There are a number of stories that occasionally receive comments and inquiries on posts from back in the day. This past few weeks, readers reached out related to the 2017 post “San Francisco’s Hidden Water Tanks” (Hidden Hydrology, 12.15.17), inquiring about a really cool hidden feature of the urban realm.
The post drew on a great article published at the time by CityLab/Bloomberg, “The Sublime Cisterns of San Francisco” (05.01.17), which explains the presence of brick circles located at numerous intersections around the downtown core of the city, such as the image below.
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Brick circles denote the location of old cisterns (via Bloomberg)
These reference the locations of underground cisterns, dating back to the 1850s, which were state-of-the-art in fire protection in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These cisterns were distributed around the downtown area and filled with water, which supplemented fire brigades and enabled them to pump water for fire-fighting prior to implementing pressurized water systems and fire hydrants. As noted in the Bloomberg article related to the need for new modern fire protection in cities:
“One of the ways officials responded to these blazes was to build cisterns. These subterranean vitrines were designed as a last-resort source of agua for firefighting. San Francisco’s 19th-century cistern system was reinforced with more, larger cisterns after the Earthquake of 1906, whose subsequent firestorm killed roughly 3,000 and left much of the city’s land looking like a blasted moon. To date there are 170 to 200 of the tanks stashed around town.”
Many of the remaining cisterns are intact below ground, revealing subterranean spaces unknown to those walking and driving above. Many are empty, but some are still used as emergency water sources today.
John Oram, aka the prolific Bay Area blogger Burrito Justice, dug deep into the cisterns as far back as 2011. Around 2016, when the original Bloomberg article was published, he created an interactive map (unfortunately no longer available) of their subterranean locations. The map represented the intersections where the cisterns were located, scaled by the capacity of the cistern below.
Another resource for these cisterns, which Oram used in his mapping project, was a 2014 project by Scott Kildall. As part of an art project called “Water Works,” Kildall focused on “…a 3D data visualization and mapping of the water infrastructure of San Francisco.” He also created an interactive map (now also unavailable) of the cisterns, and the project generated some interesting maps and art around the locations of key infrastructure, including cisterns, as seen below.
San Francisco Cisterns by Scott Kildall (via Scott Kildall)
For those interested in a deeper dive from these past sources, I recommend “What’s Underneath Those Brick Circles?” (Burrito Justice, 03.08.13), and “Cistern Mapping Project Reportback.” (Scott Kildall, 01.07.16). Although a seemingly hot topic in the mid-2010s, I only found a few scant more recent references to these cisterns. A good one worth listening to is part of a self-guided tour of these cisterns as part of the Exploratorium installation Buried History – Water Underground along with a link to a downloadable, printable map here.
I would appreciate any input from anyone in the Bay Area with up-to-date information or ongoing projects related to the cisterns.
Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 01/31/25 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/22/25.
The recent essay, “Daylighting a Brook in the Bronx” (Pioneer Works, 10.23.24), by Emily Raboteau, focuses on a high-profile stream daylighting project from a resident’s perspective. The project to daylight Tibbetts Brook has been ongoing for many years. For some quick background, Tibbetts Brook originates north of New York City in Yonkers, where it flows from Tibbetts Brook Park, heading south into the Bronx and reemerging above ground in Van Cortlandt Park. It then flows underground the remainder of the way south through the city, as demonstrated on the graphic below, showing the original course of the now-buried waterway and its eventual connection into the last leg of the Harlem River before draining into the Hudson.
Illustration of Tibbetts Brook’s original course in the Bronx – via Pioneer Works
Raboteau, a resident of the Bronx, outlines the project from a personal and experiential perspective, joining some of the local advocates from the Tibbetts Advisory Group and the Parks Department and others working on the daylighting project and highlighting some of the site-based artworks focused around the brook. The positives of the project are notable, as she mentions early on in the essay:
“Daylighting will abate combined sewage overflow, extend greenspace, absorb heat, and relieve chronic flooding in our area’s janky, archaic drainage system, in an act of climate mitigation and as a community effort to solve a mess caused by old crimes.”
I’m not planning on spending too much time recounting her specific words, which I strongly encourage you to take the time to read. I wanted to extract my reflections on a couple of critical themes she highlighted in her essay.
Perfection and Imperfection in Daylighting Projects
The challenges of these projects are myriad, and while striving for a solution that solves all the problems, trade-offs must often be made. She mentions a couple of issues, including the high cost, resistance from the MTA, and the need to underground the creek under rail lines in some industrialized portions. Additionally, gentrification could arise by ‘cleaning up’ marginal spaces during the daylighting project. On one hand, revitalization could improve the area and attract new residents and economic activity. Conversely, the improvements could incentivize new developments and rising costs, displacing long-time residents. Another issue she brings up is the potential lack of good access from some of the adjacent neighborhoods, creating questions of ultimately who will benefit and the overall environmental justice issues at heart in any project like this. As she notes:
“I had so many ethical questions without easy answers. It felt uncouth to ask them of a dream thirty years in the making…. Could it ever be pleasant here? Difficult to picture. Even with the brook resurrected, there would still be the sound of the road.
