infrastructure – Page 4 – Hidden Hydrology

19 December 2017 19 December 2017

Underground Munich

Jason Kingcity, cultural, history, infrastructure, maps, munich, places, rivers, streams3 Comments

I stumbled on an interesting short article via Environment & Society via Twitter (@env_and_society) on some of the subterranean history of Munich, Germany. The post “Munich from Below: What Happens Underground?” was developed by Lisa Bauer and Sonja Meinelt as part of the virtual exhibition “Ecopolis München: Environmental Histories of a City“. The authors paint a common story of growing cities developing new infrastructure to meet demands and deal with growth, but also delve into some interesting concepts as well, ranging from ice, beer, agriculture, mushrooms, and a dead queen.

These stairs are the entrance to Munich’s underworld. They lead down to the masonry canal that was built in 1912. Photo by Lisa Bauer

The development and growth around the Isar River set the stage for disease. “The city’s inhabitants dumped their garbage on their doorsteps or into the Isar. Only a few meters away, they extracted fresh water from wells. Germs and diseases spread ruthlessly, and epidemics of diseases like cholera and typhus killed thousands.” The caption to the map below reads: “This map shows the course of Munich’s streams that are west of the Isar. The different colors represent whether a stream is on the surface or underground. The ones mapped in dark blue are below ground. The ones in light blue are above ground. And the ones mapped in purple are abandoned streams.”

As you see, the majority of streams are now underground. While the infrastructure improvements that utilized the underground systems were driven by water pollution, there are some interesting alternative uses for the subterranean landscape of the city, mentioned in the article. Ice was critical for storage, and “In mild winters, ice for cooling beer cellars was even harvested from the Birnhorn glacier.

The ice was a vital ingredient in storage of beer, which along with clean water was critical to taste. “The cooler the temperature at which the beer was stored, the longer its shelf life. The breweries built deep cellars at the gates of the city, in the sand and gravel pits on the slopes of the Isar. Cooling methods improved steadily. As of 1830, in addition to implementing ventilation systems, breweries also began to use natural ice in their storage cellars. The quality, reputation, and economic success of Munich beer became better and better.”

With beer cellars, comes a perfect spot for a cool place to drink beer as well, such as the Augustiner beer cellar seen below:

Few cellars remain, as mentioned: “The majority of Munich’s beer cellars no longer exist today. After serving as bomb shelters in the Second World War, many were destroyed, demolished, or built over. The beer cellars have since been largely forgotten. Only here and there are they still around, hidden, mostly inaccessible—deep below the cellars of buildings.”

There were some interesting uses in that interim period, especially in the war, where “mushrooms were grown underground in an old rail tunnel beneath Goetheplatz. Today the U3/6 line runs through the “mushroom tunnel,” which was built as a section of Munich’s first subway line.” The below image is from World War II, where “…the subway shaft served as an air-raid shelter, and afterwards as a place for cultivating luxury food: button mushrooms. However, invasive ground water ended mushroom cultivation.”

The underground also was developed to manage runoff, as previous mentioned. “To ensure that wastewater does not flow into the Isar, enormous subterranean basins store excess water.” The image in the header, shows one of these, and below shows “The largest rainwater-retention basin in Europe (90,000 meters) is located below Hirschgarten…”

Beyond the underground storage tanks, the aforementioned sewers were build come with an interesting tale. The impetus for the sewerage is a common theme, to combat waterborne disease. This case was a bit different, as discussed in “The Queen’s Death Ensures Clean Water“:

“Max von Pettenkofer brought about a change in Munich’s cleanliness. The doctor found that the recurring cholera outbreaks could be traced back to unhygienic conditions. In order to counteract the causes of the epidemics, he encouraged the idea of a modern sewage system with a waste transport system and the introduction of flush toilets. He also pushed for a supply of drinking water from the Mangfall valley in the Alpine Foreland. He initially encountered strong resistance. The government took action only after the death of Queen Therese of Bavaria. In 1854 she became a victim, along with another 2,935 Munich residents, of a cholera outbreak.”

Thus Munich built the modern system, per the map above. The image above shows this “…masonry canal was built in 1912. Even today it drains wastewater from surrounding houses.”

The hidden hydrology of any city starts to become similar when you start looking at how cities have developed, development pressures, and the inevitable ‘modernization’ by burying of surface waters into underground systems. The thread that exists in modern urban areas around the globe, concurrent with the Industrial Era in the 1850s to 1900s, is telling as within a short timeframe of a century, most world cities will have undergone a massive reconfiguration from surface to subsurface water. Not to say Munich is special in this case, just brings up the point that all stories lead to a similar conclusion. Worthy of some comparative exploration.

