Neville Wakefield

Rachel Whiteread: Looking Up
Scalo, 1999
ISBN: 9783908247166

The trouble with water is that you just don’t know where it’s been.

It is, however, not true that the water we drink from the faucet has passed through several bodies en route to its passage through our own.

Average water usage in the U.S. is approximately 50 gallons per person per day.

Water costs about $2 per 1000 gallons. Of this amount 30 cents are for treatment and the rest (excluding profit) pays the mortgage on the treatment plant, the conveyance of the water, the maintenance of pipework, and the salaries of the utility company workers.

The New York City distribution system contains approximately 6.180 miles of pipe. 88.633 mainline valves, 103.661 fire hydrants, 6 distributing facilities, 16 gatehouses, 15 pump stations, and 11 maintenance and repair yards.

According to the Department of Environmental Protection’s Water Supply Statement of 1997, over 90% of New York City’s 1.3 billion gallon daily water consumption is groundwater collected from a 1.969 square mile watershed.

Quoting Bernard De Voto, Joan Didion wrote: “The West begins where the average rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it and the same is true of power.” (The White Album, 1979)

In Adult Comedy Action Drama (1995), Richard Prince makes his own laconic observation regarding such connections. On p. 153 is an image of the Department of Water & Power in Los Angeles, California from Fall 1991.

That same photograph is reproduced on the inside jacket of Courtney Love’s Celebrity Skin, an album cryptically dedicated “To all the stolen water of LA and to anyone who ever drowned.”

In the movie Chinatown, Robert Toyne depicts water as the incestual connection between power and ancestry, a dirty yet transparent secret passed along aqueducts and oviducts, from place to place, from generation to generation, diverted by developers away from agriculture to the city.

In arid climates, water is the liquid capital on which dynasties flourish or founder. “Gentlemen:’ declares Mayor Bagby in an opening scene from Chinatown, “Today you can walk out that door, turn right, hop on the streetcar and in twenty-five minutes end smack in the Pacific Ocean. Now you can swim in it, you can fish in it, you can sail in it-but you can’t water your lawns with it, you can’t irrigate an orange grove with it. Remember: We live next to the ocean but we also live on the edge of the desert. Los Angeles is a desert community. Beneath this building, beneath every street there’s a desert. Without water, the dust will rise up and cover us as though we had never existed.”

In the state of New York the average annual rainfall is 42-43 in.

“Before this, I turned on the faucet, it came out hot and cold, I didn’t think a thing of it.” -Gittes, the private investigator in Chinatown.

Those of us who live in such temperate parts of the world think about water rarely since we take its presence for granted. Yet the social and historical structure of the city owes its form to the availability of water to combat fire and disease.

“New York:’ says Andrew Rosenwach, president of Rosenwach Tank Co.. the original and one of two main operations still building wooden tanks in New York City, “is, in our mind, a tank town.” (Pipelines, Spring 1998)

Pipelines is the quarterly newsletter of the American Family of Tank, Plumbing and Cooling Tower Specialists.

Buildings, like bodies, are serviced by subcutaneous arterial systems largely invisible from the outside. Stop-cocks, faucets, pressure valve, and drains regulate a system based on supply and demand.

Early settlers in Manhattan obtained water from shallow privately owned wells. In 1677 the first public well was dug in front of the old fort at Bowling Green. In 1776, when the population reached approximately 22,000, a reservoir was constructed on the east side of Broadway between Pearl and White streets.

Water pumped from wells sunk near the Collect Pond, east of the reservoir, was distributed through hollow logs laid in the principal streets. In response to the fires that ravaged the City thoughout the summer of 1830, and to the cholera epidemic of the same year, a tank was constructed by the City at 13th Street and Broadway and was filled from a well.

Water from the tank was distributed through two 12-inch cast iron pipes. After exploring alternatives for increasing supply, the City decided to impound the water from the Croton River in what is now Westchester county, forcibly cementing the relationship between the concentrated form of urban interior and the rural beyond.

At 5 a.m. on June 22, 1842, water was admitted into the Croton aqueduct for the first time. Twenty-two hours later, water emerged at the Harlem River end of the line, followed shortly thereafter by a small boat called the Croton Maid and its intrepid crew. The Croton system - now a series of twelve reservoir basins in Putman, Westchester, and Duchess supplying a mere 10 % of the daily metropolitan water consumption - provides a natural water pressure from the head of a reservoir approximately 300 ft. above sea level.

The water that I will draw from my tap tomorrow in New York City is passing today through City Tunnel No.1 on an 18-mile underground journey from Hillsview Reservoir in Yonkers down to the smaller rooftop reservoir that is my water tank. Natural pressure of approximately 40 pounds per square inch (psi) is created by the head of water that is the holding reservoir. This is sufficient to force the water to a height of five to six storeys above grade.

Water pressure is regulated within a range of 35 to 60 psi at street level. About 95% of total consumption is delivered by gravity. Water towers are diurnal valves: emptied during the daytime where peak demand causes pressure to drop and filled up again at night. Prior to the advent of efficient mechanical water pumps at the end of the nineteenth century, few buildings exceeded the height of the natural water pressure.

Water towers are the architectural manifestations of a fluid architecture that connects the atmospheric to the subterranean, the rainfall of the watertable to the underground supply network.