I wondered: how else might the park change the neighborhood? Will it invite gentrification? Will it grow too expensive to live here? Despite the ecological and economic benefits, will anyone suffer? Can daylighting outpace inundation, or will it be rendered moot by water tables that rise with the sea? If flooding catastrophes continue, what then? Would government funds be better spent moving the most disadvantaged among us out of the watershed to higher ground? Has anyone asked for the brook’s consent? Whose help is sanctioned when it comes to healing the land, and whose is rebuked?
The intersecting concerns and challenges are common in similar projects, no less complicated by threading daylighting through a dense urban center. Patience, openness, and creativity are vital, but the lack of these often results in projects never seeing the light of day. Compromises cannot come at the cost of marginalized communities. Yet, the short-sightedness of attempting to achieve “perfect” restoration in the form of all-or-nothing solutions is equally as damaging to attain nothing. The ability to see multiple solutions that can celebrate, reveal, and restore function requires looking beyond the ecological and including pointing a lens at the cultural context of these projects, balancing imperfection with appropriateness.
Cultural Restoration
The potential of restoration lies beyond the technical aspects and helps us fill the gaps left in implementing imperfect solutions. Raboteau mentions some of the work of artists around the brook, much of it done under the banner of the “Rescuing Tibbets Brook” project as part of the Mary Miss-led project, City as Living Laboratory. Works mentioned include Visions of Tibbetts Brook, Tibbetts Estuary Tapestry, and Estuary Tattoos, all focusing on artistic and community works around the creek restoration.
Other cultural works are mentioned in the essay. Dennis RedMoon Darkeem‘s upcoming work and the planned daylighting project use harvested mugwort, an invasive species growing near the creek in Van Cortlandt Park, and weaving it into large textiles to act as sound barriers along the course of the stream corridor. She goes into more detail about two other artists. Noel Hefele and his Daylighting Tibbetts en Plein Air paintings (see below), and The Buried Brook, an augmented reality installation by Kamala Sankaram that uses a phone app to trace “the sonic geography of the buried Tibbetts Brook.”
Numerous documents and reports on the proposed $133 million project to daylight the brook can be discovered online, touching on many technical challenges. The real story is about grounding the technical with the human dimensions while highlighting the more prominent themes of hidden hydrology. Overall, the result of these cultural explorations to complement the hydrological and ecological, to Raboteau, can be revelatory:
“I appreciate how initiatives like these offer an expansive response to catastrophe, a way to gather, and even a sense of hope. It’s not just the architecture of the daylighting project that interests me, the restitching at the scale of infrastructure, or the civic muscle behind the job, but the metaphysics of the exhumation. Daylighting feels like a cause for ceremony, a chance to pay respect to the body of the ghost river that flows unseen under our feet. Better yet, to imagine the perspective of the brook.”
Both ideas above are inherent in the conceptual potential of what can be accomplished when we think beyond just daylighting as a functional pursuit. First, we must move beyond unrealistic ideas of “perfect” and strive to achieve real projects that inevitably fall short of all that can be accomplished but succeed in not collapsing under the weight of being overly idealistic. Second, to achieve the first, we must continue to explore and expand our ways of engaging with lost rivers and buried creeks beyond. These include the incorporation of a continuum of solutions from the artistic to the ecological.
The recollection of the creek can be expressed metaphorically through art and soundscapes, which provide additional layers of meaning and context to the project’s more functional hydrological and ecological goals. This shows how daylighting projects, while aiming for restoration of function, are not really about attempts at pure ecological restoration but a mix of green infrastructure and ecological design aimed at multiple goals like access to nature for humans and other species, reconnecting communities, and achieving climate-positive design, among many other potentialities.
The potential of these solutions highlighted by Raboteau:
“Daylighting feels like a cause for ceremony, a chance to pay respect to the body of the ghost river that flows unseen under our feet.”
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CONTEXTUAL CODA
Tibbetts Brook has been a topic of interest in my thinking on Hidden Hydrology for some time. I first discussed the Brook in an article on Steve Duncan, a ‘drainer’ type of urban explorer focusing on underground and buried creeks and rivers. He has explored and photographed urban creeks around the globe, but focused on many New York City creeks, including Tibbetts Brook, as I wrote about in a post, “NYC: Watercourses to Undercity” (Hidden Hydrology, 12.28.17).
Tibbetts Brook was the subject of the article “Why New York Is Unearthing a Brook It Buried a Century Ago” (NY Times, 12.6.21), which discusses the project goals and objectives in detail. “The city plans to unearth the brook — an engineering feat known as “daylighting” — at a cost of more than $130 million, because burying it in the sewer system has worsened the city’s flooding problems as a warming planet experiences more frequent and intense storms.”
The re-interest in the Tibbets project and connections to climate-related flooding came about as a reckoning of post-hurricane Ida solutions, which included more ‘spongy’ green infrastructure, hardening critical infrastructure, and methods to “unclog drains and widen pipes.” I’ve written about Eric Sanderson’s work of historical ecology and mapping hidden waterways in his Mannahatta and the broader Welikia Projects. He writes a powerful post-Ida opinion piece, “Let Water Go Where It Wants to Go” (NY Times, 9.28.21), where he connects the impacts of Hurricanes Sandy and Ida to areas where waterways were buried, shorelines filled, and wetlands paved over.
