Flushing Station
John Gurda - Cream City Chronicles
John Gurda - Cream City Chronicles
Beneath the lakefront landmark at 1701 N. Lincoln Memorial Drive lies a water pump that was once the largest in the world, with a propeller fourteen feet in diameter.
The pump, which still works, was installed to remedy a nineteenth-century problem delicately referred to as "the river nuisance." The lower Milwaukee River was a lively stream in its native state, but decades of dredging and docking had turned it into an estuary—an inlet of the lake whose current was barely perceptible. There were times, in fact, when the river actually flowed backward, a phenomenon that can still be observed occasionally today. The becalmed river became a watery grave for all sorts of urban waste, including tons of horse manure that plopped onto the city's streets every day and washed into the stream with the next rain. By the 1870s, the city faced a pollution problem of epic proportions. Summer heat turned the slack, scum-covered waters of the river into a noxious stew whose smell was almost overpowering. Contemporary observers left no adjective unturned in describing the stream. "Filthy, villainous, unhealthy, plague-breeding," offered one reporter. Another wrote that the prevailing stench "made the average mortal wish he had been born without nostrils." The chorus continued: "sickening," "deplorable," "intolerable," "vile and offensive," "unendurable." "Simply disgusting," added a visiting lady lecturer. "Why, I nearly stifled as the steamer came up the harbor this morning." Something obviously had to be done. No one suggested diapering the horses or closing the tanneries and breweries. The simplest "solution," some believed, was to open the North Avenue dam every so often and push the accumulated filth out into the lake. The city's engineers, however, concluded that opening the dam would simply mix the soup without removing it, and that it would take three weeks for the pool upstream to recharge. Others favored pumping Milwaukee's wastewater over the glacial divide west of town and into some river that would carry the problem to the Mississippi. City officials chose an alternate course. Why not, they wondered, dig a tunnel under the East Side and pump fresh lake water into the putrid river, giving it enough force to cleanse its lower reaches? Why not flush? That was precisely what they did. Workers dug a horizontal hole, twelve feet in diameter and a half-mile long, between Lake Michigan and a river outlet just below the North Avenue dam. They also dredged a lake inlet, now lined with concrete walls, that is still a popular fishing spot. The inlet fed a huge, steam-driven pump designed by Milwaukee's own E.R Allis Company, a forerunner of Allis-Chalmers. The pump's centerpiece was a Titanic-sized propeller capable of moving nearly 6,000 gallons of water every second. Both pump and propeller were enclosed in a handsome Romanesque building that might have been mistaken for a Turner hall or a school. The "flushing works" was completed in September 1888, at a total cost of $240,774.88. Milwaukee thought its problems were over. The Allis pump could replace the entire contents of the river below the dam every twenty-four hours. "This immense volume of water keeps the river in very fine condition," wrote city engineer George Benzenberg, "and tends to cool the air along its shore during hot days." Another problem surfaced soon enough. Lake Michigan's long-shore currents generally move from north to south in the Milwaukee area, but contrary weather sometimes pushed the plume of river sewage in the opposite direction—right over the city's water intakes at North Point. Milwaukeeans began to suffer regular epidemics of "intestinal flu," and it didn't take a trained hydrologist to identify the culprit. The city started adding chlorine to its drinking water in 1910, but it was not until 1925, when the Jones Island treatment plant opened, that the sewage threat was largely neutralized. We have traveled light-years from the time when Milwaukee's main river was literally an open sewer. No one would confuse the downtown channel with a trout stream today, but its water quality is immeasurably better than it was in the 1880s. The Flushing Station, built as a monument to desperation, has become a working antique, its pump operated only occasionally for "general maintenance purposes." Now the station serves a different purpose. A partnership between the Sewerage District and Colectivo Coffee Roasters preserves one of Milwaukee's most distinctive landmarks, and a coffee shop occupies the main floor. That, I think, is grounds for applause, but there's also an irresistible irony on the lake-front: A high-end coffeehouse is now selling beverages in a facility designed to move a far murkier liquid. |