Politicians may be a different breed from the rest of us, but even they need to drink.
TITLE BLOCK Proposed water supply of the City Hall, Philadelphia. General plan of present and suggested mains.
DATE October 1884
EXTENT Parts of West Philadelphia, Center City, North Philadelphia, and Fairmount Park which include reservoirs, exisiting, unfinished, or proposed, that might serve the still unfinished City Hall.
SOURCE PWD Historical Collection. Map is frontispiece of the Report of the Committee on Water Supply of the New City Hall, Philadelphia; together with the report of Howard Murphy, C.E., hydraulic engineer to the Commissioners for the Erection of the New Public Buildings, therein recommended for adoption, and the action of the Commissioners thereon, February 3, 1885.
WHY DO I LIKE THIS MAP? My favorite part of the map is the section on the left side, showing the relative elevations of the city’s reservoirs and how high in the new City Hall water would need to reach. One recommendation in the report accompanying the map was to provide a separate main directly from a reservoir to the building to ensure adequate water pressure. The map also shows many small streams in Fairmount Park, and gives some of them names. In West Park, I knew about Lansdowne and Sweet Briar creeks, but I had never noticed the small stream identified as Sweet Briar Vale. It also shows the proposed Cambria Reservoir, which was never built, and the unfinished East Park Reservoir, which was finally completed in 1889, 20 years after its construction was begun. City Hall itself would not be completed for 17 years after this map was made, in 1901.
MORE INFORMATION This is a rare example where a written report is more interesting to me than the map accompanying it. Howard Murphy, the civil engineer who wrote the report, goes into fascinating (at least to me) detail about wells that had been dug in Center City and the quality of water obtained from them. One would have thought that, since the entire water system for Philadelphia began, in part, as a replacement for polluted wells, that this option would not have been considered, but Murphy gives the option its due before recommending that the building rely on the municipal supply.
He also lists all the uses for which water will be needed in the new building, which adds up to about 500,000 gallons a day! He quantifies everything from the gallons used by water closets and self-cleansing urinals, for floor-washing and for fighting the occasional fire. He calculates that the average person will use 3 gallons (!) to wash their hands with soap and water and, as “it is to be hoped to the that we may estimate upon the occupancy of this building by cleanly persons, such may be expected to wash hands upon entering, before lunch, before going home and after use of the closets, say four times per day, and consuming 12 gallons of water per person, or 12,000 gallons for, say, 1000 persons.”
And why City Hall needed twenty bathtubs (50 gallons each, used twice a day, for a total of 2,000 gallons a day) is beyond me. Maybe if employees came in unwashed, their supervisors could order them into the bath?
If anyone knows of any bathtub that still remains in our grand old City Hall, I’d like to see it, and maybe dip my toe into it, if the water is just right.