Designed by W. W. Boyington and dedicated at a great celebration in March of 1867, including a grand parade whose participants made their way uncertainly from downtown through Chicago’s muddy streets, the new Chicago waterworks featured several major pieces of infrastructure: the limestone Water Tower and Pumping Station on either side of Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue) at Chicago Avenue, and a two-mile tunnel beneath the lake, at the end of which was an intake known as the “crib.” The Water Tower and Pumping Station were designed by W. W. Boyington in what the Board of Public Works called the “castellated Gothic” style, touched off with battlemented cornices.
The waterworks system was conceived by City Engineer Ellis S. Chesbrough, who had been brought to Chicago in 1855 to solve expanding Chicago's drainage problems shortly after his successful service on Boston’s Cochituate Waterworks. Chesbrough was instrumental in the decision to raise the city’s grade to improve drainage. He proposed the 1860s waterworks not only to meet the needs of Chicago’s rapidly rising population but also to draw water from far enough out in the lake so that it would not be contaminated by the unspeakably polluted Chicago River, which at that time flowed into the lake. This tactic proved only partially effective, and the river’s flow was eventually reversed in the last decade of the century by yet another titanic public works project, the construction of the Sanitary and Ship Canal.
