Pic request Dale Reservoir - Thread - Urban Exploration Resource

Posted by SaladKing

Holy hell that looks amazing... and perfectly fine? Any idea why it was shut down and demolished?

It was amazing! Here's some history and plans for the site from 2010:

A symbol of St. Paul’s fantastic growth at the turn of the 20th century has been buried, covered by dirt, turf and a fence, in a clump of woods north of the city for 92 years.

Until this month.

A crew started scraping the earth off the Dale Reservoir, a 30-foot-deep, 5-acre concrete tub completed in 1918 and meant to hold water for a city that had grown by more than 400 percent since 1880 and was expected to grow even more.

While the city did become larger — albeit at a slower rate than expected — the way it stored and supplied its water changed. Within a few decades, the Dale Reservoir would become a 30 million-gallon dinosaur in a world of 10 million to 20 million-gallon water tanks.

Its owner, St. Paul Regional Water Services, is replacing the aging structure, which was in use through last year, with a smaller cistern on the same site in Roseville’s Reservoir Woods. The project is out for bid, but the city expects to pay $5 million to $6 million this spring, with construction ending by June 2011.

“You don’t see stuff being built like this anymore,” said Dave Schuler, chief engineer with the water service, of the Dale Reservoir. “That was the game back then, keeping up with growth.”

It was a remarkable structure for the time: 19,264 cubic yards of concrete and 1.1 million pounds of reinforcing steel, built into a hilltop in what was then Rose Township. Laborers worked alongside horses over two years to complete it.

The giant reservoir bid out at $250,000 but ultimately cost twice that much to build, according to water service records (that’s about $7.8 million in 2010 dollars).

It was also a leap forward for a city that initially had drawn a weak flow from Lake Phalen in 1870 for its water needs and was still using an open-air reservoir in Rose Township for water in 1917.

The hilltop site was chosen to serve the upper reaches of St. Paul, including Summit and University avenues and the Como and North End neighborhoods, because it sat 100 feet higher than the McCarron’s reservoir, which supplied downtown and the West End with water.

A crew began demolition April 9 on the Dale structure, dropping a giant wrecking ball through the cast-concrete ceiling.

“It’s kind of hidden in the heart of the city,” said Jeff Dahn, head of the crew from Total Construction in Inver Grove Heights. “To have a 30 million-gallon tank under the grass here, and nobody knows about it, that’s pretty unique.”

The interior of the reservoir, something of a pitch-black cathedral with concrete pillars and arches, was normally accessible only through a hatch that leads down a long staircase.

But over the next several weeks, Dahn’s crew will demolish the roof, collapse the interior columns and break down the walls. The rubble will be crushed and layered on site to create a 5-foot-thick base for the new reservoir.

The new reservoir, a 45-foot-tall domed concrete cylinder, will have a footprint about a quarter of the size of the old one and hold 10 million gallons. It will serve Roseville, one of about a dozen communities the water service contracts with.

In the past few decades, water use has decreased in St. Paul — from a peak of 58 million gallons a day in 1988 to 43 million last year. That’s the result of better conservation and a decrease in water-heavy industry such as beer brewing and manufacturing, according to the water service.

The city has 15 elevated reservoirs — what most people simply call water towers — several wells and the Vadnais-Sucker-Pleasant chain of lakes through Vadnais Heights and North Oaks.

About 70 percent of the service’s water initially is drawn from the Mississippi River north of the metro area.

“We’re in a really good place right now,” said Dave Schuler, chief engineer for the water service.

That wasn’t the case 100 years ago.

For much of the early history of St. Paul, politicians saw water-storage capacity bumping up against use. Residents and businesses used up to 15.89 million gallons a day, and use was expected to increase.

“The city was growing like crazy,” said Jim Graupmann, production division manager for the water service.

According to the U.S. census, St. Paul’s population grew fivefold — from 41,473 to 214,744 — between 1880 and 1910.

Beginning with Lake Phalen, the city’s water sources expanded to include Vadnais Lake and even overflow from Bald Eagle Lake, north of White Bear Lake.

By 1914, the city started treating its water, which previously ran untreated from source to home. But St. Paul needed a way to control the chlorination more closely than in an open-air reservoir.

So planners decided to build a covered reservoir designed to meet the city’s water needs for decades to come.

But after the completion of the Dale Reservoir in 1919, the city started building smaller reservoirs closer to the neighborhoods they served — including reservoirs of 18 million and 10 million gallons in Highland and a 10 million-gallon reservoir in Hillcrest.

By the 1960s, the Dale Reservoir was used for Roseville almost exclusively.

By the 1980s, with water use on the decline, the need for a giant reservoir was gone — particularly because Roseville used only about 5 million gallons a day.

And with costly repairs imminent — including patching cracks in a wall and the ceiling — the water service decided to scrap the reservoir.

It was taken offline and drained last December.

Bike and hiking trails through the woods will remain open as demolition and construction progress.

While the city’s original water commission enthused about the Dale Reservoir — “We have talked a great deal about our new 30 million-gallon, reinforced-concrete reservoir, but believe it is excusable inasmuch as we are quite well pleased with it and because it fills a long-felt need,” the commission wrote in its 1919 annual report — the new reservoir is a smaller, quieter affair.

It will not be covered with earth like the old reservoir, Schuler said, but the water service plans to add elements that will help it blend into the forest.