Lynda H. Schneekloth, Professor Emerita
School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo
To be published in: Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan of the Great Lakes Basin. 2016
Eds.; Daniel Ibanez, Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim and Mason White. [Barcelona: ACTAR,
We live not only in physical, material places, but in a world structured by our ideas, beliefs and imaginations. These imaginations are so powerful that, at times, the imaginal is confused with or masks the world underfoot, in front of our faces, and over our heads.
Collective imaginations are not static and shifts in the conceptual, physical and/or imaginal reverberate on the material world and the spatial practices of people in place.(1)
Buffalo, New York has experienced major shifts in its understanding of both the physical and the imaginative presence of water. To the indigenous Native Americans, water was a center of life and culture. With the advent of colonization and the infusion of new people and new economic and social practices (such as industrialization and urbanization), water slowly transformed into a single-purpose phenomenon like the Erie
Canal—a major water project that opened in 1825. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, wetlands, lakes, rivers, and streams were channelized or replaced by an out-ofsight urban infrastructure in cities across the Great Lakes, rendering them invisible. Each transition had a profound impact. It has only been in the last 35 years that water has emerged within the Buffalo consciousness. How this revitalization happened is the story of this essay.
Like most cities established at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Buffalo
(1804) got its water from water wagons, community pumps, or directly from the various area rivers. In 1827 the private company, Jubilee Water Works, began delivering water from an underground aquifer to wealthy patrons through 16 miles of pump logs.
However, most of the city was not serviced and in 1832, there was a major outbreak of cholera.(2) Through a totally different set of social and spatial practices unrelated to water, people used cesspools, privy-vaults, and the bucket system to dispose of human waste while they relied on pigs to roam the streets and devour garbage. In many places,
“night soil” from the cities was picked up for use on farmlands.(3)

During the nineteenth century, London was at the forefront of ingenuity regarding water infrastructure.(4) Edwin Chadwick published a widely circulated paper in 1842 proposing that it was the government’s responsibility to address the environmental conditions of the foul industrial city, claiming that the provision of clean water and the elimination of waste were connected.(5) It was a radical idea as sewers were used solely to “dewater” the city and were not involved in the removal of human waste. It wasn’t until the adoption of the flush toilet in the latter part of the nineteenth century that sewers were used to dispose of human and industrial waste directly into local waterways. With this new practice, and perhaps paradoxically in the name of public health, the ripe fishing grounds around Buffalo and many other cities were polluted.
Buffalo developed a public water system not to provide clean water to residents but as a result of a downtown fire in 1850 and the need for more water pressure. The
Buffalo Waterworks was a privately owned system that was expanded in 1868 when the city assumed responsibility for the delivery of water. In spite of the new system, there was another major outbreak of cholera in 1854 because they had built the new intake directly downstream of the highly contaminated Buffalo River.
What seems obvious to us today—the separation of potable water from wastewater—was not so obvious over a century ago. There was, in fact, no line of thought suggesting that this separation was necessary and therefore there was no effort to solve it spatially, pragmatically, operationally, or managerially. As cities grew, the spatial practice of using water from the same basic supply (to cook, clean, drink, as well as getting rid of waste), became the origin of disease, deadly epidemics, and general ill health. An old Wisconsin Farmer’s Almanac once quipped that a civilized person is someone who doesn’t shit in their water before they drink it. If this were the measure, nineteenth-century cities were far from civilized.
The dominant paradigm of the day was the miasmatic or “filth” theory that understood disease to be caused by foul odors (a “miasma”) that were plentiful in early industrial cities.(6) The miasmatic theory and its focus on air rendered the connection between water supply, sewers, and disease invisible. It wasn’t until 1894 that Buffalo’s first health commissioner, Dr. Ernest Wende, confirmed with scientific study that the water intake system was the source of typhoid bacteria.(7) This research was dependent

upon the acceptance of the scientific methods, theories, and new technologies such as microscopes. The discovery of bacteria in the 1870s by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch revealed an entirely new realm of life. The existence of these invisible life forms radically transformed the concept of clean water, which was previously identified by its clarity.
This discovery had significant repercussions not only with respect to health and disease, but it also created a shift in the very basis of knowledge. If seeing and smelling could no longer be trusted, how did one know whether water was safe? The source of danger shifted from air to water and to invisible, almost imaginary players. Knowledge of their existence relied on complex instrumentation, and protection of the public health demanded state intervention to oversee compliance to certain standards.
In response to germ theory, Buffalo began chlorinating its water in 1914 at the completion of the new waterworks intake and building. At that time, 28 percent of the US urban population was drinking filtered or treated water, but by 1923, over 97 percent of citizens living in the largest cities had treated water thanks to the creative problem solving of sanitary engineers.(8) The age of epidemics in modern cities was essentially over now that the problem had been understood and scientific innovation provided sufficient treatment to kill bacteria.
But what about the receiving waters? Allen Hazen, a well reputed civil engineer of the late nineteenth century, summarized the attitude of municipalities and engineers,
“[It] is . . . both cheaper and more effective to purify the water [intake] and to allow the sewage to be discharged without treatment, so far as there are not other reasons for keeping it out of the rivers.”(9) If disease could be eliminated through water treatment, there was no need to treat discharging waters.
George Whipple, author of the Typhoid Fever: Its Causation, Transmission and
Prevention (1908), was one of the few dissenters and his voice is prescient to what the environmental movement would become, 60 years after his book’s publication. Whipple argued that the loss of rivers and streams had serious consequences to public health. He also noted that pollution damaged recreational opportunities and waterfront property values, stating that if cities increase their “capital in the form of mills and factories, [they]

