The Metropolitan Water Works' Chestnut Hill High Service Pumping Station, built 1886-87 and expanded in 1897-98, was built at the height of what is sometimes called Boston’s Golden Age, a period of great prosperity for Boston and New England, lasting from the Civil War through World War I.

The architecture and landscape of Boston— both local and regional, physical and intellectual--serve as the backdrop of the construction of this building. While not unique as an “industrial building in fancy dress,” the Pumping Station has a fascinating story.

Starting in the mid-1830s, Boston developed its first public water supply. The Cochituate Aqueduct came into service in 1848, not long before the filling of the Back Bay. While mostly buried, that water system incorporated three visible public expressions of civic pride: a towering fortress-like reservoir behind the State House; the elegant gatehouse of the aqueduct’s terminal reservoir; and a 90-foot high jet of water that first erupted from the surface of the Frog Pond in the Boston Common during the Great Water Celebration, in October 1848, when the Cochituate water first arrived in Boston. For many years afterwards, it continued to play on certain occasions—a civic monument whose only substance was water.

While the Pumping Station does not explicitly reveal its industrial function, it is broken down into functional modules: coal store, boiler house, and, although masked by the tower and symbolic entrance arch, the machine room containing the pumps. To some extent, it presaged the modernist injunction that form should follow function.

The Architecture of the Chestnut Hill Reservoir

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