Salvaging Houston’s first underground reservoir

Many possibilities for bayou

Matt Dietrichson, Jan 31, 12.

Planners are looking for a way to reuse a defunct underground reservoir, originally built near Buffalo Bayou and Sabine Street in 1927, according to The Houston Chronicle:

A couple of Public Works guys opened the hatches - several hatches for no reason but to let sunlight down into the reservoir; and one hatch with a skinny ladder that our party of four would climb down into the darkness.

“Do you have an air monitor?” the Public Works guys asked Guy Hagstette, our leader. “And a winch?”

“They’re in my truck,” Hagstette said.

“A winch?” I asked.

“Emergency equipment. The city requires it. So that we could haul someone out if they’re injured.”

This was not, in my experience, how encounters with sublime beauty usually began. But then, I’d never gone hunting for sublime beauty in an underground reservoir.

A few weeks earlier, I’d run into Hagstette, Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s consultant in charge of planning, at a party, and he’d told me about the Cistern. Ever since, I’d been dying to see the place.

In 1927, he told me, the City of Houston built its first underground drinking-water reservoir - a concrete holding tank roughly the size of one and half football fields on Sabine Street, near Buffalo Bayou. But after decades of service, the reservoir sprang a leak that couldn’t be found, much less stopped. So the reservoir was drained, and for years it sat unused: just an odd hill topped with hatches behind a Public Works building.

About a year and a half ago, when the city was taking bids for the reservoir’s demolition - to remove the concrete and fill the depression with heavy dirt, suitable for building atop - the Buffalo Bayou Partnership began doing due diligence to acquire the land.

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