Saturday, January 16, 2021

1919 Mayfair Water Supply Pump Station (N3)

Until this pumping station was built, the Mayfair neighborhood was supplied by the Lakeview station that was three miles south. But the water pressure was too low and only the first story of buildings in the Mayfair neighborhood received service. People would have to carry water from the first floor to the second floor to flush toilets. So an eight-mile long, 12-foot wide tunnel was dug under Wilson Avenue to a new Wilson Avenue intake crib three miles offshore in Lake Michigan, and this station was built at the western terminus of that tunnel. [ChicagoSteppes] After the Wilson Tunnel was built, the Lakeview Station connected to the new tunnel and the Lake View crib was abandoned.

"The pumping station's adjacent smokestack, which is 184 feet tall and 8 feet, 5 inches wide, has not been operational since 1946, according to Northwest Chicago Historical Society." [DNAinfo]

Street View

The station was designed to hold seven vertical triple expansion pumping engines of 25,000,000 gallons capacity each. The shovel used for excavating the pump room was powered by steam, but the hoists were powered by electricity. [eBook-1915] The design capacity of the Mayfair station was 150,000,000 gallons/day The 1915 reference is wrong. Not all of the pumps had a capacity of 25m. Only the low-level pumps that can service a 140' head. The high-level pumps that can service a 200' head have a capacity of 17.5m/day. The pumps normally run at 62 rpm. But they can run at 73 rpm to support heads of 160' and 231'. [eBook-1918]

eBook-1918
The pump room was 236' x 60' and the floor was 38.65 feet below street grade. The pumps had to be low enough to have a sufficient head from the lake level to deliver the maximum desired flow of water.
[The pump room needed a big hole. The steam shovel had to remove a lot of dirt.]

eBook-1918
Since they were digging through rock, they screened the rock and mixed the cement in the tunnel and saved a lot of hauling. The collapsible steel forms were designed to allow the passage of tunnel cars so that the finishing work could follow close behind the tunneling work.

eBook-1918

eBook-1918

Centrifugal pump were considered, but they were too new to have a track record, so they stuck with reciprocating pumps because they had a good track record in the pumping stations that had already been built.

eBook-1918
The six 500 hp Edge Moor water tube boilers are stoker fed and have superheaters. The chimney was 184' tall above the boiler room floor with a 9' internal diameter at the top. The outside diameter at the base of 19' 3" tapers to 10' 8" at the top. The steam condensers use all of the water that is on its way to the pumps.

Most of the auxiliary appliances are powered by small steam engines. The only electrical device mentioned in the article was a freight elevator. I guess that if you have six big boilers, you might as well use steam for other things as well. [eBook-1918]

eBook-1918

eBook-valve

I can't find when the reciprocating pumps were replaced by centrifugal pumps that were driven by steam turbines. Today it has 16 GE electric pumps. [wikimapia]

The square building on the north side of the station contained the coal storage hoppers. The Milwaukee Road had a spur that went into the north side of the building. It is a little hard to see that spur in this aerial.

1938 Aerial Photo from ILHAP at photo resolution

Carl Venzke posted
Milwaukee Road's 'Olympian Hiawatha' at Mayfair Tower. The Skytop sleeper-observation car of Milwaukee Road's Olympian Hiawatha bangs across the C&NW diamonds in a 1952 view from the tower at Mayfair, on the north side of Chicago. W. A. Akin Jr. photo
[Note the pumping station smokestack in the background over the coal silos.]