A new book, more than 40 years in the making, about an iconic Philadelphia building

by Adam Levine on

Fairmount Water Works: The Surprising History of an American Landmark

By Jane Mork Gibson and A. Leonard Pundt

This photograph, taken sometime between 1882 and 1891, shows the Fairmount Water Works forebay. Click the picture above to open a larger version, in which you can see several people strolling on the grounds, a potted plant near the Race Bridge, a steamboat just outside the forebay, Boathouse Row, and the observation tower on Lemon Hill. See a similar view, about 40 years later, at the bottom of the page. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

In 1978 Jane Mork Gibson, a historian of technology, worked on the history of the Fairmount Water Works for the Historic American Engineering Record of the Department of Interior. She became fascinated by this iconic building, and ten years later she helped mount an exhibit about Fairmount at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for which this beautiful catalog was produced. Jane was later hired by the Philadelphia Water Department to help them interpret the building’s history as it was being resurrected from its abandonment and transformed into the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center.

Jane had a dream of expanding her earlier efforts into a much more detailed and accurate history of Fairmount, which served as an integral part of the city’s water supply from 1815 until 1909. She completed a first draft of this work before she died in 2016. PWD then hired A. Leonard Pundt III to complete the manuscript and provide the footnotes that Jane had not had the chance to insert. Len was also asked to expand the narrative to include some of the broader context in which Jane was not interested: cultural background, organizational environment, political atmosphere, personal anecdotes that illustrate the personalities of the people involved, and connections between these elements—in short, the things that explain not just the what and when, but also who and why, Among his most valuable additions were coverage of the post-water-supply history of Fairmount, including the Aquarium decades, and a detailed history of the building’s restoration based on interviews he conducted with many of the people responsible for the work.

Len realizes that his mammoth working draft is too long to ever make it into a print edition, but he considers this an important document in itself, as a compendium of all of his and Jane’s years of cumulative research. He hopes that it will prove valuable to other historians for its coverage of:

There are literally thousands of photographs, prints, and drawings of Fairmount in the Philadelphia Water Department Collection alone, and both Jane and Len dream of illustrating this work with some of those many images. For now, though, the words will have to be enough.

The entire manuscript is posted on the Internet Archive, where you can use that site’s built-in book reader to leaf through it page by page. You can also search the entire book by keyword. The Table of Contents is shared below, with links to each section.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Fairmount Water Works, looking upstream on the Schuylkill River, with Boathouse Row on the east bank and Lemon Hill above. This April 1, 1924 photograph, by Phillip Wallace, was taken shortly after the forebay, which once brought water behind the buildings, was filled in. At this time, 15 years after the water works was taken out of service, the buildings housed an aquarium, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art was under construction on the hilltop where the reservoirs once were. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

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