They look like miniature castles that tried to cross a wide and powerful river and got stuck in the middle.
What were the architects thinking?
That’s what you might be asking as you look south crossing over the Mississippi on the New Chain of Rocks Bridge on Interstate-270 in St. Louis. They were no accident.
“What style should we build?” This was the great question posed to architects of the day. Unlike in past ages, the answers to urban planning weren’t as defined as the classical golden ratio anymore. For some, the Eiffel Tower and Crystal Palace epitomized the bold answers demanded by modernity; others less bold, fell back on trusty Neo-Renaissance and Gothic styles.
The two castle towers standing side by side in the middle of the Mississippi River in St. Louis today, in fact, sprang from the latter camp. To the southwest, we have the smaller of the two towers, the older cylindrical building constructed in 1894. It features rough-cut limestone, arched windows, an encircling balcony, and a conical copper roof. The weather furnished it with its green patina. Of the two towers, it resembles a medieval castle the most.
More northeasterly and nearer to the Interstate, the second tower of about the same height but roughly twice the heft was built later, in 1915. This one has the Roman design of an Italian Renaissance villa. It features thick decorative stone casing, arched doors, and a pair of columns on either side of an entrance. The two façades are mirror images of each other. White subway tile covers the interior. Were it a real Renaissance villa, there would be a soaring great hall within.
Surprisingly, no one has ever thought to name these two towers. A variety of designations have been given, though, for civic utilitarian purposes: the older one was simply called “Tower 1,” “The Small Tower,” or “The Old Tower.” Rather predictably, the newer one was called “Tower 2,” “The Big Tower,” or “The New Tower.”
The mind behind Tower 1 was that of the prominent St. Louis architect William Eames, known for his Palace of Education, designed for the 1904 World’s Fair, and St. Louis’s own Cupples Warehouse Complex. Rather than enlist just one mind for the second tower, the city hired the architectural firm Roth and Study for the project.
Just a water treatment plant.
It might sound mundane, humdrum, even boring. But it’s hard to deny it—they are beautiful.
“They could easily just have been ‘holes’ in the river instead of little castles,” the executive director of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Andrew Weil, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The towers were built when a lot of time and effort was being put into embellishing our community architecture.”
Essentially, the two “castles” consist of ornate water intake structures with several levels of ports built into the sides of each, thereby managing the changing water levels at different times of the year. Gates were fashioned for each port which, when removed, would enable water to flow diagonally down gravity-fed tunnels into the treatment facility.
It’s amazing how long they have operated. Both were still in use as late as 1993, until high waters eventually filled the intake ports with debris and mud. The structures themselves are outfitted with prows—which probably explains why they are so stalwart. Although the city’s budget hasn’t yet permitted a revitalization of the towers, that could conceivably be done; city employees do visit the towers once or twice per year to conduct inspections. The towers were granted landmark status by the city in 1971.
Getting to either of them is fraught with risks. There are rapids and rock shelves strewn all about, and a raging current makes it a fight just to take hold of the ladder. Although neither tower has electricity or plumbing, they include living quarters with coal furnaces for heat as they were once manned by crews who handled the city’s clean water supply. Since their closure, trespassers have set foot inside, though that was halted in 2010 when steel gates were installed.
Actually, three others, landbound, form a system with Towers 1 and 2, with the grounded trio serving as pressure valves to maintain equal water pressure across the city. “They could have been built as large pipes with no character,” Mr. Weil said, speaking to the notion of “form follows function” in the city of St. Louis over a hundred years ago.
Still standing glorious and tall today, these three have actual names: The Bissell Point Tower (by Mr. Eames); the East Grand Tower (the largest freestanding Corinthian column in the world); and the Compton Hill Tower (a marvelous display of the French Romanesque style). The Bissell Point Tower rises to 195 feet while the other two are 154 feet high. All stand as symbols of community pride. All are remarkably adorned.
“All five towers were built at a time when the people in charge were creating beautiful architecture instead of something just utilitarian,” Mr. Weil said. “Each are very significant landmarks in the history of our city.”
