Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape (2006; revised 2014). A uniquely comprehensive and valuable survey of the vast array of technical infrastructure we see all the time and rarely understand.
Kate Ascher, The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005). A wonderful illustrated guide to the infrastructure of New York City. See also Ascher's book The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (2011), which explores the technical systems that make tall buildings possible.
Gerard Koeppel, City on a Grid: How New York Became New York (2015).
Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present (1999). This is the classic one-volume environmental history of sanitary systems in American cities. Be forewarned: the paperback edition is abridged.
Judith Walzer Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (1982).
Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999).
William J. Rathje & Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage (1992).
Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (2016).
Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things (1997).
This is a lecture about the invisible landscapes on which all of our lives depend: underground systems and networks. But it is also about one of the underlying themes of the course we've been encountering for weeks now: the ways in which the world was becoming increasingly interconnected in the 19th century. Finally, it is also about a paradox of these growing interconnections: as landscapes were becoming ever more interconnected, those interconnections were becoming ever more opaque. Even though more and more people were becoming dependent on these hidden landscapes, fewer and fewer people understood those interconnections or even remembered the ways their lives depended on them.
One additional observation I'd made at the start is that this lecture is organized more as a geographical tour of these often unnoticed and taken-for-granted systems than a historical narrative of their emergence and growth over time. This is partly because they are so pervasive, existing in essentially every city or town or rural area as essential features of the modern landscape, with each individual system having its own unique story but each also partaking of features that are shared by all of them because of the engineering protocols and building codes that now standardize their construction. More often than not, I'll gesture today toward these systems as they emerged in New York City, which was one of the earliest innovators in several of these areas and today operates some of the largest and most complex of them; New York also has better and more readily available documentation to enable me to illustrate how these systems work. (Kate Ascher's books in the reading list above focus on New York, for instance, and are uniquely helpful in offering overviews of how New York's infrastructure works.) But for my purposes today, it's less important to focus on the minute particulars of individual systems in individual places than on the ways all of them work and their spatial expressions in the landscape.
Let's start in a city we've discussed many times in this course: Chicago. We know from past lectures that the midcontinent of the U.S. the nineteenth century was becoming connected via trade via the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence watershed, the Erie Canal, New York Harbor, and the wider Atlantic world. Chicago in the early decades of the nineteenth century was many things: a group of Potowatami villages, an American fur trading post, a U.S. Army fort.
Remember the Land Ordinance of 1785? One way to think about the land survey set in motion by that law is that it transformed abstract space, natural environments, and the landscapes of native peoples into real estate. By applying boundaries to territory and attaching property rights to those boundaries, the Ordinance of 1785 made it possible to buy and sell land. But the 1785 Ordinance was not by itself enough to turn land into valuable real estate. In order for land to have value, it needed to be connected to markets in which buyers would pay money to purchase it.
Thus the two-square-mile land grid at the mouth of the Chicago River, an image we've seen before, can serve as a telling example. Though the platting of this land in 1832 was an action separate from the Ordinance of 1785, this land was gridded into rectangular pieces of property in a similar fashion. With the designation of the site as the terminus of the northern edge of the Illinois-Michigan Canal, the two square miles of land at the mouth of the Chicago River experienced one of the most explosive real estate bubbles in history. Between 1832 and 1837, land at the mouth of the Chicago River increased in price by 50, 100, 500 percent. Come the Panic of 1837, land prices collapsed, and the Chicago economy as well as the national economy took a decade to recover. But notice that this real estate bubble happened when the gridding of the land happened as that land was connected to a market via the Illinois-Michigan Canal.
We can understand this growing economic interconnection in the 19th century by looking to John H. Kinzie, one of the settlers in this 1930s Chicaago real estate boom. He was the Indian Agent in Portage, Wisconsin, and we've encountered him before via his wife Juliette Kenzie, who made a name for herself as the author of the frontier memoir Wau-Bun that I described in the first lecture of the course. We're revisiting John Kinzie in this lecture because he became a Chicago commission merchant, who made a living by arranging transportation for people who wanted to ship their goods to eastern markets. For those interested in contracting his transportation services, advertised a list of the agents who would overseek the movement of goods en route. This list shows us the extent of the interconnections he was able to build and benefit from as he shipped goods between Chicago and New York. Along with commission merchants, the railroads also contributed to this growing web of interconnections. The Illinois Central Railroad, similarly, entered Chicago in 1850, and also helped build out these links. So if we look at images of seemingly opposing landscapes from the 1850s, urban factories and rural farms, we are reminded that urban and rural worlds, far from being separate, were becoming ever more intimately interconnected. Urban and rural Americans were buying from each other, selling to each other, and depending on each other, in ever increasing volumes.
