Leader: Aaron Goldstein 
Start/End: Corner of Sixth St and Harrison St in Berkeley
Distance: 2.75 miles
Accessibility: Flat. Well-behaved dogs on leash are welcome.
This walk is full. Please sign up here to be on the waitlist.

This walk reconstructs a once ubiquitous but now largely forgotten piece of the circa-1900 Berkeley urban landscape. Back then, windmill-topped water towers stood on nearly every city block, pulling up water from wells into elevated water tanks and providing pressurized water for domestic use. Of the thousands of "tank houses'' that once existed in Berkeley, only a handful remain. We'll visit 6 surviving examples in North and West Berkeley and learn about what people had to do to get water in the pre-EBMUD East Bay. Come if you are interested in architectural history, vernacular architecture, urban archaeology, construction, ecology, geology, Berkeley and Easy Bay history, social history—or if you just like walking!  

Aaron Goldstein, a Berkeley architect and San Francisco native, has been studying and tracking down the East Bay's urban tank houses for a year and a half. He has developed several walking tours as part of the public education component of the project.  

This walk starts near the northern terminus of the 18 bus line and is about 1.5-miles from the North Berkeley BART station. This tour is a loop, but because the surviving tanks are quite spread out, there are some long stretches of walking at the beginning of the tour. We will take breaks as needed, and breaks are always good opportunities for questions.

This is a relatively flat and accessible walk, and well-behaved dogs on leash are welcome.