In Chicago, a ‘Magic’ Water Pump Draws Nostalgic Neighbors, Springwater Lovers, and Believers of Papal Lore
~1500 Words
In the Schiller Woods Forest Preserve on Chicago’s Northwest Side, near the asphalt turnout along Irving Park Road, sounds of industry syncopate: Cars and trucks whirr above the speed limit, and airplanes—both O’Hare arrivals and miniature, plastic departures from the Schiller Model Airplane Flying Field—coast overhead.
Closer to the forest’s bramble, and quieter: The mumbles of small-talk, mostly in Polish, and the relentless squeaking of a water pump’s rusted handle.
Rain, snow, wind and shine, this water pump squeaks, squeaks, squeaks from morning till night. It is one of the most-used of 180 working hand pumps in the Cook County Forest Preserve system. Certainly it is the most storied: It has been blessed by the Pope. It is a fountain of youth. It cures all illnesses. It resurrects plants. To each their own, beliefs abound.
“Would you believe I’m 110?” jokes Sharon Steffensen, a resident of Chicago’s North Side, who is nearly 80 years old and has been drinking the pump’s water for 42 years. She says that she “goes along” with the pump’s rumored “fountain of youth” abilities—one of the many ethereal legends that has grown from this site, that this water brings eternal health—and says that the pump’s “artisan” water is better than any bottled brand or filtered tap.
“When you’re in your late teens and early twenties, you don’t really care about your water that much,” says Steffensen, who recalls her days growing up in nearby Forest Park and visiting the Schiller Woods with her friends in the 1960s.
Installed in 1945, the pump draws from an underground aquifer that has a higher concentration of natural minerals than Chicago tap water, says Tom Rohner, the Director of Facilities and Fleets for the Cook County Forest Preserve District and who oversees the department responsible for the pump’s maintenance. And, unlike tap water, the aquifer has no added fluoride or chloride, which are among the chemicals his department tests for annually.
This difference in taste alone is enough to draw many visitors—Mark and Audra Panczyszyn made the two-hour trip from Spring Grove, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border, for their very first sips. Compared to their regional pumps, Audra said, which had turned the water brown with high iron concentrations, this water was “soft, clean, excellent.”
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The line of people at the pump is nearly omnipresent, backed up sometimes thirty yards, all the way to the road. While waiting, some visitors enjoy passing time by counting the many deer, who by now are comfortable with people, emerging from the forest. Empty milk jugs, glass bottles and five-gallon barrels rest, soon to be filled, near the idle feet of those patiently waiting.
And the wait can be long—even in January sub-zero or March dampness, few visitors come and go without pumping water in bulk. Switching arms, switching knees, a whole line behind silently watching on—the pumping is a workout. Each person makes two, three, four trips via wagons, milk crates, and dollies back to their cars. One man carries a cardboard box, which alternates between holding water jugs and Christmas ornaments. An older couple places water bottles in grocery bags, which hang from the handles of their walkers.
Hardly anyone leaves without enough water to last a while — a month per person, or a week when shared by an entire family.
Two other nearby pumps also draw water from this aquifer, but hardly anyone uses them. Pump-goers cite a sulfuric taste and rotten egg smell, a common byproduct of well water and one that doesn’t escape memory easily, Rohner says.
On one particularly cold day in late January, the “magic” pump froze, while the other two didn’t. Everyone who came and turned away went home, rather than use the working pumps. Rohner is called to fix the “magic” pump about four times per year, he says, compared to receiving just one call for the others in the last two years.
To share news about the “magic pump” — such as these instances of freezing, or a broken handle from overuse — Chicagoan Michelle Lukacs created the “Schiller Woods Fountain of Youth” Facebook group. For over a decade Lukacs has been coming to the pump, a practice that began for her through her grandparents, Hungarian immigrants, who began coming in the 1960s as a way to remember how they retrieved water in Hungary.
