Nice Pipes: The Inner Workings of Buckingham Fountain
Curious City
WBEZ Chicago
4.8 • 642 Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2015
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The lowdown on how the fountain shoots water so high, and why it was built to impress in the first place.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When were the... |
| 0:03.7 | What school's... |
| 0:06.0 | Who decides what the next... |
| 0:08.0 | Where's that story? |
| 0:09.3 | Why they give the look? |
| 0:11.2 | What is this? |
| 0:13.6 | It's a curious city. |
| 0:15.0 | Where WBEZ answers your questions about Chicago, the region, and its people. |
| 0:20.2 | Hi, I'm Chloe Prasinos, here to answer a question about a Chicago icon. |
| 0:25.5 | San Francisco has the Golden Gate Bridge. |
| 0:27.9 | New York City, the Statue of Liberty. |
| 0:30.5 | Chicago has Buckingham Fountain. |
| 0:33.0 | If you can't picture it, imagine water cascading down a wedding cake-shaped fountain, as majestic, |
| 0:38.9 | greeny bronze seahorses spit, and a central stream of water shoots to seemingly impossible |
| 0:44.6 | heights. |
| 0:45.7 | I'm going to explain why they put such a grand fountain on the city's shore. |
| 0:50.4 | Here's a hint. |
| 0:51.5 | The fountain was a compromise, a way to establish a public lakefront without creating too |
| 0:56.1 | much clutter. |
| 0:57.6 | But first, the question. |
| 0:59.7 | Alan Ireland is an HVAC contractor and a self-described pump guy. |
| 1:04.6 | So I heard that Buckingham Fountain is run off of one individual pump and that there |
... |
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