Public drinking fountains in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, have been built and used since the 19th century. Various reform-minded organizations in the city supported public drinking fountains as street furniture for different but overlapping reasons. One was the general promotion of public health, in an era of poor water and typhoid fever. Leaders of the temperance movement such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union saw free, clean water as a crucial alternative to beer. Emerging animal welfare organizations, notably the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, wanted to provide water to the dogs and working horses of the city on humanitarian grounds, which is why Philadelphia's drinking fountains of the era often include curb-level troughs that animals could reach.
History
Background
Philadelphia suffered multiple yellow fever epidemics in the 1790s. The Philadelphia Watering Committee, formally the Joint Committee on Bringing Water to the City, was founded in 1797–98 with the mission of constructing a public water system to combat the disease. Scottish-born architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, famous for being the architect of the United States Capitol building, designed the Philadelphia system in which an underground brick aqueduct carried drinking water from the Schuylkill River to Centre Square, now the site of Philadelphia City Hall. There, twin steam pumps propelled the water into a tank in the tower of the pumping house, from which gravity distributed it throughout the city via wooden water mains (cored logs). Completed in January 1801, this was the first citywide gravity-fed public water system in the United States.
Latrobe's chief draftsman, Frederick Graff, designed a "T"-shaped wooden fire hydrant in 1802, that featured "a drinking fountain on one side and a 4-1/2-inch water main on the other." The hydrants were installed along every major street of the city.
Latrobe's Greek Revival pumping house and the gardens surrounding it became a major attraction. Graff was promoted to manager of the Water Works in 1805, and designed the fountain for Centre Square. The Watering Committee commissioned sculptor William Rush to create a statue, Allegory of the Schuylkill River, to be its centerpiece. Better known as Water Nymph with Bittern, it was carved from pine and painted white (in imitation of marble). The first public fountain in Philadelphia was unveiled in August 1809.
Drinking fountains
The idea of purpose-built drinking fountains was relatively novel. The first public drinking fountains in England appeared in Liverpool in 1854, through the efforts of Charles Pierre Melly, and that city had 43 in total by 1858. The first in London was a granite basin attached to the gates of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, funded by Samuel Gurney and his Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association in 1859.
A spring-fed public drinking fountain was erected in 1854, along the Wissahickon Creek opposite Chestnut Hill. It was described in 1884 as:
The first fountain, so called, stands upon the side of the road on the west side of the Wissahickon ... It is claimed that this is the first drinking fountain erected in the county of Philadelphia outside of the Fairmount Water-Works. A clear, cold, mountain spring is carried by a spout, covered with a lion's head, from a niche in a granite front, with pilasters and pediment into a marble basin. The construction bears the date 1854 ... Upon a slab above the niche are cut the words "Pro bono publico"; beneath the basin these, "Esto perpetua".
In the 1860s, philanthropic groups and governments across the United States began to fund the building of water fountains, including the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1867 (in Union Square in New York City), and the Philadelphia Fountain Society beginning in April 1869. New fountains in Philadelphia proved immediately successful. They quickly proved their "utility and absolute necessity;" by September 1869 the Fountain Society had constructed 12, and the Pennsylvania branch of the ASPCA (PSPCA) had built another 5. As of 1880, the Philadelphia Fountain Society recorded 50 fountains serving approximately 3 million people and 1 million horses and other animals. Reformers continued installing such fountains throughout Philadelphia into the 1940s. Many remain.
In 2015, Philly Voice reported on plans to re-establish a system of public drinking fountains in the city.