Call Number:

05

Repository:

The Historical and Interpretive Collections of The Franklin Institute

Extent:

5.0 linear feet

Language:

English

Date:

circa 1885-1925

Creator:

Philadelphia (Pa.). Water Department

Abstract:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was the first city in the United States to provide water as a public utility and was known for its advances in water distribution technology, such as using a centralized distribution system and employing the use of hydropower for pumps. The Philadelphia Water Department (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) traces its roots to 1799 when the Joint Committee on Supplying the City with Water (known as the Watering Committee) was established by the city council in response to pressure from the city's residents to provide them with clean water for drinking, fire fighting, and cleansing the streets following a series of yellow fever epidemics. The Philadelphia Water Department lantern slides, circa 1885-1925, consist of two hundred and ninety-four lantern slides depicting images of documents, machinery, and other subjects related to the Water Department's research and operations.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was the first city in the United States to provide water as a public utility and was known for its early advances in water management technology, such as using a centralized distribution system and employing the use of hydropower for pumps. The Philadelphia Water Department traces its roots to 1799 when the city council established the Joint Committee on Supplying the City with Water (known as the Watering Committee). This was in response to pressure from city residents who wanted clean water for drinking, fire fighting, and cleansing streets following a series of deadly yellow fever epidemics in the 1790s.

The Philadelphia Water Department began providing water to citizens in 1801. The first system, with a steam engine at Centre Square (the current location of City Hall) and a second engine at the foot of Chestnut Street, drew water from the Schuylkill River. Water was piped throughout the city, with paying customers served by direct lines to businesses and houses and free water provided through public hydrants. This system was plagued by high costs and technical problems, however, mostly related the unreliability of the stream engines.

In 1812 work began on a new facility, the Fairmount Water Works on the Schuylkill River at Fairmount. Designed by hydraulic engineer Frederick Graff (1775-1847), the Fairmount Water Works began operating in 1815. Steam engines pumped water up to reservoirs on top of the hill at Fairmount overlooking the river (the current location of the Philadelphia Museum of Art). In addition to the technological advancements it represented, the Fairmount Water Works was widely recognized for its aesthetic beauty and architectural style. It immediately became a major Philadelphia landmark and one of the most popular tourist attractions in early nineteenth-century America.

While the steam engines at the Fairmount Water Works were better-designed than those at Centre Square, they were also inefficient and costly to run, leading to a plan to use water power to pump water into the reservoirs. This was accomplished in 1821, when a dam was completed across the Schuylkill at Fairmount. The dam diverted water to run water wheels to operate the pumps, resulting in major improvements in cost and efficiency over steam powered pumping, which was abandoned at Fairmount. Water-powered turbines were added to Fairmount between 1851 and 1871. By this time, several other steam-powered pumping stations were operating to serve various parts of the City, drawing water from the Schuylkill River, Delaware River, Monoshone Creek (serving the Germantown Water Works) and various springs (supplying the Chestnut Hill Water Works).

The City of Philadelphia and State of Pennsylvania passed various anti-pollution laws beginning in 1828 and in the latter part of the nineteenth century the city purchased large tracts of land upstream from the Fairmount Water Works in order to protect the quality of the water coming into the system. This land became Fairmount Park, the largest landscaped urban park in the world. While these measures helped, pollution remained a major problem. Both the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers became badly polluted. Combined sewers, carrying storm water and sewage in the same pipe, emptied directly into the city's rivers and streams while dumping of industrial wastes went largely unchecked. As a result, water-borne diseases, in particular typhoid fever, killed tens of thousands and sickened hundreds of thousands in the period between the Civil War and the early twentieth century.

