Ypsilanti — If time travel were a real thing, I would go back to 1890 so that I could ask a man named William R. Coats just one question: “As the guy who designed and built the Ypsilanti Water Tower, why, oh why did you decide to make it look like a giant Johnson?”
Ypsilanti does indeed have the oldest and most famous water tower in Michigan, and it’s famous for one reason: Because it looks like an erect penis sticking out of the ground. Not just a little. A lot.
Go ahead and giggle. Knock yourself out. People have been yukking it up about the Ypsilanti Water Tower since 1890, when Coats designed it and led various teams of day laborers to build it. It’s been looking like a big willie standing guard over Ypsilanti for 135 years.
So why did William R. Coats design the water tower the way he did?
I’ve been pondering this question since I was a little kid, because I grew up in Ypsilanti, just four blocks from the Big Guy. I’ve done my share of giggling about it, but, like most people from Ypsi, the gags have mostly gotten old. When I was a kid, the running joke was that Paul Bunyan came to town in the 1800s and died here, and they buried as much of him as they could. One part was still sticking out of the ground, though, so they just put some bricks around it.
And we’ve all heard the urban legend that if a virgin ever graduates from nearby Eastern Michigan University, the water tower will crumble. The punch line, of course, is that it’s still standing. Hardy har har.
Ypsi folks just accept it looks the way it does, but the rest of the world seems obsessed with the shape of our water tower. So much so that in 2003, Cabinet magazine voted it “The Most Phallic Building in the World,” ahead of such structures as the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the headquarters of the People’s Daily newspaper in Beijing.
The Huffington Post got into the act in 2014, featuring it prominently in a scholarly article titled “10 Buildings That Look Like Penises.”
Yes, yes, yes. We get it. Hilarious.
I’ve researched the heck out of this thing, and I can’t find any evidence that Coats channeled his inner Beavis & Butthead back in the 19th century when he decided that the water tower needed to look like a penis. None of the newspaper articles from back then make mention of the water tower’s unusual shape, and none of the historical materials talk about it either.
But come on. Assuming the male anatomy in the 1800s looked roughly the same as it does today, Coats had to know what he was doing. He could have picked any number of designs for his water tower, so I’m just going to assume he had a good (if very juvenile) sense of humor and did it intentionally.
Whatever the case, the Ypsilanti Water Tower is still standing strong 135 years after it was erected (yuk yuk yuk), and it’s still providing water to much of Ypsi. It’s the oldest water tower in Michigan still in operation, and it’s an engineering and architectural marvel.
Back in the late 1800s, water towers weren’t commonplace in America, and certainly not in Michigan. Most towns like Ypsilanti got their water from local lakes and rivers, and it wasn’t always sanitary.
That’s where the concept of a water tower came in. The idea was that you’d construct an elevated tank on a high spot in town, pump water up to it, and then when residents or firemen needed water, the gravity would do its job and provide a good, steady flow of H2O. Water pressure works.
In 1888, the good people of Ypsilanti decided that they wanted to be one of the first communities in the state to get a water tower. They came up with a way to assess local residents, farms and businesses (based mostly on how many faucets, bathtubs, and cows you had), and raised $21,368 to get it built (about $758,000 today).
They hired Coats to get it built. He came up with the hilarious design, and then used Joliet limestone to build it, using a Queen Anne style that was popular at the time.
One of the unique aspects of the brickwork is that there are four crosses hidden in the design (you can see one clearly above the door). Rumor has it that some of the men working on the tower were devout Catholics and wanted to embed crosses in the design to help protect them from danger.
Coats obtained a massive 250,000-gallon metal tank and built the 147-foot-tall tower around it. It opened on Feb. 3, 1890, and the Ann Arbor Sentinel announced the news in a front-page story: “The elevated reservoir—the great iron tank which surmounts Ypsilanti’s water tower—was completed Sunday, and Monday it was filled with water from the pumping station.”
I’d guess that by Tuesday, the first dick jokes were being told.
All that aside, Ypsi’s water tower quickly became the most famous landmark in town, just as it remains today. It also became the talk of Michigan, as city fathers from all over the state came to Ypsi to see how they did it. Even if they didn’t copy the design, they copied the concept, and every water tower you see in Michigan today is built on the legacy of Coats’ limestone marvel.
When you visit Ypsilanti today, you’ll see it still standing proudly on Summit Street, towering over Eastern Michigan University and my old neighborhood. It’s won every award and honor that a water tower can win and was named a Michigan Historic Site in 1988. A beautiful marble bust of Greek war hero Demetrius Ypsilanti, our town’s namesake, stands proudly in front.
Jokes and giggles aside, I’m glad that old Billy Coats designed the water tower the way he did, because Ypsi wouldn’t be Ypsi without it.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