Among the most striking symbols of this ever more intimate linking of city and country was the mail-order company: Montgomery Ward, and Sears, Roebuck & Co. (which finally declared bankruptcy in 2018). What is a mail-order company? In a way, Ward and Sears were the Amazon.com of the late nineteenth century. They published and distributed catalogs featuring the products they offered for sale, enabling customers from across rural and small-town America to place orders from afar. Mail-order companies profited primarily by organizing geographical networks of customers across immense stretches of the rural landscape.
How did buyers place orders with such companies? They sent orders via the U.S. mail—another network emerging during this period, one whose origins and expansion I won't try to tell in this course, that in many ways served nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans as the Internet serves us now. You placed your order via the U.S. Postal Service, sending payment in much the same way. Your order went to a central distribution facility in Chicago. Ward and Sears boxed up orders, put them on railroad cars, and shipped them out to customers across rural America. This image of "the busy hive" at Montgomery Ward's Chicago facility shows a central node in this vast interconnected network:
https://chicagology.com/goldenage/goldenage015/
I would argue that invisible networks of interconnections like these is a defining feature of modernity. The paradox is that although our lives depend on them, they are largely invisible to us, making it challenging for us to recognize and take responsibility for their impacts on ourselves, on other people, and on the world around us.
With this focus on the networks connecting Chicago with its hinterlands as our backdrop, I want to look to networks within cities, particularly the ones that principally exist underground. I will talk about networks today that you may think of as recent, but whose origins are in fact centuries or even millennia old. Despite the long history of human systems for distributing drinking water or disposing of sewage, for example, what begins to be different in the 19th century is the emergence of new technologies whose purpose is to serve these functions systematically across an entire metropolitan area.
We've already spent time before the midterm exam exploring the emergence of far-flung transportation networks and technologies: rivers, overland trails, canals, railroads, roads, interstate highways, air traffic systems. There are complex political economic reasons why these networks took the form they did in the American landscape--reasons you read about in the railroad chapter of Nature's Metropolis, and that to some degree apply to these other transportation networks as well. One obvious feature of these systems is that they became densest and most concentrated in areas we think of as urban, and least dense in areas we think of as rural.
You can think of cities as key nodes in these emerging networks, places where the far-flung connections in these systems intersect with each other. Chicago is a spectacular example of such a node. The second half of the 19th century was the moment when the modern corporation was being invented, with the railroad companies inventing many of the features we now take for granted in corporate organization: managerial hierarchies, financing, labor relations, commodity supply chains, accounting systems, and everything else that corporations typically do. Corporations invented and managed the networked systems we're discussing today.
Now let's ponder the networked worlds within cities that emerged during this same period. As we've already seen, towns were created in the 19th century when promoters bought up a tract of land, platted its streets and property parcels, and then sold off the resulting lots. Lots could sell for a handsome price if the developer could assure that the new town would have a reliable connection to a transportation system like the railroad.
The same gridded street plan that became nearly universal in laying out new towns in the West also showed up on the growing margins of older cities. The most famous example is almost certainly the New York City Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which laid out the rectilinear grid of streets and avenues that characterize the island of Manhattan north of Greenwich Village.
http://thegreatestgrid.mcny.org/greatest-grid/
https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3804n.ct000812/?r=0,-0.151,1,0.591,0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811
Once the grid of city streets had been laid out as the blueprint for future development on Manhattan (and other such cities), it set the template that would shape the growth of all other systems of infrastructure that would be built thereafter.
Existing geographies and natural systems gradually disappeared into the geographies of the grid. We can place the Plan of 1811 alongside Egbert Viele's unique 1865 Topographical Map of New York, which sought to show all the streams and watercourses that existed on the island of Manhattan before those waterways were went underground.
https://www.loc.gov/item/2006629795/
In reading an urban landscape, it's always worth asking where the original rivers and streams have gone, since most always became part of the underground infrastructure cities expanded in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The flooding we experience in Madison in 2018 mainly took place in parts of the city that were constructed on drained wetlands.
In cities like New York where problems with street congestion became severe enough and where the market for rapid transportation was great enough, urban transportation systems began to go underground at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century in the form of subways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway
The first subway in NYC opened in 1904, and the proliferation of subway tunnels in the decades that followed can stand as a symbol of the ever more complicated underground world that began to be constructed beneath the city's streets. It's that world I want to explore for the rest of today's lecture.
