When I first moved to Columbus, mama Serota came with to get me settled.  Being from just east of Cleveland, I asked her what the deal was with all these water towers hanging around these parts.  She told me that she wasn’t positive, but she thought they were water reservoirs, you know in case of a drought.

About a month later, I was having a conversation with JooYoung, who informed me of the main function of water towers, which is to maintain water pressure over an area or for a particular building (e.g. the Smith Bros. hardware building, where I work).

Image courtesy of none other that watertowers.com. DUH.

However, mom was right – water towers also supply and pressurize water during a power outage or failure of the town’s water pump.

I have always had a fondness for water towers (to accompany my bizarre, now indulged fondness of Ohio), so I decided to take a little more time and see what was up with these things.  I found a smidge of interesting information on Wikipedia stating that a large number of water towers are now non-functional, and are protected as historic landmarks and not allowed to be demolished.  This makes me a happy person, as they are the only divergence from the painfully horizontal topography of the greater Columbus area.

Furthermore, there are awesomely constructed water towers, such as this one in Illinois:

The only thing cooler would be a spicy mustard water tower.

But wait!  The most exciting is yet to come! MC Eric B (definitely not Paid in Full Eric B) wrote The Water Tower Rap, which is so funny and ridiculous that it almost deserves its own blog post.  The actual song is appropriately awful.

So there it is.  My typographic (and musical?) homage to the adorable pressurization mechanisms that litter countrysides and tenement tops alike.  Of course, there’s more information and fun photos to be found via watertower.com, your comprehensive site for…. water towers.

I leave you with the touching words of MC Eric B:

Look up in awe
and feel the power
see the beauty we call
the water tower