About the Museum

The Waterworks Museum is a museum in the Chestnut Hill Waterworks building, originally a high-service pumping station of the Boston Metropolitan Waterworks. It contains well-preserved mechanical engineering devices in a Richardsonian Romanesque building. During its busiest years, the waterworks pumped as much as a hundred million gallons of water each day. The station was decommissioned in the 1970s, and later some of its buildings were turned into condominiums. After a period of disuse, the pumping station was restored, and in 2007 the Waterworks Preservation Trust was set up to oversee its conversion into a museum. In March 2011, the building reopened to the public as the Waterworks Museum.