The skyline of old New York is the engineering consequence of the reserves of water held in upstate regions. According to current estimates there are 17.000 rooftop water tanks in New York City. (Pipelines, Spring 1998)

“The poetry of New York is not that of a practical concrete building that scrapes the sky; the poetry of New York is that of a many-piped organ of red ivory-it does not scrape the sky, it resounds in it with the compass of the stysole and diastole of the visceral canticle of elementary biology ...” - Salvador Dali quoted by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York, 1994 The economy of water operates on the scale of supply and demand.

In 1905, increases in demand led to the creation by the State legislator of the Board of Water Supply.

Its first project was the development of the Catskill System. The Board of Water Supply proceeded to plan and construct facilities to impound the waters of the Esopus Creek, one of the four Catskill watersheds.

New York City is currently served by three systems - the Croton, Catskill, and Delawa systems - linking nearly 2.000 square miles of watershed to B million residents.

To ensure the quality of the New York City water supply, the City has instigated an aggressive ten-year, $260 million program to acquire hydrologically sensitive watershed land and protect it from the effects of human habitation. Human habitations must be protected from their own effects.

In New York City the sewage charge -the water used in the disposal of human waste - constitutes approximately two thirds of a building’s entire water bill. In 1997, the Department of Environmental Protection exceeded the first year’s goal of soliciting the owners of 56.609 acres of watershed land, placing 9.100 acres of land under purchase contracts worth $24 million, and closed on 147 acres.

Litigation on behalf of 45 property owners in the upstate watershed, seeking damages of approximately $10.5 billion in the aggregate for the alleged diminution in value of their property caused by a chilling effect on the real estate market from the City’s regulatory program, is pending following a denial in June of 1997 of the City’s motion to dismiss this suit. The same litigation asserts claims for the unconstitutional taking of property without just compensation.

The City has also received approximately 80 additional claims from individual property owners not party to the joint litigation, seeking similar relief. ‘Yeah -they’ve been blowing these farmers out of here buying their land for peanuts. Have any idea what this land’lI be worth with a steady water supply? About 30 million more than they paid.” -Gittes in Chinatown.

In present-day New York City, the politics of land values can be read in the architecture of the skyline. Water, like any other system, is political: power that can be channeled, streamed, diverted and stored.

All surface and groundwater entering New York City’s distribution system is treat with chlorine, orthophosphate, and in some cases, sodium hydroxide.

Orthophosphate is added to create a protective film on pipes which reduces the release of metals such as lead from household plumbing.

A sequestering phosphate is added to keep naturally occurring minerals, mainly iron and manganese, from settling out in distribution and household plumbing. Since the mid-1960s a small amount of fluoride - one part per million - has beer added to the City’s water supply in accordance with the New York City Health Code.

Watertowers have, since that time, become one of the visible manifestations of a City-wide program to prevent tooth decay. Traditional wooden watertowers have been depicted by Stieglitz, Hopper, Sheeler, Abbott, the Bechers, Feininger, Kertesz, and others. The construction of wooden tanks has changed little over the past century and is Iaid out by a National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standard.

All lumber designated for tank construction shall be well-seasoned and free from rot, sap, loose or unsound knots, wormholes and shakes in accordance with the National Wood Tank Institute Bulletin S82.

As defined by the NFPA 22 Standard for Water Tanks for Private Fire Protection, a holiday is “A discontinuity in the coating system including but not limited to voids, cracks, pinholes or scratches.”

Untreated lumber in the staves and bottom shall be thoroughly air-dried (below 17% moisture content) “All Heart” or “Tank Stock” without any sapwood after shaping. Acceptable untreated species shall be redwood, western yellow cedar, southern white cedar (dismal swamp), western red cedar and Douglas fir (coast type), the varieties being arranged in order of preference.

The lumber in the staves and bottom of the tank should be according to the prescribed specifications at least 2 ½ in. nominal dressed to not less than 2⅛ in. thickness for tanks less than 20 ft. in depth or diameter.

The standard sizes of wood tanks are 5000 gal., 10.000 gal., 15.000 gal., 20.000 gal., 25.000 gal., 30.000 gal., 40.000 gal., 50.000 gal., 60.000 gal., 75.000 gal. and 100.000 gal. net capacity.

Tanks of other sizes are built. Wooden tanks, if well-maintained, are expected to last upwards of 30 years.

Since most of the water we consume is held suspended in the upper atmosphere it is appropriate that Water Tower is transparent. Water towers were originally designed to provide a static head of water held in momentary abeyance of the laws of gravity. Rachel Whiteread’s Water Tower is filled only with atmosphere.

To look at Whiteread’s Water Tower is not only to be reminded of the origins of what we take for granted but also to delve into the functioning of a larger system of which wooden water towers are merely the visible pinnacles. On August 13, 1998, eight weeks after the installation of Water Tower on a SoHo rooftop, Mayor Giuliani inaugurated City Water Tunnel No.3, the largest capital improvement project in the City’s history.

The construction of City Water Tunnel No.3 began in 1970 and has so far cost $1.000.000.000 and 24 lives. At its deepest, below Roosevelt Island, the tunnel is between 700 and 800 ft. below ground, its finished diameter nearly twice that of the base of Water Tower.

Upon completion, the flow of City Water Tunnel No.3 will be operated by four large underground valve chambers, The largest of the valve chambers is at Van Cortland Park, built 300 ft. below the surface and 620 ft. long (longer than two football fields placed end to end).

“The activation of City Water Tunnel No.3 marks the culmination of a century of strategic water planning in New York City.” -Mayor Giuliani’s inaugural address. August 13.1998 Water Tower is also a monument to the culmination of a water distribution system that has remained largely unchanged for 160 years.