Mile 190.3 - RBD Water Treatment Plant City of St. Louis

190.3 RBD Water Treatment Plant City of St. Louis

The residents of St. Louis, along 13 million other inhabitants along the Mississippi River, draw their water resources directly from the big river. The City of St. Louis Water Division maintains two water treatment plants that draw water from the area's two main rivers. The Chain of Rocks Plant is located on the Mississippi River about eleven miles north of the center of the City and about five miles south of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. The Howard Bend Treatment Facility is located on the Missouri River, 37 miles above the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and 15 miles west of the City limits. Combined, these two plants have the capacity to treat and distribute 380 million gallons of water per day. From their website, the City of St. Louis Water Division state: “In our dedication to provide the highest quality water to our customers, we continually monitor, test, and purify this water. The Water Division always maintains a sufficient amount of chemicals on hand for use in purifying and disinfecting the water.”

Water Towers

As you paddle through St. Louis (or maybe as you look over neighborhoods from the Hwy 66 Bridge) you notice some tall elegant towers, skinny like a minaret, brick & stone, obviously old, well engineered and architecturally striking -- but they seem to serve no purpose. They look more like church steeples than anything. They don’t bulge out, like a new water tower would. Perhaps you have wondered what these are. These three structures are the old “standpipe water towers.” These towers are remnants of another time; each is at least a century old. Before modern pumping methods, the steam-driven pumps that were used to send water throughout the city created large surges in pressure, often causing the pipes to rattle and shake. This also caused multiple-story houses to have difficulty getting water to upper floors. Standpipes (large vertical pipes in which a column of water rose and fell to prevent surges) were built to equalize water pressure. For aesthetic purposes, towers were built to hide the standpipes. In times past, nearly 500 of these towers dotted the cities and towns of the United States. As technology advanced, however, standpipes became obsolete, and most of the standpipes and the towers surrounding them were torn down. Today, only seven remain, and St. Louis has three of them. All three have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since the early 1970s. They are the Grand ("Old White") Water Tower, the Bissell ("New Red") Water Tower and the Compton Hill Water Tower.

Grand ("Old White") Water Tower

Described as "the only perfect Corinthian column of its size in the world," the Grand ("Old White") Water Tower on 20th Street and Grand Avenue was built during the waterworks expansion led by Thomas Whitman (brother of poet Walt Whitman) following the Civil War.

The Bissell ("New Red") Water Tower

The Bissell ("New Red") Water Tower was built in 1885-86 from design plans by Deputy Building Commissioner William S. Eames, a founder of the St. Louis chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Constructed from red brick, light gray stone and terra cotta, the tower stands 194 feet high and is located at Bissell Street and Blair Avenue. The interior of the tower once contained a spiral staircase that led to a balcony at the top, but that staircase has since been removed.

The Compton Hill Water Tower, the newest of the City's three towers. Located at Grand and Russell Boulevards, the tower is built on the 36 acre Reservoir Park, and was completed in 1898 after a design by Harvey Ellis. The 179-foot tower is made of rusticated limestone, buff-colored brick and terra cotta. Its walls are adorned with carvings of mythical animals and leaf patterns. Inside, spiral steps take visitors to the top of the tower where an observation deck under a bell-shaped roof of terra cotta tiles offers a 360-degree view of the City of St. Louis.