I now want to invite you to think about what's under your feet when you walk down a city street. Many of the diagrams I showed during this part of the lecture are from a wonderful book by Kate Ascher called The Works (2005), listed in the Suggested Readings above, which seeks to illustrate most of the underground infrastructure that now makes up the urban fabric of a city like New York (much of which you'll also find in Madison and most other cities). When you walk down a city street today, you'll typically notice only a top layer of asphalt, though if you know how to interpret what you're seeing, you'll find signs of other things that lie below: layers of asphalt covering a concrete substrate and gravel below, all of these overlaying the storm sewers that carry rainwater through underground watercourses to streams that now flow underground. Protecting pavement from water is itself a challenge, since they can easily be ruined just by the freezing and thawing of ice during the winter: holes form in the asphalt and form cavities that begin to give way, reminding us of the land underneath that paving. That's why potholes often become such a problem in northern cities like Madison as winter progresses.
The creation of a storm sewer system to handle precipitation was one of the major challenges faced by sanitary engineers in the late 19th century. An even greater challenge was separating this stormwater from the water in your sink and toilet, since the latter was far more likely to be biologically active and a likely vector for water-borne disease. Manholes and sewer grates remind us of the storm sewers that lie below the surface of the street. Paving streets became much more difficult when you needed to protect access to manhole covers and storm sewers.
I'll just briefly note another underground system that emerged during this period in larger cities that involved not water or ice but steam: "district heating." To avoid every building having to install its own boilers (with the attendant risk of fire and problems with smoke generation), district heating generated hot water and steam at centralized facilities that then distributed this steam to individual buildings through an underground system of pipes. Begun in NYC in 1882 by Consolidated Edison, district heating was also a way to capture and profit from heat that would otherwise have gone to waste in the process of generating electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system
New York's steam system is by far the largest in the world, and many iconic buildings we know today—the Empire State Building, the United Nations—rely on district heating both to heat and cool themselves. The same is true of most buildings on the UW-Madison campus.
But now let's turn to an underground distribution network that is far more familiar to you: drinking water. Creating the plumbing and distribution systems for water and sewage (and keeping the two separate) was among the great urban transformations of the nineteenth century. Remember that one of the most important political drivers for the construction of water systems was the threat of fires and the need to extinguish them quickly. Although the designers of early water systems in the first half of the nineteenth century wanted to supply water to fight fires and to provide for drinking and cooking, they didn't yet have a germ theory of disease to justify the construction of public water systems (and separate sewage systems) for health reasons. So the provision of water to put out fires and to supply drinking water justified large investments in water infrastructure like the Fairmount Waterworks in Philadelphia in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairmount_Water_Works
In New York City, securing water for the city also meant looking outside the bounds of the city, since the rivers of New York Harbor were brackish and wells in the boroughs weren't adequate to meet supply. Between 1837-1842, the Croton Aqueduct was constructed dozens of miles up the Hudson River, and first began operation in 1842 to deliver water to two reservoirs in the city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croton_Aqueduct
The Croton had become inadequate by the last quarter of the 19th century, leading to the opening of a larger New Croton Aqueduct in 1890, followed by aqueducts to the Catskills in 1916 and the Delaware River watershed in 1945.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Croton_aqueduct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_system
The system today has a storage capacity of 550 billion gallons, and delivers more than a billion gallons of water to NYC every day. An elaborate network of mains and pipes--many of which are now well over half a century old--delivers this water to the buildings in the city. Although we take many aspects of this water system for granted, a number of them are present in our lives every day: water towers, fire hydrants, water meters, sinks, toilets, and the hidden tanks and vents on top of buildings that as much as possible use the force of gravity to make the system to work.
In my environmental history course, I talk about the rise of the conservation movement, American ideas of wilderness, and Romantic notions of nature, all of which directly relate to this question of urban water supplies. One famous story I tell in that course involves a political conflict in the early 20th century over Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. The fires following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake created the political demand for a more reliable water source near the city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy
Although Hetch Hetchy was a symbol over the battle over how to use land, as I discuss in 460, you should remember that the construction of aqueducts was in fact happening all over the country. In today's lecture, notice that the Adirondacks—with Adirondack Park being the largest wilderness park outside of Yellowstone—was set aside from development to protect water sources for the Hudson River and the Erie Canal (and hence New York City), whatever the romantic virtues of wilderness in the park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adirondack_Park
The argument to protect national forests were also a product of watershed protecting effort. George Perkins Marsh made the argument, in his classic 1864 book Man and Nature, that forests were crucial to creating reliable water supplies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Perkins_Marsh
This concern about protecting urban watersheds was very much on the minds of advocates seeking to create a system of national forests system, which began to emerge at almost the same time as the Adirondack Park with the Forest Reserve Act of 1891.