“It's been something that has really filled my life,” she says. “I feel a difference drinking that water versus Chicago tap or a bottle of purified water. I feel it filling, quenching and really giving me what I need from water.”
Some who visit the pump use the water only for cooking and cleaning, and others only for drinking; some use the water for soup but not pasta, and others for tea and coffee—most, though, pick and choose their own combination. When Lukacs switched from tap water to pump water for her Dracaena plant—found dead in a trash can in a winter-salted alley—it recovered and grew to be over six feet tall, she said.
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The most popular neighborhood belief emanating from the water pump teeters between fact and fiction, and is particularly significant for the neighborhood’s heavy Polish and Catholic presence: In October 1979, when Pope John Paul II—the only Polish-born pope—visited Chicago, he stopped his motorcade at the pump and blessed its water.
“Because the fountain was blessed by the pope, that whole aquifer, the whole place behind it, has basically been touched by the hand of God,” says Rohner, who has looked into the community history of this legend. “However, it’s not provable,” he concludes.
The documents held at the Archdiocese of Chicago Archives and Records Center—over four boxes of letters, newspaper clippings, memos and press releases—can neither confirm nor deny this blessing either.
Per one report from the Office of the Archbishop and dated September 1979, those close to the pope believed that his motorcade traveled further on ground throughout Chicago, than it had in any other American city. Though his exact route wasn’t officially recorded, maps and itineraries confirm he flew in and out of O’Hare, and made at least two separate trips through Northwest side neighborhoods—including one planned, 55-minute parade.
Charles Heinrich, the archival technician at the Archdiocese’s Archives and Records Center and a longtime Northwest side resident, distinctly remembers his grandparents setting up lawn chairs across from the Copernicus Center in Jefferson Park, in anticipation of the pope’s motorcade.
“The pope has been known to stop his traveling in impromptu fashion to greet people in previous trips,” an August 1979 press release from the Archbishop’s office reads.
Certainly the pope was very close to the pump, and perhaps even passed by it. But even if evidence of a blessing in 1979 remains undetermined, it is also possible that Pope John Paul II blessed the pump before he was pope. As a Cardinal—Cardinal Karol Wojtyła—he made two separate visits to Chicago—the first in 1969, and again in 1976. During this second visit, according to documents archived at the Archdiocese, he visited Gordon Technical High School on the city’s Northwest side, and ate dinner in Niles, a suburb, at the Polish-owned White Eagle restaurant.
“He traveled extensively throughout the neighborhoods of the city,” says Heinrich. “He visited many Polish neighborhoods such as Brighton Park and the Polish corridor throughout the Northwest side. So who’s to say?”
In line at the water pump in 2022, these facts are hardly relevant. “We are very proud of Pope John Paul” says Maria Gwizdz, who was born in southern Poland near Krakow. When the eventual pope was still Bishop Wojtyła, he drove from a nearby town, Wadowice, and confirmed Gwizdz into the Catholic Church, she says. The next time she saw him, eight years after having moved to the city’s Northwest suburbs, he was the Pope in downtown Chicago.
Gwizdz has been coming to the pump for 40 years, taking every chance to bring along her daughter Joanna, who has been drinking from the pump “all her life,” she says.
“We heard it’s the purest spring water source,” Gwizdz says. “In Poland we would always drink the purest form of water fresh from the mountains. It was a nice reminder of home while living away from home.”
Earlier this year, Pawel Banasik arrived in Chicago from Lublin, Poland, a city 60 miles from the Ukrainian border. Coming to the pump was one of the first things his mother, also from Poland and having lived in Chicago already for a number of years, instilled in him. “I never asked why exactly that pump,” he says. But still he likes it better than Chicago tap.
“To me, this is a story that's about faith,” Rohner says. “The people that partake in this particular well are loyal. They believe in what this pump stands for and what this pump brings to them. I would never question it… We’ll continue to fix the pump and keep it running, and it’ll make people happy.”
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