The Brick Dick

My tribute to the Ypsilanti Water Tower, a building frequently sighted as the most phallic structure in the world.

The great stone Water Tower is clearly the defining landmark of the Ypsilanti area. There are many, many older buildings around town, but there none as memorable or as unique as the “brick dick.”

Putting aside the tower's odd and controversial shape for a moment, here are a few facts about the structure. The tower, located on the corner of Cross and Summit Streets, was designed in 1889 by architect William R. Coats and built in1890. It is147 feet high and has a base diameter of 85 feet. Constructed of Joliet limestone, its walls vary from 24 to 40 inches thick, and it can hold up to 250,000 gallons of water. Opened shortly after its construction, the tower became the cornerstone of a city wide reservoir system and stayed in active operation -- supplying water to the citizens of the city and surrounding areas -- until 1953. In 1988, the tower became a Registered Michigan Historic Site listed with the Bureau of History, Michigan Department of State.

In 2003 Cabinet Magazine conducted a world-wide contest to identify "The World's Most Phallic Building" and the Ypsilanti Water Tower was declared the winner. This brings us to the main point of this short essay. According to local historians, the tower's unique appearance was neither an accident nor a joke. It was designed to look exactly like what everyone thinks it looks like: a huge, erect penis. Why the architect wanted to place a phallic symbol on the highest point in the city of Ypsilanti, no one knows. There is nothing in either his biography or list of other designed structures that suggests mental derangement, an interest in Freudian psychology, or even an odd sense of humor. To this day, Coats' motives remain a mystery; as do the motives of city fathers who approved its financing and construction. One can only suppose the sexual mores of 1890 were somewhat different than they are today; that people were less likely to read overt sexuality into abstract objects in the late nineteenth century than they would be in the century that followed.

As early as 1913, plans were made to change the shape of the tower's “ill-proportioned wooden dome.” Proposals were taken from a number of firms on how the structure's appearance could be altered, yet nothing ever came of these plans for re-design. My cartoon suggests that, even upon its completion, the tower inspired controversy. The picture was taken by myself and altered with Adobe Photoshop software. The figures in the foreground were lifted from a drawing by James Thurber and superimposed in front of the tower itself. The joke is basically the same one nightclub comedians have been making in Ann Arbor for years.

NOTE. A few years ago the city of Ypsilanti tried to cover it up by draping a huge sheet of plastic over it. As a way of hiding the structure from public view the attempt failed miserably, but during the time the plastic was in place the birth rate in Washtenaw County dropped 43.8 percent.