“Water demands a place to go. That means making room for streams and wetlands, beaches and salt marshes. It means solving human-caused problems with nature-based solutions. These include removing urban impediments to let streams flow once again, a process known as daylighting; restoring wetlands and planting trees. It also means using the collective power of our community — expressed through tax dollars — to help people move to safer places.”
Overlay of flooding locations (28th Street subway station) in New York City and the location of former wetlands (The National Archives via NY Times)
In my reflection on this article by Sanderson, these connections between hidden hydrology and climate are of keen interest, so this led me to investigate in more detail one of the significant benefits espoused by those advocating daylighting Tibbetts Brook — which was alluded to by Raboteau — the ability to make cities more resilient to climate change by removing base flow water from buried pipes, or captured streams, through daylighting, and freeing up that water to handle extreme rainfall events and reduce flooding. As noted in the NY Times article:
“Though out of sight, the brook pumps about 2.2 billion gallons of freshwater a year into the same underground pipes that carry household sewage and rainwater runoff to wastewater treatment plants. It takes up precious capacity in the outdated sewer system and contributes to combined sewer overflows that are discharged into nearby waterways.”
To learn more about this concept, I wrote on “Captured Streams” (Hidden Hydrology, 12.11.21), taking a deeper dive into the broader idea and its applications globally, drawing on a paper by Adam Broadhead and others, which makes the case that the encasement of freshwater streams in urban sewers is a widespread issue, significantly increases wastewater treatment costs by needlessly treating clean water and the various economic, social, and environmental benefits of diversion. The team included case studies from Zurich, highlighting efforts by the Swiss city to pioneer the idea of urban daylighting to remove base flow.
A diagram of the process, similar to the process envisioned at Tibbetts Brook, from the paper is below.
Diagram of buried stream separation from sewers in Zurich (via Broadhead et al.)
The Tibbetts Brook project aims to be a model case study in this form of separation. While the result will fulfill the goals to reduce flooding, create more resilience, and provide additional positive environmental benefits, the more significant questions Raboteau asks in her essay are vital to allow us to envision the bigger picture and redefine what counts as success: Who is included at the table in planning and design and how are those voices given appropriate weight? Who ultimately benefits? Who has access when the project is complete?
Give the essay a read, and let me know your comments.
Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 11/30/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/22/25.
There are multiple ways of activating urban waterways, including those focusing on ecological, economic, and social aspects. Urban surfing is a unique way to use waterways in the city for recreation and people-watching, expanding on the use of swimming and boating by modifying the flows of existing rivers or creating artificial waves in waterways. Recently, a few examples of these projects came across my screens, and I was blown away.
Eisbachwelle | Munich, Germany
The most well-known of these urban surf spots is the Eisbachwelle, a standing wave created in the Eisbach River in Munich. According to the article “Eisbach: the mother of all river waves.” (Surfer Today), the site has been surfed since the 1970s, and over time the flow has been modified using planks and ropes to make the swell more consistent. The site hosts surfing competitions and as seen below, all season surfing in the urban core.
The article delves more into the process of how the park was developed, and what was done to integrate the recirculating system into an existing canal. The project aims to be a destination, with different experiences for beginners to learn, versus areas for seasoned surfers. The club also includes a restaurant and bar, rentals, and several other amenities beyond the surf.
The proposed system, set to open soon after a 12-year process to get it built, produces waves every seven seconds through a complicated mechanical system of pumps, designed by consultants at SurfLoch. According to the article, Rif010:
“…uses pneumatic technology to mirror the way waves form in the ocean. At RIF010, this technology is powered by eight engines that are powered by wind energy sourced from the North Sea. The engines do what the wind does in real life, namely “push and pull” the water to create a succession of waves known as a swell.”
In the United States, a little bit of searching on on the topic yields the story of Big Surf in the 1960s. As noted in the article, “Big Surf: the story of America’s first modern wave pool.” (Surfer Today) discusses the design and development of Big Surf, a totally artificial wave park in Tempe Arizona, simulating real wave action miles from the ocean.
Our focus here is less on the water park model and more on activating urban rivers and waterways. The article “River Surfing: The 7 Best Destinations in the USA.” (American Surf Magazine, 04.03.24) showcases several other examples worth a look, a few of which are more urban and river-based versions.
River Run Park | Sheridan, Colorado
Located near Denver, along the South Platte River, River Run Park was constructed with three surfing waves, called Chichlets (seen below), Benihanas, and Nikki Sixx, each providing more difficulty.
A plan shows the constriction of the river which were originally drop structures in a channelized stream. As noted in the ASLA Colorado award submittal from DHM Design: “The project reconstructed two large, existing drop structures and replaced them with six lower drop structures that include recreational features from wave shapers for surfing and kayaks to water shoots for kids play.”
Closer to (my) home, the Bend Whitewater Park provides multiple experiences through modification of the hydrology of the Deschutes River. There are 3 distinct channels, one focused on habitat, another for slow floating, and a third, a whitewater channel with multiple waves for surfing, kayaking, and paddleboarding.
