Taking a closer look at the sculptures on the Washburn Water Tower, Minneapolis, Minnesota


A good friend of mine recently started going through some of his photos of his old neighborhood in Minneapolis, called Tangletown, and today he sent me this photo of the Washburn Water Tower in 1978.

This water tower, which is on Prospect Avenue between Harriet and Highview, and is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, as the Washburn Park Water Tower, is something that I really have no memory of, although it was just a few blocks away from where I went to high school, and closer still to my friend's house, where I visited quite often to flop his dog's ears. So today I thought that it would be good to take a closer look.




Since my friend is an Engineer, and I'm a Graphic Designer, we do see things differently. We was able to tell me about its history, how it replaced the original water tower, the fact that it sits on the highest point in the city of Minneapolis, that sort of thing, but what I really enjoyed is how he said that as a kid he would stand right underneath the sword and wait for him to drop it on his head.


I was able to get some basic information from Wikipedia (which you shouldn't always trust, but for this stuff is pretty reliable), and apparently it was built in 1932, and the sculptures were done by John K. Daniels. I found a picture of him on the Library of Congress website from 1903 when his claim to fame was doing sculptures in butter. And now I'm thinking of the Minneapolis that he saw from the first time his picture was in the paper (that's the Minneapolis Journal, by the way) until he did these admittedly heroic sculptures on a water tower. Those are guardians of health, by the way.


I really don't know if they're supposed to be historically accurate, or to just be representational, but to me they kinda look like Knights from the time of King Arthur. I think I see chainmail armor? You know, the time of gadzooks, gramercy, and feasting with the king, quaffing mead, eating gigantic turkey legs, and wiping your hands off on the dogs. None shall pass!


As I look at the Guardians of Health on the Washburn Water Tower, I'm reminded of the first time I saw the sculptures on Hoover Dam, which were done in the same era. And this type of artwork was used to decorate all kinds of things, especially engineering achievements. It as if they wanted to say, "Ta-da!", and that this was more than just some concrete that would give people water that wouldn't give them typhoid. Of course now we just take it all for granted, and wonder why these people thought that something should have monumental sculpture. Nowadays it might seem pretentious, but I'm glad they did it, and I understand.

Thank you for visiting the Washburn Water Tower with me!



Photos courtesy of Ted Bezat, used with permission.

Library of Congress links:


If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more