From this inquiry also emerges some interesting stories of how subterranean spaces have been used, re-purposed, and are woven in the histories of places and their people.

Citation: Bauer, Lisa, and Sonja Meinelt. “Munich from Below.” In “Ecopolis München,” edited by L. Sasha Gora. Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions 2017, no. 2. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/8052.

14 December 2017 15 December 2017

DC Water Atlas

Jason Kingcase study, city, history, infrastructure, maps, places, rivers, streams, washington dc1 Comment

Last year, I did a review of some of the hidden hydrology of Washington DC showcasing contemporary studies along with a range of historical maps. Since that post, an amazing mapping project by John Davis (@jnddavis) has launched that’s worth some further examination.

Called the D.C. Water Atlas, the site is hosted by the Dumbarton Oaks, and is summarized as:

“A digital atlas of waterways big and small in Washington, D.C., from the eighteenth century to the present. The online atlas provides a clear sense of the relationship in scale between a city block and the course of an entire river, and facilitates visualizing changes over time in layers or phases.”

A simple blueprint theme provides the foundation for data organized into larger groupings of Aqueduct, Canal, Watefrtont, Watershed, and Sewer. Each of these can be accessed via the navigation or through exploration of the map. The larger theme maps give a short text description and some dashed boxes highlighting more information such as the aqueduct below (click images to see larger images).

The regional scale makes way for the urban, concentrating on the DC area, in terms of Watefront and Sewer, with a cool rollover method of depicting the growth of the sewer system from the 1870s to 90s.

Or the larger system of water conveyance and reservoirs, including the aqueducts, explained: “The original distribution system, built as part of the construction of the aqueduct itself, served only a relatively small area of the city, as compared to the extent of water service now. Shown as a dashed line on the map, the original water-supply mains prioritized government buildings, such as the Capitol and the White House, and areas of concentrated population, like Georgetown. To ensure adequate pressure throughout the system, and to get water to places that were at higher elevation than downtown, the engineers built a series of “high service” reservoirs in high points around the city. Most have been demolished in modernization efforts. A few fragments of trident-shaped fencing, however, remain in the special collections of the Georgetown Public Library, which was built on the site of one of these domed reservoirs.”

This also expands out into the fringes, to show the reach of water systems in watershed, canal, scales, and aqueducts that connect hinterland with urban center. The maps below shows the watershed north of the urban area.

Each map contains the ‘Year Depicted’ so there’s continuity of some form of linearity time-wise (most depicting a timeline from the mid-1800’s through early 1900s and later. There area also some hidden ‘ghosts’ such as a proposed reservoir in the Rock Creek Valley, a dam that could have been as “…engineers eyed the valley as a convenient site for a water reservoir close to downtown. Luckily for the city’s residents, a group of citizens led by Charles C. Glover urged Congress to purchase the land comprising today’s park, and blocked construction of the dam, which would have inundated a large part of the urban landscape.”

It has the feeling of an exploratory video game, as the opening page was fun to see what emerged, and as you zoomed in on scale, the layers of history was revealed in a nonlinear narrative. The highlighted sections were cues, but the users

The scale at some times get’s relatively micro, with zoomed area such as the Navy Yard, below, the nested scales working well in revealing significant water system landmarks.

And the Cabin John Bridge, in which “…engineers designed and built a masonry arch bridge to support the aqueduct’s conduit in its course across the valley. This graceful structure, noted for its simplicity of design and elegant form, was the longest single-span masonry arch in North America for nearly one hundred years.”

The extensive bibliography shows a richness of data that can be layered and unified (often a missing piece for critical analysis using sources of different types). There’s also a complementary essay, in which Davis discusses his take on the digital format in flattening the narrative structure of maps, as well as some methodology, including the pains of digitization and archiving and a switch to open source GIS, and some thoughts on the way we present spatial data. As Davis mentions, scale is one of the key elements that needs to be considered in representation:

“The Water Atlas, because of extensive processing, does convey a sense of place and space to the structures and landscapes it considers. A combination of cartography and orthographic drawing conventions, the Water Atlas resists the ubiquitous tendency to reduce events, structures, and landscapes to icons. Instead, it portrays these structures as visible at an urban scale, and the drawings reflect the true impact of these structures on the landscape. Though not as fluid and seamless as the Google Maps-powered Panorama, or Leaflet, or Neatline; orthographic, architectural scale drawings convey information at that middle scale necessary for representation and analysis of landscape.”

