Houston built its cistern in 1926 to serve as the city’s underground water reservoir. By 2007, the year that the city decommissioned it, Houston was already sourcing its drinking water from lakes and rivers. The cistern had sprung a leak over the past decade that rendered it unusable. So the city locked it up and promptly forgot all about it.
The cistern might have stayed lost, too, had it not been for two things: One, from the outside, it forms a rather prominent hill in a city that doesn’t have many. Two, the cistern enjoys pride of place near the edge of Buffalo Bayou Park, the 160-acre stretch of restored parkland that opened to great fanfare in the summer of 2015. [...]
The bottom of the Houston Cistern is still covered by about 6 inches of water; the egress added by Page is the only part of the structure that can be occupied by people, which limits tours to just 30 visitors at a time. Nevertheless, Buffalo Bayou Park has registered more than 11,000 registrations for tours since the cistern opened to visitors in May.
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