The One Tower

“Tower Park Observation Tower,” says a red spot on my road atlas, specifically on the Peoria submap. It’s in a suburb to the north called Peoria Heights. When you cross over into that town, you notice that a lot of the area’s wealth is there, especially in the form of sizable houses. Nice, but I wanted to see the observation tower, to do some observing.

It’s something I like to do: find a high spot somewhere new, climb or be elevated to the top, and look around. Maybe that kind of enjoyment goes back to the days I rode to the top of the Tower of the Americas, the name given to the observation tower built for HemisFair -- the world’s fair in San Antonio in 1968. It’s a stark modernist tower in most ways, such as the unadorned concrete shaft, and the glassy top that owes something to the design of satellite.

Still, at 750 feet, it’s a distinctive part of the San Antonio skyline, a very aesthetic feature. I couldn’t imagine San Antonio without it. Better still, it offers a great view, both from the exterior elevator on the way up, and the top. I went up there with my mother and brothers, both at the fair and occasionally afterward; I took a date or two up there in high school; I took Yuriko there before we were married; and one of these days, I’ll take Lilly and Ann up for the view.

The tower in Peoria Heights is a lot closer to our home, however. But what were the odds that it would be open at about 11 on a Sunday morning? After waking up around 7 or so -- habit, and a hard one to break at that -- and sluggishly eating breakfast, fooling around some at the campground (more rocks needed to be thrown by small hands into the nearby lagoon of the Illinois River), and watching the childless couple at the next door campsite pack and leave, we got around to packing up. By the time we were on the road, the warm sun of the early morning had vanished under some clouds.

I knew roughly where the tower was from the map, figuring it would be visible as we closed in. It was. Peoria Heights doesn’t sport a lot of tall things. The mostly circular tower is dull red, painted steel, and reaches up about 200 feet. I asked the woman at the ticket booth about it, and she said it was formerly a water tower for a nearby Pabst Brewery, since closed. Now it’s a municipal water tower, with a three-tiered observation deck, which is supposedly unique among water towers. We paid the modest admission and took an exterior elevator, with mostly glass sides, to the lowest of the three decks.

How to describe a view? It didn’t qualify as magnificent. The Illinois River valley isn’t the Grand Canyon, after all. But it was pretty with the flush of spring, new greenery rolling all around and down to the river, where a couple of barges floated by. Peoria’s small downtown rose to the south, and facilities I took to be Caterpillar’s weren’t far away either. I would have meditated more on the view, but Ann was most interested in hiking up and down the metal staircases between the levels, and I followed her around. She doesn’t care a bit for views (I think), but she knows a good staircase when she sees one.