The three channels of the Bend Whitewater Park (Jeffrey Conklin/Bend Magazine)
The list above is not exhaustive (please send me others you know about), but gives a snapshot of some European and US places that provide unique opportunities to carve some waves without a trip to the beach. While not focused on the ecological benefits these provide special locations for use of urban waterways for surfers and spectators.
For some bonus reading, the article “A brief history of artificial wave pools.” (Surfer Today) outlines the historical evolution of introducing waves into water bodies through artificial means, dating back to the mid-19th century! It’s probably worth a follow-up on this interesting tangent to the potential of waterway transformation.
Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 06/11/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/23/25.
I spotted this great project this week on LinkedIn and thought it worth sharing. The transformation of urban highways to waterways is an interesting subset of hidden hydrology worth exploring, with some great global examples we will discuss more in the future. This project traces the history of the Catharijnesingel, a canal removed to create an urban highway in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and more recently transformed from hardscape back to its original form as a canal. This provides a great case study on the benefits of public spaces around water, and the ability to restore lost public and ecological benefits through the restoration of waterways.
An overview can be found on the European Prize for Urban Public Space competition site, (Public Space) which recognizes “…all kinds of works to create, recover and improve public spaces in European cities.” The Catharijnesingel project was the winner of the competition in 2022.
For some background, the original Catharijnesingel was a canal that flowed around the defensive walls of the historic city. A park was originally built in the canal zone in the 19th century but was drained and paved over in the late 1960s to 1970s to create space for a major arterial roadway.
Work on the Catharijnesingel before burial (Public Space)
The before picture shows the Catharijnebaan, the roadway built atop the original canal. In 2002, citizens began to discuss the removal of the roadway and restoration of the canal to its original form.
The transformation shows the restoration of the canal and revegetation of the banks. The description provides the context of reconnecting with public spaces in urban environments, and the ability to create new, safe, places to access nature and socialize. As noted in the project assessment, on the Public Space website:
“The Catharijnesingel adapts to this new situation by providing pedestrian paths and boat routes and enough space for outdoor recreation. The emphasis on the different microbiotopes of the green areas also makes a positive educational contribution to outdoor activities, where the changing face of nature can be contemplated while walking (or sailing) on the Catharijnesingel.”
The transformation provides access to the waterway for boating, paddleboarding, shady spots, and water access points along the banks, providing much-needed recreation spaces. The project was built in two phases, over 2015 and 2020 with a total restoration area spanning 1.1 kilometers of length.
There’s also a great video on the Public Space website with some additional historical background and imagery. The project designer, Utrecht-based OKRA Landschapsarchitecten refers to the higher goal of the project as a “…climate-adaptive backbone for the centre of Utrecht,“ and elaborates on the project goals and results:
“In the 20th century Catharijnesingel became Catharijnebaan: an unattractive urban highway dominated by asphalt and concrete. When offered the chance to revert that development, we took the opportunity to push the idea further to its full potential. As the water returned to the historic Canal area, it brought along a new natural park route right into one of the busiest areas in the Netherlands. The result was an urban landscape that was fully connected to the past, the present and the future.”
These transformations provide a great example of the power to right some of the previous wrongs in urban areas, creating adaptable, climate-friendly spaces. While the canal was never a natural waterway, the project shows that restoring artificial waterways can provide myriad benefits similar to creeks and urban rivers, providing important hydrologic, climate, and public space goals.
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Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 05/29/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/23/25.
The article “A cartography of loss in the Borderlands.” (High Country News, 02.21.24) outlines the work of artists Jessica Sevilla, Rosela del Bosque, and Mayté Miranda includes documenting the “Archivo Familiar del Rio Colorado.” This “Colorado River Family Album”, in their words “…brings together contemporary art, environmental education and historical research to document bodies of water that are disappearing or are already gone.”
Archival map overlay – Colorado River Delta (Archivo Familiar del Rio Colorado/HCN)
The work focuses on the area around Mexicali, tracing the memories of rivers and waterways that have been erased via burial or polluted by contamination. The town included diverse Mexican and Chinese workers, who helped develop the Imperial Valley in California’s irrigation canals and working farm fields. This has evolved into a border town with maquiladoras, which has led to an industrial urban pattern. For the artists, the connection to this place is important. “They named the project the Family Album to signal its focus on personal connections to the landscape… to show that our relationship with the Colorado River and the landscape of Mexicali is that of a relative.”
The work incorporates historical source data and art in creative ways to discover the lost elements of the Colorado River area. A video on their You Tube page visually explores the ideas the project is tackling, with English and Spanish subtitles.
The project’s website also outlines many specific projects, installations, and workshops created by the collective and through their curated works. This was a call for entries along with Planta Libre, as noted in the ‘Announcement.”
“We began by launching a call in collaboration with Planta Libre and through a resource provided by FONCA for the reactivation of scenic spaces, seeking to receive memories and memories about landscapes and bodies of water that no longer exist, as well as speculations about alternate futures, pasts or presents. for the rivers, lagoons, canals, lakes that used to run through the city of Mexicali. The categories of the call were photos, anecdotes and fictions about the bodies of water of the Colorado River. We receive fictitious maps, newspaper images, family archives accompanied by anecdotes, among other materials. The call remains open and the search for family archives and oral histories continues.”