It’s worth clicking and just exploring and seeing for yourself the layers, often easily discerned and sometimes hidden in the relatively simple interface. And as Davis mentions, it works at a scale that unlocks stories at a range that seems both comprehensive and accessible. As mentioned on the Dumbarton Oaks page, the Atlas “… shows the development of the city’s water infrastructure over time, from large features like canals to the sewer grid and water treatment facilities…” adding “It’s interesting to be able to visualize things that aren’t always apparent when you’re walking around the city,” says John Davis, Tyler fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies. “It’s a totally different conception of how the city works.”

As I compile precedents for my own mapping, this stands out as a really inspiring example of what could be. The interface isn’t seamless, but in a way that works in a way where you have to dig a little and move around to unearth all of the secrets. The multi-scalar approach could be adapted to any area and allow for spatial and temporal layering. I likened it to an exploratory video game, but perhaps it more a metaphor for hidden hydrology, that all is not immediately revealed, and that part of the fun is in the journey.

All images – screen shots taken of the DC Water Atlas. The footer for the site reads: “This project was completed as part of work for a Tyler Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C. Copyright John Davis and the Trustees of Harvard University, 2016. All Rights Reserved.”

13 December 2017 14 December 2017

The Water in the Wood

Jason Kingarchaeology, history, infrastructure, precedents26 Comments

The inventiveness of early builders constantly provides us with wonder at their ability to create systems from available materials. The use of wood logs as piping for water and sewer is one of those logically illogical things that makes a lot of sense, but also boggles the mind when you consider the immensity of urban infrastructural systems that relied on this as the primary water and sewer conveyance technology for many years. A May 2017 article in The Washington Post, “Discovered: Philadelphia’s high-tech, totally natural plumbing of 1812″ shows the use of tree trunks, in this case, a series “…of 10-foot pine logs, laboriously drilled to create a 4- to 6-inch center opening and bound together by iron couplings… The pine pipes lay buried and forgotten for two centuries until a worker sank a backhoe in the 900 block of Spruce Street earlier this week.”

Part of the original 45 miles of wooden mains in Philadelphia, expert on all things water in Philadelphia, Adam Levine via his great site PhillyH20 (see also my post here for more) provided some, including some additional history and imagery of the wooden pipes, in this case “A section of wooden water pipe, long out of service, removed from a Philadelphia street in 1901. It had been installed about 1801.”

Other cities obviously used similar technologies, via a fascinating site by Jon C. Schladweiler, The History of Sanitary Sewers we can find some good history and lots of imagery of wood pipes, including bored elm & hemlock used in London as well as Philadelphia and other US Cities where it was employed. From the site:

“The use of bored elm pipes underground with quills of lead running off into the houses of the well-to-do seems to have begun in London as early as the 13th century. All the old London water companies that appeared between the 16th and 18th century used bored elm pipes for distributing water. “

The natural taper of trees allowed for fittings that mirror the flange of modern pipes, and the holes were bored out manually, aided some times by the use of fire to burn out heartwood. A couple of images from The History of Sanitary Sewers , showing “Bored hemlock (wood log) water pipe, laid about 1754. Early wood log pipe was used often for either water or sewage conveyance.”

The concept of ‘fire plug’ was also explained, where wood pipes could be tapped when there was a fire, auguring through the wood to get at the water (or installed at intervals) and once marked, could be replaced by driving a redwood plug into the hole – thus, the fire plug. An image of this, an example from Philadelphia from a wood pipe with metal banding that was removed in the early 1900s.

An pair of articles from the NYC Environmental Protection mentions the discovery in 2013 of a section of 19th Century Wooden water main during repairs, and some of the history of this in New York infrastructure back as far as the 1820s.

The image above shows the excavation and pipe, with some context via their site.

“The wooden mains were installed in the early 1800’s and were discovered in 2006 during routine utility upgrades that included the replacement of water mains in Lower Manhattan. Adding to the uniqueness of the discovery, when unearthed, the two wooden pipes were still connected, to form a 26-foot section of the city’s original 19^th century water distribution system. While several New York City institutions, including the New-York Historical Society, have pieces of wooden water mains in their collections, there are no known examples of complete sections still intact. Once on display, the wooden mains will help educate New Yorkers and visitors about how clean drinking water helped New York grow into a modern metropolis.”

Another image shows wood water supply pipes, in this case excavation of some pipes installed in Bristol, England, dating back 500 years.

