When you are exiting Water Tower Place, you have an option to turn left or right onto Michigan Avenue. Take a left, cross the street, and go into the next building you see. Congratulations, you've just found your way into the historic Chicago Pumping Station. Built by William Boyington in 1869 (at the same time as the Water Tower), the pumping station was (obviously) also one of the few buildings to survive the Great Chicago Fire. The takeaway here is this: if you want your buildings to survive a cataclysmic fire, build them using stone!
Of course, just like its neighbor from across the street, the Pumping Station isn't used for its original purpose, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't found a new purpose. That first room you walked into? That is now another Choose Chicago tourism office(you know, like the one in the Cultural Center) in one area of the building, if you go to another area, you can still see the pumping equipment preserved as it was in another room, and another area of the building is now being rented out by the Lookingglass Theater Company. Not only is this arrangement advantageous to the Pumping Station, it is also good for the Theater Company, as it now had a home for the first time ever. In relation to the renovations related to bringing in the Lookingglass Company, in 2003 and 2004 the building won several awards for something called adaptive reuse (which is taking a building and renovating it rather than outright destroying it.) Among the awards they won were the Honorable Mention for the 2003 Richard H. Driehaus Public Innovator Award, the 2003 Chicago Landmark Award for Preservation Excellence, the 2003 ACEC Engineering Excellence Honor Award for the state level, along with many others. The Pumping Station is merely one more example of how it is possible to integrate the past with the future without losing sight of who we are in the process, a skill that is extremely helpful to coexisting with a 176 year-old city.
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