decrease it in the form of natural water resources; we are not, as a nation, growing rich as rapidly as we think.”(10)
At the beginning of the twentieth century, 88 percent of urban areas disposed of their household and industrial waste without treatment.(11) Rivers such as the Buffalo
River and the Niagara River and small creeks such as the Scajaquada and Cornelius were channeled and/or put into pipes. Once fertile straits and wetlands, these water flows became part of the industrial production process that moved waste out of the city.
The decision to discharge human and industrial waste into receiving rivers had been made and the only question remaining was how to design these systems effectively and within municipal budgets. The combined system, in which stormwater and sewage used the same conveyance infrastructure, became standard practice in the cities of the
Great Lakes. These systems eliminated the backup of waste effluence into streets and basements. Yet this decision, although rational at the time, made both treatment and resource recovery more difficult and expensive in the long run.(12)
It wasn’t until 1935 that the New York State Board of Health established the
Buffalo Sewer Authority (BSA) and mandated the construction of a sewage treatment facility. On June 29, 1938, the Bird Island Waste Treatment Plant used the most modern technology to incorporate 754 miles of underground pipes and interceptor sewers. After the facility opened on the Niagara River, there was a 97 percent drop in levels of bacteria in the water.(13)
By the 1940s in the United States, all levels of government were involved in regulating and managing publicly supplied clean water and sewer treatment through the
1942 Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA). This act was followed by the 1956 and 1966 federal amendment to the FWPCA and the 1965 New York State Pure Waters
Act. These acts were critical because Buffalo, “the Queen City of the Lakes,” sat on
“dead” Lake Erie and the conjoining Buffalo River, which had zero life and actually caught fire in the 1960s.
The Clean Water Act (CWA) of 1972 enabled the City of Buffalo to access federal funds to expand its plant to include secondary biological treatment.(14) To all appearances, the construction should have solved the sewer problems for the city and led to compliance with the requirements of the CWA, which mandated that by 1985, “All

water bodies in the United States would be fishable and swimmable and that all discharges of pollutants be eliminated.” (15) When the system is fully operating during dry weather, it functions according to sound engineering and environmental principles.
Yet Buffalo, a city that has experienced a staggering loss of 50 percent of its population in the last quarter of the twentieth century, still has over 50 overflows each year and struggles with contaminated lakes and rivers, endless fishing advisories, and closed beaches.
Modern cities have now engaged in two centuries of experimentation and invested billions of dollars in urban water infrastructure through supply treatment and watercarriage waste removal. But the antiquated sewer systems of the Third Coast are unable to handle the volume of waste. Further, we are now faced with whole new classes of contaminants: chemicals found in industrial processes, plastics, and pharmaceuticals that cannot be treated in our bacteria-based treatment plants. In other words, we still struggle with the very basic premise of “not shitting in your water before you drink it.”
By the third quarter of the twentieth century, Buffalo still struggled with water issues and, like many early industrial Great Lakes cities, was profoundly impacted by globalization and resultant deindustrialization. Buffalo’s prime advantage for transshipment evaporated with the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, the expansion of the Welland Canal, and the closing of the Port of Buffalo in the 1960s and 70s.
Perhaps the death knell was heard most clearly in 1985, when Bethlehem Steel closed its plant in Buffalo and laid off 5,000 people in one day, creating a waterfall impact on the city and region. The city was left with limited resources and investments and with an abundance of contaminated land and waters. However, this abandonment of industry also released the waterfront from its grip, allowing natural processes to begin reclaiming the land and cleaning the water that enters the connected streams and rivers.
The abandoned but regenerating landscapes opened a space in people’s hearts and minds to reimagine the waterfront. In Buffalo, this process began in 1982 with a major waterfront study and public process. People eventually remembered—they really were a city with waterfronts. This began another major shift in imagination that brought the water back into the discourse of the city. Citizens began a long-term struggle to reclaim their right to clean water and public access.