Historical precedents for the use of wood as pipe date back even longer, up to a few millennia, probably to when people began to convey water in earnest by ‘mechanical’ means. Via Dr Susan Oosthuizen (who posts great stuff on Twitter) there was an interesting link about Dutch dam builders (from New Scientist, 1996), which along with the fact they were ‘plagued by lice’, mentions preserved wooden logs used as pipes that were found, using dendrochronology, to have been from around 100-70 BC. “The dig has also uncovered dams and sluices built along an estuary. The dams were shut to keep out high tides, and the sluices were opened at low tide to allow water to drain from farmland that would otherwise have been tidal marsh. One dam, says de Ridder, is in the same place as a modern bridge with a similar tidal barrier and sluice. “They were regulating the water level on a large scale,” he says.”

A sketch showing what these tidal sluices using logs may have looked like comes from a sketch Dr. Oosthuizen posted via Twitter along with the quote “Late IronAge banks kept seawater off Dutch coastal marshes at high tide; & were set w/ wooden pipes to drain dams of fresh water at low tide”

Later iterations use wood in somewhat different ways, typically using ‘staves’ that were milled in lengths and banded with metal straps to create a tight fit, and didn’t require boring. The use of wood that had natural waterproof characteristics, such as cedar and redwood, aided in water tightness. As the saying goes, ‘Wood Pipe is Good Pipe’.

The wood stave offered the option of being able to reach dimensions much larger for greater conveyance (the above shows a range from “3 to 120 inches in diameter”, and allowed for greater expansion in the use of projects, shown here as a diagram of outfall sewers from Niagara Falls which includes both brick tunnel sections and a super steep wood stave flume.

This one below is via sewerhistory.org shows a wood stave sewer line here in Seattle, from around the 1930s, which was a common type of installation of the era. You also see the images of Tanner Creek from this previous post show installation of a similar wood stave and brick in Portland in the 1920s, the preferred method of erasure of urban creeks. along with brick sewers that were becoming more common. Will do a bit more digging on where this is but looks like the image below shows an outfall to Lake Union?

HEADER: Image of 200 year old wood pipe discovered in Philadelphia in May, 2017. Via Washington Post, image Jon Snyder/Philadelphia Inquirer

11 December 2017

Dining on Tanner Creek

Jason Kingart, city, creeks, cultural, explorations, history, infrastructure, places, portland, streamsLeave a Comment

A quick visit to Portland this weekend didn’t feature much in the way of exploration, but it was a pleasure to stumble upon the Tanner Creek Tavern, a new restaurant in the Pearl District (corner of 9th and Everett) with a nice connection to hidden hydrology. The name says it all, but the spot has the distinction of housing some notable historical remnants celebrating Tanner Creek, including some maps and photos of the creek, which ran nearby for many of the early years of Portland’s history before being encased underground in the early 1900s.

The far wall of the restaurant contains a 1870s aerial lithograph of downtown, viewed from the east across the Wilamette River, with the ‘route’ of the creek highlighted in a faint blue. Some questions arise about the fidelity of the tracing of the mouth of the creek, but it does aid in reinforcing Tanner Creek.

Oddly enough, I’ve collected other versions of this map that are not as crisp of a reproduction (it typically comes with a chunky border and is oddly cropped on both sides, but hadn’t seen this particular one, via a link on their website gallery as well., which is beautifully shaded with the wooded West Hills up from the nascent downtown grid and a sparsely filled in east side.

Birds-eye view of the City of Portland, Oregon. Photo file #1924-b

There’s some references to the creek history on the menu, and a bit of a longer text via the website, a sidebar on the Legend of Tanner Creek:

“Tanner Creek was named after the tannery established in 1845 by Kentucky settler and Portland founding father, Daniel Lownsdale. With its headwaters originating in the West Hills, the creek traced its surface path down Canyon Road and through Goose Hollow before emptying into Couch Lake and the surrounding wetlands that now make up the modern Pearl District. Portland’s heavy storm runoff would often cause the creek to overflow, damaging property on the expanding Westside. City fathers tackled this problem in the late 19th century by burying the creek in an enormous brick-lined culvert excavated at some points to a depth of 50 feet. Today this subterranean public works project still functions much the way it did over a century ago. The creek meanders below the Pearl on its final destination to the Willamette River where it empties somewhere between the Broadway Bridge and the Portland Police Horse Paddock.”

A few other views show the space, an airy semi-industrial central bar surrounded by open seating with some wood accents. A really loved the central visibility of the map as the focal point.

Another wall visible from outside has photos of the demise, a set of 1920s era construction photos of the installation of the pipes that took the surface waters underground.