Other famous episodes in the history of major metropolitan areas tapping remote rural areas to guarantee their own water supplies include the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which drained dry the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Southern Sierra Nevada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
and the Colorado River Aqueduct which carries water from Boulder Dam to Los Angeles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Aqueduct
Although we often think of western cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco as being especially "unsustainable" in their need to find water in the arid landscapes of the American West, in fact these western aqueducts aren't that different in form from New York's water supply. The same can be said for Boston, which in creating the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts during the 1930s flooded five New England towns to create a protected water supply for itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quabbin_Reservoir
In addition to the water that we take out of the system to drink, there's also the water that we put back into the system—wastewater—that needs to be, in effect, biologically deactivated. There's the network of underground pipes that delivers sewage to sewage processing plants, and the separation of that system both from the distribution systems for drinking water and the stormwater drainage system. Although I won't try to narrate their story in this lecture, all of these systems were also invented and constructed during roughly this same period. If these topics interest you, you can get started thinking about them by browsing through and outward from these Wikipedia entries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sanitation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_sewer#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitary_sewer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_drain
For Madison's sewer system, see
https://www.madsewer.org/Education/MMSD-Service-Area
and
https://goo.gl/maps/XYJkiuf6tDL2
Most of the rest of the lecture will focus on electricity and the coming of the electrical grid, which without any doubt the largest and most complicated machine humanity has every constructed (since every device plugged into the grid must essentially operate as part of that single vast machine or the whole system will collapse). Before diving in, I'll recommend a wonderful large-format illustrated book that may be worth owning if you enjoy this next section of the lecture, since no other book I know quite does what it does: Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape (2006). It's a guide with hundreds of photographs and clear, understandable explanations discussing virtually every feature of the modern industrial landscape. The web page for the book is here:
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-34983-2/
Its (fairly minimal) companion website is here:
http://industrial-landscape.com/#/home
And its chapter on the electrical grid is available online here:
https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~moyer/GEOS24705/Readings/Hayes_CH6_Grid.pdf
I'm now going to leave water behind and talk about electricity. Remember that electricity is primarily a way to move energy around, not itself a fuel or a source of energy. I'm not going to talk about the fuels and energy sources that enable us to generate electricity, though we've already touched on some of those in the lectures on mining. Instead, I want to give a quick overview of the system--"the grid"--that moves electricity into your life.
Brian Hayes offers an interpretive explanation of the work done by a simple utility pole in his book, and that seems like a good place to begin our survey of electricity in the American landscape. On these poles, moving from top to botton, we see an array of technologies: primary distribution lines, switches, transformers, secondary distribution lines, street lighting fixtures, traffic signals, television cables, telephone cables, grounding leads—and what he comically terms the "yard-sale zone," where people staple flyers to the poles. The utility pole is a king of metaphor for the many systems that we rely on and walk past every day but rarely notice or fully understand. You'll find similar explications of utility poles here:
https://hackaday.com/2016/02/22/a-field-guide-to-the-north-american-utility-pole/
http://www.psc.state.fl.us/ConsumerAssistance/UtilityPole
http://www.psc.state.fl.us/ConsumerAssistance/UtilityPoleDescriptions
Incidentally, we can and should also look at the tops of buildings for insight into the systems supporting our everyday lives: water tanks and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems, the latter of which is an invention of the mid-20th century.
Where does electricity come from? Why does it arrive to us in the form it arrives to us today?
Thomas Edison was the first person to start building electrical systems in the U.S. Beginning in the 1880s, he sought to build a system where direct current (DC)—current with a steady flow all moving in one direction—would be the form of electricity delivered to consumers. Edison's chief competitor, Nikola Tesla, argued that alternating current (AC)--current oscillating back and forth in two directions many times per second--was the superior form of electricity. The main virtue of alternating current was that one could transport electricity at very high voltages over long distances without as much loss to resistance as was true of direct current, stepping down the voltage with transformers near the point where it would finally be used.
