortress wrapped around a water pipe. There was never a knight. There was never a moat. There was one very tall tube of iron doing
quiet hydraulic work behind a whole castle's worth of medieval fantasy.
Two years later the fantasy saved it. When the Great Chicago Fire came through in eighteen seventy-one, it took around three hundred lives, left a hundred thousand people homeless, and destroyed more than seventeen thousand buildings. It burned hot enough to melt iron and warp rail track. It jumped the river like the river w
