Ypsilanti Water Tower: The Accidental Icon
Near Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ypsilanti's water tower was built in eighteen ninety on the highest point in town. Architect William Coats used a late-Victorian design with a witch's hat cap on the one hundred forty-seven-foot tower. It held a two hundred fifty thousand gallon tank and served the city's water needs until nineteen fifty-six.
What Coats did not intend, and what nobody anticipated, was that the resulting silhouette would become what Cabinet Magazine once declared the World's Most Phallic Building. Locals call it the Brick Dick with genuine affection. The tower is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Construction workers, apparently hedging their bets, built at least four small crosses into the masonry. You can still find them if you look carefully.