Buffalo’s rediscovery of its water coincided with a national shift in attitudes and actions regarding the environment that started with the environmental legislation a decade earlier. A refocus on the context of clean water and the importance of the environment and its services, embedded in the Clean Water Act, affirmed the Public
Trust Doctrine’s almost forgotten premise that the waters belong to all of us.(16) In the mid 1980s, the International Joint Commission identified 42 “toxic hot spots” that were contributing the most to the pollution in the lakes.(17) Not surprisingly, the Buffalo and the Niagara Rivers were identified in the report. By 1989, a small group of citizens organized the Friends of the Buffalo River to watch over the cleanup process. The group’s vision of what was possible on this severely damaged body of water seemed utopian in the early 1990s. However, 25 years later, the Buffalo River is a center for public access and recreation with most of its contamination remediated.(18)
This group, now known as the Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper, has also worked to improve green infrastructure by twenty-five percent, by working with the Buffalo Sewer Authority to create a Long-Term Control Plan, which includes a set of practices that keeps stormwater out of the sewer system. A whole new set of spatial practices and public infrastructure is possible with the potential to enrich the lives of urban citizens while significantly improving the functioning of urban waters.
Lake Erie, the Buffalo River, and the Niagara River are now being reintegrated into the fabric of the city. Yet beyond the waterfront, these practices have the capacity to transform the public realm, the imagination of water, and its place in our lives. Green infrastructure, as an analogous hydrological system, infuses the city with indigenous ecosystems that function specifically like the network of steams settlers found 200 years ago. These new spatial practices improve the quality of urban life by expanding the scope of cities with diverse and dispersed public spaces while reducing the unmanageable load on the sewage treatment plants.
Buffalo, like other cities across the Great Lakes, has a special obligation to the water; after all it sits on the largest source of surface fresh water on the Earth. How we imagine these waters is intimately tied to how we treat them—and ourselves. Over the last two centuries, cities have struggled to provide clean and potable water to its citizenry.
Today, the water infrastructure under our feet is nearly as marvelous as the water it

carries. It is a tribute to keen minds, great engineering imagination, the power of science, and an ethical commitment to the public good.
As our culture moves into a more holistic and ecological mindset, cities will continue to bring water back into the forefront of our social consciousness. In the end, how we think about water is what will determine how we construct and manage dense human settlements and how we understand the relationship between the urban artifact that is a city and the region in which it sits. We aspire for clean water and the effective removal of waste as we begin to understand that we need clean water for our bodies and our souls. We also now know that we need to literally see and touch these waters that run through our bodies, our cities, and our planet.
Notes
1. The word, imaginal , describes an aspect of spatial types that speaks to foundational beliefs and ideas held by communities of people about what places mean. ‘The American
Dream’, for example, is a powerful American imaginal type to which so many material, conceptual and hopes adhere. Lynda H. Schneekloth and Karen A. Franck, “Type: Prison or Promise,” in Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design , ed. Karen A. Franck et al.
(New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1994), 13-38.
2. M. Stephen Pendleton, “A Pipe Dream Comes True: Buffalo’s Decision to Make
Water a Public Good,”
Middle States Geographer 32 (1999): 49.
3. Carol Hupping Stoner, ed., Goodbye to the Flush Toilet : Water-Saving Alternatives to
Cesspools, Septic Tanks, and Sewers (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1977).
4. Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population of
Great Britain (Edinburgh: University Press, 1842).
5. Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin,
Texas: University of Texas Press, 1980), 17-73.
6. Stanley K. Schultz and Clay McShane, “Pollution and Political Reform in Urban
America: The Role of Municipal Engineers, 1840-1920,” in Pollution and Reform, ed.
Martin V. Melosi (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1980), 156.
7. Pendleton, “A Pipe Dream,” 57.

8. Stuart Galishoff, “Triumph and Failure: The American Response to the Urban Water
Supply Problem, 1860-1923,” in Pollution and Reform, ed. Martin V. Melosi (Austin,
Texas: University of Texas Press, 1980).
9. Stoner, Goodbye to the Flush Toilet , 18.
10. Galishoff, “Triumph and Failure,” 53.
11. Joel A. Tarr and F. C. McMichael, “Water and Wastes: A History,” Water Spectrum
10 (1978): 21.
12. Tarr and McMichael, “Water and Wastes,” 21.
13. Mary C. Rossi, “The History of Sewage Treatment in the City of Buffalo, New
York,”
Middle States Geographer 18 (1995): 12-14.
14. Rossi, “History of Sewage Treatment,” 13.
15. John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr ., The Riverkeepers (New York: Touchstone
Book, 1997), 153.
16. Mary Christina Wood, Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) and http://flowforwater.org/public-trustsolutions/what-is-public-trust/.
17. John H. Hartig, “Great Lakes Remedial Action Plans: Fostering Adaptive Ecosystem-
Based Management Processes,”
American Review of Canadian Studies 27, no. 3 (1997).
18. Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper, “Buffalo River Restoration Projects,” last modified June
2015, http://bnriverkeeper.org/projects/buffalo-river-restoration/buffalo-river-projects.