Sevilla’s website includes more information on the project and some graphics. She also includes a summary statement:
“Located between geopolitical, epistemological and disciplinary borders, we investigate our relationships with water and territory; launching the Colorado River Family Archive as a technology to generate situated knowledge, collectively confabulating about the interwoven temporalities of our relationships with the more-than-human in the Colorado River Delta.”
The cross-border dynamic is an interesting element of the work, mediating the governmental and political boundaries imposed on the natural systems, and highlighting the power dynamics of water in the US and Mexico. These liminal spaces provide interesting opportunities for exploration, and in the context of the contested borderlands, inevitably weave politics with water and the ecosystems, communities, and people who occupy these spaces.
The Pacific Northwest has long been one of the innovation hubs for green infrastructure solutions. Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver have been leaders for over two decades in developing innovative options to manage stormwater in urban environments, creating decentralized solutions such as green streets, rain gardens, green roofs, and permeable pavings that have now become standard solutions and spread widely to regions.
In places with high rainfall, the initial drivers for these solutions were managing stormwater and reducing combined sewer overflows (CSOs) where rain and sewage mix in pipes, which, in extreme events, overflows into waterways creating pollution issues. The importance of green infrastructure has grown to include multifaceted outcomes, helping mitigate climate impacts by reducing flooding and providing shade to reduce urban heat, and providing ‘green’ solutions over ‘grey’, increasing habitat and helping minimize biodiversity loss.
Thinking strategically about where these solutions are built is key to success. Looking beyond site-specific and one-off strategies, the goal is to provide larger overarching frameworks for how these strategies are planned to work together to achieve holistic results, and ways to plan for these interventions. “How Rainways Could Restore ‘Raincouver’” (The Tyee, August 24, 2023) highlights some of the recent work in Vancouver. What they refer to as ‘Rainways’ are the green infrastructure interventions that have been proposed by City and community groups going back to 2012 built around water in the city and ways to discover and celebrate it.
St. George Rainway illustration (City of Vancouver, The Tyee)
The St. George Rainway is another precursor to some of the work. It was studied and determined that true creek daylighting would be a challenge, due to infrastructure and costs, however, there were other ways to functionally and metaphorically restore the essence of buried creeks through green infrastructure and art. Neighbors have implemented several interventions, including street murals that follow the meandering route of the old creek.
To further visualize the potential benefits, the team here are some good before and after visuals on the site, transforming asphalt into rain gardens with pathways and plantings.
For a deep dive, the Rain City Strategy is a comprehensive document published in 2019 to celebrate water and address environmental and social challenges. The basis is green infrastructure in the city, using streets and public spaces, buildings and sites, and parks and beaches. The overall goals are water quality, resilience, and livability. This includes the management of stormwater to protect and increase water quality, facilitate infiltration, and become more adaptable to climate impacts by mitigating flooding. Beyond function, creating spaces that provide equitable access to nature and benefits to the community are inherent in solutions, assuring they aren’t just solving one problem but many.
The report includes references to the original buried and disappeared streams that existed before urbanization. These maps build on the work going back almost 50 years to research done by Sharon Proctor in her book ‘Vancouver’s Old Streams’, published in 1978 with a sweet hand-drawn version of the map below (read more about this in my 2016 post “Vancouver’s Secret Waterways”).
The execution of more formal St George Rainway design concepts is available from 2022, showing how the concepts are applied to the segments of St. George Street, with plans and sketches illuminating the proposed condition.
The holistic proposal of looking at the macro-level buried rivers as the genesis for these community interventions. The benefits of the designs are manifold, as noted in the project summary:
Reduce street flooding
Treat rainwater pollutants from roadways
Reduce combined sewer overflows into local waterways
Enhance climate resiliency
Increase biodiversity
Cool the neighbourhood during summer heat
CODA
It’s great to see this connection between hidden hydrology and innovative stormwater solutions take shape in such an intentional way. In the past, cities have looked at these buried stream routes in locating facilities and creating smaller sub-watersheds. For some background, in a presentation back in 2006 at the National ASLA conference, I did a presentation entitled “Neighborsheds for Green Infrastructure”, where I made a case for using the routing of buried streams as a framework to implement green infrastructure solutions in Portland, Oregon. I’ll dig up some of these ideas and repost them, as they may be worth revisiting, in the meantime, I mention it in part of my introductory “Ecological Inspirations” post at HH (see image below). Stay tuned for more on this.
Neighborshed Diagram from 2006 in Portland (Jason King)
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Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 05/03/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/23/25.
One of the cooler examples of hidden hydrology art in the past year is “Ghost Rivers”, the brainchild of designer and artist Bruce Willen of studio Public Mechanics.
Envisioned as a “…public art project & walking tour, rediscovering hidden streams and histories that run beneath our feet.” Willen uses traffic striping and signage to highlight multiple sites around the city, particularly Sumwalt Run, a buried creek that “now flows entirely through underground culverts beneath the Remington and Charles Village neighborhoods.”
