The search for pure water in Pittsburgh: the urban response to water pollution, 1893-1914.

An important concern of the current environmental movement is the quality of water that we drink. Nowhere has this matter received more attention than in Pittsburgh, where citizens have expressed widespread apprehension over the healthfulness of the drinking water. The issue of clean water, however, has a long history in Pittsburgh, as in other cities, and this article will discuss the manner in which Pittsburgh coped with an earlier crisis over water quality. The problem of supplying fresh water for the cities was faced by urban leaders early in the nation's history. In 1799 and 1800, Philadelphia, under the impetus caused by the yellow fever epidemic of that decade, constructed the Centre Square Water Works to bring untainted water into the city. Other cities soon followed. In the 1830s New York City constructed the Croton Aqueduct, and in the 1840s Boston developed a publicly owned waterworks with an aqueduct bringing water from outside the city. Most American cities of substantial size had taken some action on water supply by I860. 1 Pittsburgh developed its first waterworks in 1827-1828. Subsequent growth of the city required expansion of the water supply system in 1850, in 1870, and again 1879. By 1880, the city had a population of nearly 110,000 and its waterworks supplied over 15,000,000 unfiltered gallons of water daily to residential and industrial consumers. 2 To a large extent, improvements in urban waterworks were a response to a high death rate from epidemic disease and the need for adequate water supplies to fight fires in the largely wooden-structured nineteenth-century cities. By the late nineteenth century, some cities had begun to consider methods of further purification. In 1872, the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, began operating a slow-sand filter to purify its water, and in 1893, Lawrence, Massachusetts, put a simi-