To alleviate this public health hazard, the city constructed five slow sand water filtration plants between 1901 and 1912. Filtration, combined with chlorination of the water supply beginning in 1914, resulted in a dramatic decrease in the incidence of water-borne diseases. The Torresdale Filter Plant (now the Samuel S. Baxter Water Treatment Plant) and the Lardner's Point Pumping Station, which delivered filtered water into the city's vast network of distribution pipes, opened in the early twentieth century on the Delaware River in Northeast Philadelphia. These facilities were the largest of their kinds in the world at that time. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, the slow sand filters were replaced by more efficient rapid sand filters.

A small primary wastewater treatment plant went into operation along Pennypack Creek in Northeast Philadelphia in 1912, treating the sewage from several city-owned institutions to prevent it from floating upstream to the intake pipe at the Torresdale plant. In 1914 the city, under state mandate, developed a comprehensive plan for the treatment and collection of sewage, with three treatment plants and hundreds of miles of large intercepting sewers to keep pollution out of rivers and streams.

In 1923 the Northeast Sewage Treatment Plant opened along the Delaware River, but implementation of the rest of the comprehensive system was delayed by the onset of the Great Depression and World War II. Between the 1920s and 1940s, the coal-fired steam engines that pumped water in all plants were replaced by electric pumps. Construction on the comprehensive system began again in the late 1940s, with the Southeast and Southwest plants opening by the mid-1950s. By the 1980s another massive investment upgraded all three plants to secondary treatment. In the early twenty-first century, three water treatment plants supply the city and surrounding suburban communities: Baxter in Northeast Philadelphia, Queen Lane in East Falls, and Belmont in West Philadelphia. The design-rated capacity of all three plants is 522 million gallons a day, with a maximum capacity of 1.044 billion gallons a day. Besides the city's own wastes, the Philadelphia system also treats the sewage of several adjacent communities.

The Fairmount Water Works was decommissioned in 1909 and in 1911 the buildings were retrofitted to house first an aquarium, and later a swimming pool. After being unused for a period in the late twentieth century, the Philadelphia Water Department restored the complex. It is now listed on the National Historic Register and houses the educational and historical exhibits of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center of the Philadelphia Water Department. The entire site, which also includes a restaurant and a restored historic landscape, is part of Fairmount Park and administered by Philadelphia Parks and Recreation.

Bibliography:

Fairmount Water Works. "About Us." 2015. Accessed August 16, 2016. http://fairmountwaterworks.org/about-us/.

Graf, Walter A. "The Water Works of the City of Philadelphia: The Story of Their Development and Engineering Specifications." Last modified 2014. Accessed August 16, 2016. http://www.phillyh2o.org/backpages/GrafHistory_HSP.htm.

Kramek, Niva and Lydia Loh. "The History of Philadelphia's Water Supply and Sanitation System: Lessons in Sustainability for Developing Urban Water Systems." Master of Environmental Studies, University of Pennsylvania as part of the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative, June 2007. Accessed August 31, 2016. https://esa.un.org/iys/docs/san_lib_docs/Philalessonsinsustainability%5B1%5D.pdf.

Philadelphia Water Department. "Brief History of the Philadelphia Water Department." Accessed August 31, 2016. http://www.phila.gov/water/educationoutreach/Documents/PWD_History.pdf.

The Philadelphia Water Department lantern slides, circa 1885-1925, consist of two hundred and ninety-four lantern slides of images of documents, machinery, and other subjects related to the Water Department's research and operations.

Many of the slides are images of 18th, 19th, and 20th century documents, including reports and other records from the Water Department and drawings, maps, plans, and data charts and graphs related to the Fairmount Water Works, the Center Square Water Works, and other aspects of the public water systems in Philadelphia. Additionally, there are images of the water works, waterfronts, machinery, reservoirs and pumping stations, city street pipes, and other subjects related to the Water Department's activities.

Also in the collection are images of maps of various parts of Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, row houses and other Philadelphia city scenes, locks and dams from various locations in the United States and France, construction scenes from the Panama Canal, charts related to water-borne or spread diseases, and other subjects. Each slide measures 3.25" x 4". An inventory is available on-site.