The site includes some great background, including the history of the streams and their burial, along with some great illustrations of the path as it winds through
Stream burial (Baltimore DPW Archives, Ronald Parks – Ghost Rivers)Sumwalt Run pipe (Ghost Rivers)
The installation itself is simple, using durable thermoplastic traffic striping in a wavy pattern that allows the line to engage with people in multiple ways and follow curbs and walks – so it is interrupting the linear flow patterns of walkers, cyclists, and driver throughout the city. This allows the eye and the curiosity to wander along these paths and connect the dots.
Images of the meandering blue path in the public realm (Ghost Rivers)
Self-guided walking tours are available and will expand as more sites are included, along with a Google map to track the route and key points. The signs are also simple, but bright and noticeable for those passersby, allowing for a bit of interactivity as they line up with the views of the meanders, and provide some background information and QR codes to scan for more engagement.
The summary statement explains the idea of connecting us with these hidden creeks.
“Below the streets of Baltimore flow dozens of lost streams. These ghost rivers still cascade from their sources, the many natural springs around the city. As the street grid sprawled outward from the harbor, these verdant waterways were buried in concrete tunnels. They now run deep beneath our rowhomes, channeled into the city’s storm sewers, hidden and mostly forgotten. You can sometimes hear their rushing waters echoing up from storm drains.”
The site also includes awesome resources for more information, history, daylighting resources, and other artistic interventions worthy of a follow-up, including a few I’ve posted about in the past and a few new ones. This is a model that is highly replicable in almost any city, using materials that are simple and evocative in unique ways to highlight those subterranean stories and make us reconsider our relationships with the hidden hydrology.
The idea is one of the most cohesive and elegant takes on the idea of revealing creeks using blue lines tracking the historical routing of the waterways. It draws upon precedents, mentioned by applying traffic coating, markers, or paint to mark the route of creeks, most similarly artist Sean Derry’s work in Indianapolis ‘Charting Pogue’s Run” and Henk Hostra’s “The Blue Road” in Drachten, The Netherlands, the proposed “Ghost Arroyos” in San Francisco. Another art-based example from Baltimore is the “Green Alley” street painting, and more loose, ephemeral versions in the St. George Rainway in Vancouver, B.C., in São Paulo, Brazil as part of the Rios a Ruas project, Stacy Levy’s Stream Sketches in New York City.
There are lots of examples of this type of project, and it is interesting to see the different ways a simple blue line can be used to engage in revealing historical layers. So let me know if you have other favorites you’ve seen.
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Note: This post was originally posted on Substack on 04/29/24 and added to the Hidden Hydrology website on 04/23/25.
An interesting project in St. Paul, Minnesota emerged in this Star Tribune article “Work could begin soon to bring St. Paul’s Phalen Creek back to the surface,” which highlights the mix of ecological and cultural benefits of urban stream daylighting. Through a focus on both the benefits to wildlife habitat and ecosystem function and the connection of cultural heritage for native people and early immigrants to the area, it shows a rich story that is told through multiple lenses to provide solid rationale for daylighting projects.
One major idea of daylighting is visibility. As mentioned in the Star Tribune article, this is a typical case of burial of creeks for development, but like many other areas, the perceptions have shifted and the value of historical waterways are being restored. A big part of that is pointed out by Ramsey-Washington Metro district watershed project manager Paige Ahlborg, watershed project: “Another benefit is just restoring a community’s connection to the water,” Ahlborg said. “Seeing it makes it harder to do things that harm it. We still have a number of people who think that ‘if I put something down the [storm]sewer drain, it will be treated.'”
The history of places is expressed in place names. From the Capitol Region Watershed District site, some history on the current name: “Swede Hollow on the City of Saint Paul’s East Side is a historic immigrant neighborhood dating back to the 19th century. This lowland valley includes a portion of a stream from Phalen Creek to the Mississippi River. After housing was removed following the turn of the century, the city created Swede Hollow Park and placed some of the stream flow in a storm sewer pipe to complete its path to the river.”
Image of Phalen Creek burial in the 1920s. – via Minnesota Historical Society
As is the case with most places, the story and names is often told in European terms (i.e. Swede Hollow). The creek name as well comes from Edward Phalen, one of Saint Paul’s original colonists, who settled on the banks of the creek in 1838. Prior to this arrival, the history of place stretched far earlier as referenced in the Lower Phalen Creek Project, a native-led project:
“This creek served as a corridor for the Dakota people who lived here, as they made their way up the chain of lakes by canoe to White Bear Lake – one of many areas where they gathered wild rice.”
The daylighting has both ecological and cultural benefits. In the Star Tribune, Lower Phalen Creek Project Executive Direction Maggie Lorenz, who is both Dakota and Ojibwe, mentions: “[Phalen Creek] is an essential part of the community — it will bring more natural habitat and it means more opportunities for recreation and stormwater management. And, from a cultural perspective, we are really interested in restoring the land and taking care of the land according to our traditional teachings.”
