The Chicago Water Tower: The Only Public Survivor of the Fire

The Chicago Water Tower stands at 806 North Michigan Avenue, in a small green wedge called Jane M. Byrne Plaza, between Pearson and Chicago Avenue. It is the only major public structure inside the 1871 burnt zone that survived the Great Fire, and the only pre-fire landmark on the Magnificent Mile. The Tower is 182 and a half feet tall, built of yellow Joliet limestone, designed in a castellated Gothic Revival style with four turreted corners and a central rising tower like a fortified keep. The architect was William W. Boyington. The construction year was 1869. Across the avenue, at 821 North Michigan, stands its matching Pumping Station, built the same year by the same architect in the same stone, and still in active use today as a water-pumping facility.

On the Magnificent Mile, the row of luxury department stores and twentieth-century skyscrapers between the river and Oak Street, the Water Tower is the odd one out. Every other major structure on the Mile was built between 1920 and the present. The Water Tower predates the rest by half a century. It is here because it survived something the rest of the neighborhood did not.

The fire

Two years after the Water Tower opened, on the night of Sunday, October 8, 1871, a fire began in or near a small barn on DeKoven Street on the southwest side of Chicago. The popular folklore that a Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern is folklore. The actual cause has never been established. What is established is that the city was, in early October 1871, a tinder field. The summer had been the driest on record. Wooden sidewalks, wooden buildings, wooden roofs, and a brisk southwesterly wind combined into the conditions for a major urban fire.

The fire burned for two days and the early morning of a third. It moved from the southwest side northeast across the river twice, jumping the South Branch and then the main stem. It destroyed an area roughly three and a third square miles. The death toll, never precisely established, was around three hundred. The number of buildings destroyed was estimated at seventeen and a half thousand. About a third of the city's population was left homeless.

The Water Tower stood near the northern advancing edge of the fire, where the flames had crossed the main stem of the Chicago River and were moving north through the prosperous near-North-Side neighborhoods. The Tower was on Pine Street, the corridor that would later become Michigan Avenue. The fire reached the Tower's block.

It did not destroy it. The Joliet limestone, a Chicago-area quarry stone from the small town of Joliet about forty miles southwest, does not burn. Its melting point is well above the temperature of an open urban fire. The Tower's wooden floor structure inside the limestone shell was destroyed. The standpipe pump was damaged. The exterior limestone walls survived intact. The Pumping Station across the street also survived. They were the only major public structures within the burnt zone to come through.

The Wikipedia article on the Chicago Water Tower is careful, and the architectural-historical record is careful, to specify what this claim does and does not mean. The Tower was not the only structure inside the burnt zone to survive. Several private brick and stone buildings also survived, as did a number of buildings outside the burnt zone's edges that newspapers later reported as having "survived the fire" without specifying that they had never been inside it. What the Water Tower was, precisely, was the only major public structure within the burnt zone to come through. That distinction is the one that holds.

What it meant in 1872

In the year after the fire, the Tower became a symbol of municipal survival. The pumping infrastructure was repaired quickly; the city's water supply, which the Tower had been built to provide, was operational again within months. Chicago's broader physical rebuild began almost immediately, and by 1873 the burnt zone was visibly under reconstruction. The Tower was the visible reminder of what had been lost and what had endured.

The Pumping Station continued to function. The Tower itself, once the building's standpipe pump was no longer needed in its original capacity (the water system was modernized over subsequent decades), became a landmark without an industrial purpose. It was a piece of public infrastructure that had outlived its function but had acquired a meaning the function could not produce.

By the 1880s, the Tower had become Chicago's most visited tourist destination. Oscar Wilde, on his American lecture tour in 1882, was shown the Tower with civic pride and dismissed it as "a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it." His comment was widely reported and equally widely ignored. The Tower stayed. The Pumping Station kept pumping.

The threats since

The Tower has been threatened with demolition multiple times across the century and a half since the fire. The first major threat was the 1920s widening of Michigan Avenue, the same project that built the Michigan Avenue Bridge across the river and produced the bridgehead skyscrapers that became the Magnificent Mile. The widening required a six-lane right-of-way through what had been the narrow Pine Street corridor. The Water Tower stood directly in the path.

Preservation pressure, led by Chicago civic groups and amplified by the popular memory of the fire, refused the demolition. Michigan Avenue was widened by working around the Tower rather than through it. The small plaza around the Tower, which became Jane M. Byrne Plaza in 2018 (renamed for Chicago's first female mayor, who had championed the lakefront), was created by the geometry of the avenue widening that the Tower's survival forced.

Subsequent road-improvement schemes, midcentury urban renewal plans, and various development proposals through the 1950s and 1960s all considered moving or demolishing the Tower. Each was defeated. The Pumping Station, which was a working facility throughout, was a less contentious target; the Tower, which was a landmark without active industrial function, was repeatedly the target. It stayed.

The Tower today is a Chicago Landmark, a National Register of Historic Places listing, and an American Water Landmark designated by the American Water Works Association. The Pumping Station is also landmarked. Both buildings are still in their 1869 condition externally, with periodic limestone restoration and tuck-pointing.

What to look for

Stand on the east side of Michigan Avenue, looking west across the plaza at the Tower. The stone is the warm yellow-cream color of Joliet limestone. Look at the four corner turrets. Each is topped with a small conical spire, the "pepper boxes" Oscar Wilde mocked. Look at the central tower. Its base is octagonal, rising into the slender vertical shaft that housed the 138-foot standpipe.

The Gothic Revival vocabulary is the period's stylistic default for a public utility building of civic ambition. William Boyington was a Chicago architect of moderate reputation; he designed the Tower as one of dozens of mid-nineteenth-century public buildings he completed in the city. Almost none of his other work survived the fire. The Water Tower and the Pumping Station are the building pair that did.

Now turn around and look across Michigan Avenue at the Pumping Station. The two buildings were designed as a working pair. The Tower housed the pressure-regulating standpipe. The Pumping Station housed the steam-driven pumps that lifted water from the lake to the standpipe. The system fed water through pipes to the surrounding North Side. The standpipe is no longer in use, but the Pumping Station still moves Lake Michigan water to a large portion of Chicago's North Side. You can hear it running, faintly, from the sidewalk in front of the entrance.

Now look up Michigan Avenue, north toward Oak Street. Every building on the avenue from this point to the river was built after 1920. Most were built between 1920 and 1929 on cleared post-fire ground, in the rebuilding boom that produced the Magnificent Mile as a unified retail corridor. The Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower, the Allerton, the Palmolive, the Drake. The 1860s Water Tower is the lone pre-fire building among them. Every other landmark on the Mile is twentieth-century architecture standing on land that had to be cleared before they could be built.

This is the inverse of every other stop on the Magnificent Mile. The other landmarks are what the city built after the clearing. The Water Tower is what the clearing did not take.