“The past is a foreign country” sometimes isn’t strong enough. Sometimes, the past seems to be a foreign country occupied by very strange people. That’s not a relic of some fort, it’s a water tower for a late-1800s system that served a fair-sized chunk of Hudson County, New Jersey. The Weehawken Water Tower held 165,000 gallons of water, otherwise known as over 1,370,000 pounds of water. That engineering feat, for some reason, required crenelations. The tower is part of a historic complex of waterworks structures and, for obvious reasons, the most visible.
Hudson and Bergen Counties, across the Hudson River from New York, contain a number of small cities and suburban towns, none of which would be able to easily set up a supply of fresh water by itself. That’s as true today as it was when the Hackensack Water Company was building strangeness all over the area 140 years ago. Certain systems – transportation and water supply are the most obvious – have natural service areas that are substantially larger than any municipality. That means that, depending on which era of American history you’re looking at, they were built by private companies with state charters, states, or the federal government. Sometimes bigger is better, even when it results in whatever that tower is supposed to be.
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