The first successful generator was built in New York City in 1881, Edison's "Jumbo No. 1." By 1882, Edison was delivering electricity to a commercial block of New York. The very first delivery of electricity from a central generating system to a residential user was right here in Appleton, Wisconsin. Henry J. Roger, owner of the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company, became the first homeowner in the world to have his house lit by electricity. Teslanpartnered with George Westinghouse, who won a contract in 1893 to generate and distribute AC current from generators at Niagara Falls, and also won the contract for lighting the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. It was the beginning of the end for Edison's DC system, though DC remains crucial for many electronic devices today, requiring that AC current be converted to DC before electronic devices can deal with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents
The electrical systems initiated by Edison and Tesla proliferateed and became increasingly complicated, with Tesla's vision of alternating current winning out. Urban electrical systems mimicked urban water systems except for this problem: you didn't want your electrical lines to mix with systems of water distribution for fear of the damage done to the electrical lines by water exposure. So we began to see the start of long-distance and high-voltage lines installed above ground.
Notice that the nation's electrical system, as it developed, was not completely interconnected and it is still not completely interconnected today. We can see from maps that the four grid systems of the U.S. are a bit sealed off from each other: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Systems Coordinating Council Interconnection, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, and (reaching into Canada) Quebec Hydro. This points us to another paradox: it is no exaggeration to say that the grid is a single, vast machine. The moment you plug any appliance into the grid, it becomes a load on the grid. One of the hardest things about the grid is that it will collapse if every device connected to it is not oscillating at the same rate. This explains why, when there's a blackout, the blackout cascades, and when you bring the grid back online you cannot bring it back online all at once. Managing that system—managing baseload—is unbelievably complicated, and a problem that advocates of intermittent power sources like wind and solar rarely discuss.
The energy to generate electricity can come from waterpower, coal, natural gas, biofuel, nuclear, solar, wind: anything that can eventually turn a turbine. Most generators work by boiling water and using steam to spin turbines. The geographic lines that high-voltage powerlines follow are the lines of the railroads, telegraphs, and interstate highway systems—networks we've been tracking all semester. Electricity moves through transformers, then into the lines that distribute it to buildings and end-users. I encourage you to ponder the number of devices you use daily that rely on this vast and interconnected system of electricity distribution.
One last point to remember is how much of the modern world is utterly dependent on the steady flow of electricity, which is why the stability of the grid is both so important and such a remarkable engineering and managerial achievement. This remarkable graph offers an invaluable timeline depicting the rate of adoption of different electrical appliances over the course of the twentieth century, from telephones to radios to refrigerators to washing machines to televisions to air conditioning to computers. It's well worth pondering. As you do so, think both about how these appliances relate to the American landscape, and how they express themselves in your own life:
https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-pace-of-technology-adoption-is-speeding-up
the original version of which is here:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/02/10/opinion/10op.graphic.ready.html
For a fascinating timeline that focuses in a similar but even more detailed way on adoption of telecommuncations technologies, see this diagram from the Wall Street Journal:
http://www.karlhartig.com/chart/techhouse.pdf
Few images better suggest the scale of impact that electricity has had on the landscape of the United States than a satellite view of the nation at night, in which the network of urban nodes, where streetlighting and transportation are densest, leaps off the screen. The following NASA page shows the nighttime landscape of the United States, which is worth comparing with the nighttime landscape of the planet as a whole, also included on this same page:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html
Paralleling the growth of the electrical grid was the growth of the telecommunications grid, first with the telegraph, then the telephone, then radio and television, then the Internet, fiber optics, and cell networks. As we've already seen, the telegraph tracked the growth of the railroad network and preceded the electrical distribution network itself, including for the vital undersea cables that were first laid in the mid-nineteenth century and remain indispensable for global telecommunications. I won't try to narrate these in today's lecture, but they too are a vital part of the invisible networked landscapes we're exploring today. If you're interested in this history, you could explore the links below and consider their implications for the American landscape and your own life. You're certainly not required to do so for this course...but if you want to have a better appreciation of the technical systems that underpin a huge part of what you do every day, you might want to educate yourself about how these systems work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_network
I'll end the lecture where I began, by noting that these vast networks that reach across the entire continent and in some cases all around the world express themselves fractally on every scale, from the nation to the region to the city to the neighborhood to the household and even down to the devices in your own pocket. I concluded with a whirlwind review of the ways the systems I've traced in the lecture as a whole emerged in Madison and our own campus. Images I showed that seem especially good for thinking about the networked systems in this lecture would include the following:
James Duane Doty's 1836 plat map for streets on the Madison Isthmus:
http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/maps/id/1131
Bird's-Eye Panoramic Maps of Madison in 1867 and 1885:
https://www.loc.gov/item/73694546/
https://www.loc.gov/item/75696711/
UW-Madison Utility Master Plan 2005 (the best readily available set of maps for the underground systems of our campus, well worth reviewing):
http://faculty.nelson.wisc.edu/middlecamp/2014/documents/Utility%20Master%20Plan%202005.pdf