Leader: Aaron Goldstein 
Distance: about 2 1/2 miles
Elevation: 0
Accessibility: The walk covers mostly level terrain, but there are several areas of narrow and/or uneven pavement. The tour involves periods standing for 10-20 minutes at each of the five sites. Because the surviving tanks are quite spread out, there are some long stretches of walking at the beginning of the tour. Well-behaved dogs on leash are welcome.

This walk traces the history of a once-ubiquitous but now largely forgotten piece of the circa-1900 East Bay urban landscape — the tank house. From the 1860s through the 1920s, windmill-topped water towers stood on nearly every city block, pulling up water from wells into elevated redwood tanks, providing pressurized water for domestic use. During their heyday, there were many thousands of these tank houses in the urbanizing East Bay. Only a handful remain of the hundreds of tank houses that once existed in Berkeley. We'll visit five surviving examples in South Berkeley and North Oakland and learn about how people got their water in the pre-EBMUD East Bay.

Come if you are interested in architectural history, vernacular architecture, urban archaeology, construction, ecology, geology, Berkeley and East Bay history, social history — or if you just like walking!  

Please note that this walk starts near the Ashby BART Station and ends near the Rockridge BART Station. Because the surviving tanks are quite spread out, the tour is not a loop, and there are a few long stretches of walking. We will take many breaks. This is a relatively flat and accessible walk. Well-behaved dogs on leash are welcome. See you there!

Aaron Goldstein, a Berkeley architect and architectural historian and San Francisco native, has been tirelessly tracking down and documenting the East Bay's urban tank houses for over a year and a half. He hosts regular walking tours on multiple routes and believes that increasing public appreciation of these neglected structures will improve their chance of being preserved.