While the goal is to extend daylighting all the way to the Mississippi River, one the first legs connects from Lake Phalen and Maryland Avenue as shown in this enlarged plan, highlighting the ecological benefits, including fish passage and enhanced in-stream habitat, establishment not just of the creek but adjacent floodplain wetlands to provide resilience and habitat for amphibians, and upland prairies that provide native riparian habitat supporting birds and pollinators.
“Consultants at Inter-Fluve, Inc. produced this visual to represent the proposed location, general design elements, and predicted habitat benefits of a restored stream channel of Phalen Creek at the Lake Phalen / Maryland Avenue project site.” via Lower Phalen Creek Project
A ton of additional information is at the LPCP site, including graphic summary of the project is found in a brochure that connects the dots between the cultural and ecological.
A project from artist Cristina Iglesias (see a post of some of her previous work here) again dives into the idea of hidden hydrology, this time in New York City. Entitled Landscape and Memory (referencing the title of one of my favorite books by Simon Schama), the work unearths a buried stream in Madison Square Park.
From The Architect’s Newspaper: “Manhattan is crisscrossed by streams and rivers that have since been buried but continue to flow, flooding their banks and the basements above when it rains. For Landscape and Memory, Iglesias will exhume an impression of Cedar Creek, which once flowed beneath where the park now stands today.”
From the Madison Square Park Conservancy, some more info: “Nodding to historian Simon Schama’s major 1995 volume of the same name, which surveyed the history of landscape across time and terrain, Landscape and Memory is informed by Iglesias’ research into the history of the site. For the project, Iglesias located and studied antique maps that documented the water flow beneath Madison Square Park, where the Cedar Creek and Minetta Brook once coursed for two miles before flowing into the Hudson River. With nineteenth-century industrialization, streams like the Cedar and Minetta were buried underground to create additional land for building sites, underground drains, or sewers. Through Landscape and Memory, Iglesias renders this buried history visible again, inviting viewers to contemplate centuries of transformation of urban sites that were once natural.”
Excited to hear more about this and see more images, as the sketch is a bit… sketchy. You can check out the full press release here for more info. Based on some of her previous work it will be wonderful in execution. The work will be installed from May 23, 2022, through December 4, 2022 so those in New York City go check it out and report back.
After bit of a break I’m hoping to write more frequently on all things Hidden Hydrology. For some context, in this time away I have been researching more deeply Portland’s Hidden Hydrology, delving into archives for stories of my local disappeared streams, buried creeks, and filled wetlands around the metropolitan area. I’ve also compiled a composite map of Portland spanning the 1850s through the 1900s to piece together the most complete version of the hidden hydrological layers that existed pre-settlement. I’ve kept up doing research more informally in the broader and mostly sharing on Twitter and Instagram, which are both simpler media for messaging, but also seem lacking in depth that more expansive writing can capture. While it may be true that blogging is no longer a viable medium, I feel a need to write more deeply, and more often, and more personally about my home, my history, and my places. This will hopefully lead to writing more broadly as well in journals, and culminate in my ultimate goal — to write a book (or more than one) on hidden hydrology.
A few recent thoughts, ideas that I take with me into the next journey.
Every story has a uniquely human interface and the phenomena of hidden hydrology is no different, with a variety of actors involved in the discovery, use, manipulation, destruction, protection, and restoration that are all story arcs of urban streams, wetlands and other water bodies. I have always seen the people involved in more broad strokes, as populations and groups acting against nature and natural processes, or conversely communities and coalitions being often negatively acted upon and attempting to preserve and protect systems. Rarely did I connect people to places in a meaningful way beyond faceless groups, only rarely placing individuals and their stories and essential ingredients to unlocking the true history of place.
Sketch of Indians Fishing by Willamette Falls – 1841 by Joseph Drayton (Oregon History Project)
As origin stories, the native Chinookan people have occupied and shaped the waters of Portland for centuries. There are specific narratives of leaders, like Concomly as part of the larger Chinook territory in the late 1700s and early 1800s and Kiesno (aka Cassino) who was located near Portland on Wapato Island, who was also an important figure through the early to mid 1800s , The native stories and start to take shape via early explorers, whereby they drift into settler narratives told about those indigenous people and never told by them. Thus we remember ‘discovery’ and the snapshots of what written narratives and maps were documented, but know less about the life and the interaction with many of the places in the region beyond a few major areas of significance that were spiritual centers and places of food gathering and trade. I challenged myself to weave these stories into the narratives, and although I feel more informed, I’ve barely scratched the surface, so the next steps are to engage and learn from descendants and hear stories of places that were of significance to Chinook people in the past, and those that are still resonant today.
In Seattle, I walked and wrote about Licton Springs, which explored the deep indigenous connections to place in a remnant urban stream – weaving together the long and contentious history, which was recently given protection as a landmark of cultural significance to Coast Salish people. Many of these stories need to be told, and the opportunity to connect our diverse history to water places – the water stories and human stories, continues to intrigue me.
Licton Springs (Photo by Author)
Broadening the cultural lens, I’ve written about Tanner Creek and the Chinese farmers who cultivated lands adjacent to the creek using the amazing resource by Marie Rose-Wong on early Chinese residents of Portland, documenting the erasure of the creek and the Chinese farms in tandem, both slowly disappearing from Portland in the wake of ‘progress’ that wanted neither the Chinese people, nor the messiness of flooding, steep gulches that stood in the way of a modern metropolis.
