This walk reconstructs a once ubiquitous but now largely forgotten piece of the circa-1900 Berkeley urban landscape. Back then, windmill-topped water towers stood on nearly every city block, pulling up water from wells into elevated water tanks and providing pressurized water for domestic use. Of the thousands of “tank houses’’ that once existed in Berkeley, only a handful remain.
We’ll visit six surviving examples in North and West Berkeley and learn about what people had to do to get water in the pre-EBMUD East Bay. Aaron Goldstein, a licensed architect, architectural historian, and San Francisco native, has been studying and tracking down the East Bay’s urban tank houses for over five years. He has led hundreds of curious locals on his walking tours as part of the public education component of his ongoing research project. Aaron lives and works in a 1905 tank house in North Oakland.
Distance: about 3 miles
Accessibility: The walk covers mostly level terrain, but there are several areas of narrow and/or uneven pavement. The tour involves periods standing for 10-20 minutes at each of the five sites. Because the surviving tanks are quite spread out, there are some long stretches of walking at the beginning of the tour.
Sign up for one or more walking tours online here (members only until August 26), or print and mail this form with a check, postmarked by August 31.