Leader: Aaron Goldstein 
Start: Corner of Sixth St and Harrison St in Berkeley (near the northern terminus of the 18 bus line and about 1.5 miles from the North Berkeley BART station)
End: Corner of Hopkins St. and Kains Ave in Berkeley
Distance: about 3 miles
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.
Please sign up here.

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 six 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.