Sulphur Springs Water Tower, Water tower in Tampa, US
Sulphur Springs Water Tower is a 214-foot (65 m) cylindrical concrete tower in Tampa, Florida. Its walls are eight inches thick, with a buttressed base on solid rock. The upper quarter holds a 200,000-gallon water tank, while the lower three quarters contain seven floors of one room each. A projecting circular balcony and a crenellated parapet ring the top.
Grover Poole, a builder rather than an architect, erected the tower in 1927 for realtor Josiah S. Richardson, who mortgaged his entire Sulphur Springs resort for $180,000 to finance it. It supplied water to the Sulphur Springs Hotel and Apartments and to Mave's Arcade, the first shopping mall in Florida, on the hotel's ground floor. After the 1933 collapse of the Tampa Electric dam damaged the arcade, Richardson lost everything. The tower ran as a private water company until the City of Tampa forced it to stop in 1971.
The tower stands over the artesian well that fed it, and its name comes from the Sulphur Springs district around it. Mave's Arcade, on the hotel's first floor, was Florida's first shopping mall. The tower now sits in River Tower Park, where a completed walkway deck connects it to Sulphur Springs Park beneath Interstate 275.
The tower stands in River Tower Park, reached by a limited one-lane access road off Bird Street; there are no facilities and only a small parking lot. A completed River Walkway decking links the park to Sulphur Springs Park beneath Interstate 275. The tower itself is not open to visitors.
The tower stands over the mouth of an artesian well, with the well and pumps housed beneath the structure itself. Its walls are 8 inches (200 mm) thick, and concrete was poured into forms raised by yokes and jacks at a rate of 10 feet (3 m) a day. Builder Grover Poole wrote that the cantilever foundation on rock, with buttresses, would make the tower "rather a difficult job to ever destroy."
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