View of Chinese Farms in Tanner Creek Gulch – circa 1892 (Portland Archives)
The narratives feature places like Guild’s Lake, a contested area with a variety of actors working to destroy, displace and erase historic waterways to pave the way for development and industrialization, with little thought to the impacts ecologically and socially to these actions. As you map out the timeline of erasure for many waterways, it’s never one person or one big move, but a variety of consistent, incremental actions, driven by the need for progress and growth, that privileged the needs of few over the impacts to many. The missing piece of this is again the human dimension, the root of all of these stories were the people who occupied these places, and how they, and their actions, gave life to the unique water places in the community. And as other forces removed the waterways, how they were impacted by the places are lost. The places are not coming back, but but hopefully through the stories some idea of that experience can re-emerge and remain.
Chinese man fishing in Guild’s Lake – circa 1890 (Oregon Historical Society – OHS-bb016278)
Another significant narrative in Portland’s water history is the intersection with the African American story, told through the emergence and eventual destruction of Vanport City. There are many narratives as to the cause of the flooding and destruction of in the1940s worth exploring, and the eventual displacement and segregation that happened after the city was destroyed continues to shape the city today.
As my post documenting the amazing OPB documentary “Vanport” shows, these, too are human stories, with interviews and first person accounts of the development and occupation of this novel community, and the lead up to the destruction and displacement of larger populations of people that had lasting impacts and left an indelible mark on the racial history and social structure of Portland.
CLIMATE CONNECTIONS
While Vanport was not a result of climate change per se, this larger narrative of catastrophic flood events also provides a hint at more extreme future scenarios that intersect with my research on hidden hydrology: the connections between the lost and buried streams, wetlands, ponds and water bodies, along with made-land through filling and manipulating shorelines, and how these ultimately give clues to and exacerbate our present impacts related to climate change.
Stories in the mainstream media are reinforcing these connections, and through recent research, and continues to gain prominence and momentum as a dimensions of climate change evolve and the impacts are played out in communities more frequently and in more extreme forms.
There are a number of drivers for the ‘creative destruction’ of water systems in cities. Making land for development by piping creeks, filling gulches, ponds, wetlands and shorelines to make developable land offers the chance to grow and continue to build. Much of this was also an element of the modern safety movement that was concerned with life and property damage from flooding creeks, and the related sanitary movement was driven by public health concerns, often by removing access to polluted waterways. In short term and in earlier times, these efforts may have seemed good approaches but come with some unfortunate baggage in loss of ecosystem function, and lack of resilience.
Flooding is obviously not a new thing, and is not always the result of removal of waterways not of climate change. However it is not difficult to make general connections that flooding often follows the historical shape of water in cities, and that removal, filling, and piping of creeks, streams, wetlands and ponds has lasting impacts to the hydrology and that the impacts will be more evident as climate change raises sea levels, increases extreme precipitation and storms, and increases urban heat.
A recent NY Times editorial by Eric Sanderson makes this case, unpacking impacts of recent extreme weather and hurricanes and tracing that to lost streams that wove through New York City. The simple statement of “Water will go where water has always gone.” sums up the phenomenon, while giving us an interesting new (old?) methodology for predicting impacts by using historical hydrological systems in new ways. Beyond that in the past year, my Twitter feed is filled with stories of flooding in Europe, UK, and around the US, a global climate change induced impact all traced back to the link between historical waterways and current, human-caused climate change. Lots more on this topic to come.
EVOLUTION
As I researched more from the archives of local newspapers and uncovered more unique, human stories, the narratives became less about places and the lost waterways, but how these created a tableau of life. Rarely were stories these idyllic and utopian, but painted a picture of daily life and the struggle to build a city carved out of the forest at the confluence of two rivers. Often they were narratives of greed, racism, and exploitation, focusing on power and money which were allowed to run rampant in a time of very little environmental policy and awareness of impacts.
The water stories become stories of native people who developed thriving communities that were in a short span of time decimated by disease, violence and displacement from their lands and waters. The stories of Chinese farmers who lived on the margins of gulches and ponds in Portland, who contributed to the building of the community and were rewarded with racism and erasure from their places of productivity and community. The devastation of a flooded African American community of Vanport left ship workers and their families, engaged in supporting the war effort while building a life in Portland left many without a place live and led to a continuing and marginalization that continues today.
These historical water stories connect people to place and add a human dimension to an ecological history. When woven together with more contemporary climate stories, it also provide a solid foundation for why this work matters in design and planning for the future. It is far from a nostalgic looking back of what’s lost, but rather an opportunity to think about lessons learned related to how we can live and thrive together while growing a diverse community. It is also a blueprint for action on climate resilience, a future-focused approach to planning for urban heat, flooding, and other key resilience measures to make our communities more livable. Call the preliminary phases of this project a good information gathering, understanding what hidden hydrology is. The evolution becomes how to use this information to shape our communities in positive ways. Look forward to exploring and continuing to evolve.
