In defense of the water tower

There is a genre of civic architecture that never gets a postcard, and it is the genre that actually holds a town together. The water tower. The grain elevator. The curling rink with the roof that was redone in 1994 and is, by all accounts, holding. These are the buildings that appear when you type a small town’s name into an image search, usually photographed from the highway, usually a little crooked.

Our badge has a water tower on it where a mountain should be. This was not an accident and it was not a bit. When we started drawing the mark, we tried mountains. Mountains are what souvenir logos are supposed to have — the implication being that you visited somewhere dramatic, somewhere that earned its merchandise through elevation. But the towns we commemorate mostly do not have a dramatic skyline. They have a water tower with the town’s name painted on it in a font nobody chose on purpose, repainted every couple of decades, visible from the road in both directions.

Here is what a water tower actually is: a promise. It says a town decided, at some point, that it planned to still be there in fifty years, and did the municipal math to prove it. Nobody builds a water tower for a town they intend to abandon. It is infrastructure as optimism — a hundred and forty feet of quiet confidence that the taps will keep running and the kids will keep coming back for Christmas.

The landmark test

When we add a town to the catalog, we ask one question: what would the gift shop have put on the shirt in 1978? Not what a brand consultant would choose now — what the person behind the counter, who had lived there for forty years, would have pointed to. Sometimes it is a bridge. Sarnia has a bridge. It is a good bridge. Sometimes it is a lake, a smelter, a statue of a fruit. In Trail, British Columbia, it is arguably the smelter, which has been smelting since 1901 and does not care whether you find that glamorous.

The point is that every town has one. The landmark test has never once failed us, because the landmark test is really a question about whether a place has a story, and every place where people have lived for a hundred years has a story. It is usually a modest story. Modest stories are the ones people actually belong to.

Wearing infrastructure

So when you wear a shirt with a water tower on it, you are not wearing a joke about a small town. You are wearing the most honest monument the twentieth century produced. The Eiffel Tower was built for an exposition. The water tower was built so that Mrs. Kowalski on Third Street could water her tomatoes during a dry August. One of these is more famous. We would gently argue the other one is more important.

Our position, stated plainly: the water tower deserves the reverence. The town of eleven thousand deserves the merch. And if your town’s tower has the name painted in that slightly-wrong municipal serif, we would like to hear about it. That font is exactly what our display face is trying to remember.