While I am probably same in assuming I was the only one in the place geeking out on a giant wall map of a hidden stream, it’s a decent attempt at connecting a place to place and imbuing a story into what are often sort of hollow legends that are crafted for bars and restaurants in lieu of real context. And, hidden hydrology nerdiness aside, the food and drinks are pretty good as well.

05 December 2017

San Francisco’s Hidden Water Tanks

Jason Kingart, city, history, infrastructure, maps, photography, places, san franciscoLeave a Comment

A fascinating history of hidden hydrology (of a sort) are the mysterious infrastructure traces often in plain sight. We may do a double take, or wonder about some random pattern on the surface, but often dismiss this as legacies of historical cycles of building and erasure. Those on the lookout and with an inquring spirit may discover, if you’ll pardon the pun, a deeper story.

A recent article in May 2017 from CityLab shows “The Sublime Cisterns of San Francisco”, and offers some clues to the origins, namely “Subterranean vats were an emergency response to the city being repeatedly and savagely burned to the ground.” The circles exist at a number of intersections throughout the city, noted with a circle of brick or stone.

“To date there are 170 to 200 of the tanks stashed around town—the city’s numbers vary quite a bit—functioning as emergency watersources apart from the water mains and suction stations pumping saltwater from the Bay.”

The first reference to this urban feature traces back to the always prescient Burrito Justice, who first unlocked the story in 2011, in a post link “Cole Valley Alley Solves Cistern Mystery”, and expanded on this in the 2013 post “What’s Underneath Those Brick Circles”, both of which highlight the origins of the stone circles, some dating back as far as the 1850s.

The original Cole Valley Alley post got some info from the SF Department of Public Works, including the “original 1909 plans for the 75,000 gallon cistern on Frederick & Shrader”

The original CityLab post links to a few more pics from Robin Scheswohl/San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, showing the amazing interior of these spaces:

The CityLab article also mentions the map by Mapzen’s John Oram (Burrito Justice himself), who built a fantastic interactive map of the cisterns available here – a few screenshots of which are found below – which reveals more info when zoomed in, such as location and size.

Another mapping project mentioned is by artist Scott Kildall, as part of his more expansive Water Works project, focused some energy on creating a Map of San Francisco’s Cisterns here.

A model of cisterns as well.

The randomness of these traces is also interesting, with juxtapositions outside of the formal symmetry but off-grid and partially obscured, such as this image. via Kildalls site, where you can read more about his project

Cistern at 22nd and Dolores – via kildall.com

The significance of fire that created this system of cisterns that folks are discovering is driven by several major fires in the 1850s. Thus the distributed reservoirs have been installed since the original founding of the City, seen in a key plan from July 1852 – from Burrito Justice (linking to a David Rumsey map of San Francisco 1853) and identifying intersections where these existed.

The fires culminated in the most notable fire is the aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake, discussed in this April 2017 CityLab story “The Ultimate Photo Map of the 1906 San Francisco Quake” which identifies photographs documenting the event.

Market Street on fire. Looking east to the Ferry Building from Fremont Street, April 18, 1906. (Willard E. Worden photograph. Glass negative courtesy of a private collector). via Open SF History

Quoting Woody LaBounty from this Open SF History Post “Rise of the Phoenix: A Closer Look:

“One hundred and eleven years ago, in the early morning of April 18, San Francisco shook and trembled through a massive earthquake. Stone buildings shed their skins. Chimneys and brick walls collapsed on streets and adjoining buildings. Roadways split and sunk. People were gravely injured or killed by crumbling boarding houses, apartments, and warehouses…

The disaster became much worse as fires broke out from the Embarcadero to Hayes Valley and, aided by wind and inept attempts to create fire breaks with explosives, joined into larger maelstroms that gobbled up almost 500 city blocks of cottages, factories, tenements, hotels, stores, banks, and government buildings over the next three days.”

The extent of the fire is captured in this view from Oakland, via CityLab, showing “A view of the San Francisco earthquake’s aftermath from Oakland” (Credit – Oakland Museum of California)

There’s a pretty extensive history of the SF Fire Department via the SF Museum site (published in 1925) for some historical perspective and some illustrations of these early 1850s fires.

The City of San Francisco Fire Departments page drops a link to the cisterns as well as a video via the exploratorium, ‘The Science of Firefighting: Cisterns’ which has some FD folks “discuss the history and function of these cisterns, and demonstrate the drafting procedures used to access the water.”

Header image via Burrito Justice.