Dan Becker hasn’t lived in New Jersey since 1984.
But for decades, the Texan has maintained a shrine of sorts to a landmark from back home — the Union Township water tower.
The 212-foot (or 211-foot, depending on who you ask) pale gray baton and bulbous tank has loomed over the Garden State Parkway and Route 22 since 1964, proclaiming “UNION” for all the land to see.
A golfball atop a colossal tee. A leviathan lollipop. A giant eyeball. The “spiritual center of Union.”
Those are just some ways Becker, who lives in Austin, describes the tower. For highway travelers, the name emblazoned across the column’s lofty “watersphere” above Kawameeh Swamp leaves no doubt as to where they are. For Unionites, the waypost serves as a symbol of home.
Becker’s website, The World’s Tallest Water Sphere, pays homage to a boast that used to be visible on a billboard at the base of the tower.
It’s a claim that, with Becker’s help, has endured despite challenges whenever newer, taller water towers crop up, from Oklahoma to Dubai. Though he has no stake in the water company and doesn’t plan to move back to Jersey anytime soon, Becker has become the self-appointed, unofficial steward of the watersphere.
If the fabled mast and sphere were the Great and Powerful Oz, Becker, 57, would surely be the gatekeeper. Except instead of warning of the tower’s fearsome power and mystery and slamming a window to scamper back inside, he’d welcome you in with factoids, diagrams and photographs.
Dan Becker and his wife, Jane Becker. Dan's interest in the Union water tower has drawn fans of the watersphere to his Austin home. He added a virtual tour of the collection to his website.Courtesy Dan Becker
Becker’s fascination with the watersphere is an enduring one.
Though his website looks like an homage to 1990s homepages — he started the project in 1995 and bought the domain name in 2000 — the retired web developer posts regular updates to the site. Just this week, he debuted a major addition: a “virtual tour” of his at-home “museum” dedicated to the water tower.
His main personal website, danbecker.info, is a portal to his self-described “twisted world.” There’s a sidebar with links to “Puppies" (he and his wife, Jane, have two Labrador retrievers), “Model Trains,” “Weather," his friend’s LiveJournal and the Union High Class of 1980, of which Becker is a member (the 40th reunion is in May, but he can’t make it).
The watersphere in 2009. Other challengers have threatened to take the "tallest" title, but Becker is always quick to debunk those claims.Ed Murray | The Star-Ledger
Becker’s other diverse interests include triathlons, guitars, armor, trebuchets, miniatures and model-making. But his crowning glory is the personal hall of fame he’s constructed for the tower of his youth.
In fact, he once tried to make contact with the New Jersey American Water Company, which owns the watersphere, to ask questions about maintenance on the structure.
“You can see it’s starting to rust,” Becker tells NJ Advance Media, referring to aerial footage of the tower, which is located near the intersection of Morris Avenue and the Parkway.
The Union water tower in 2004 with the old billboard advertising its "world's tallest" status.Jennifer Brown | The Star-Ledger
Alas, Becker says the water company “ghosted” him after he asked when the tower was last painted.
“Maybe they saw my website and they said, ‘This guy’s a weirdo,'" he says. Even among water tower enthusiasts, websites fixated on just one tower are rare.
The rejection didn’t dampen his spirits. Becker, who settled in Austin in 1996 after spending 12 years in Florida, started a Facebook group for the World’s Tallest Watersphere. He fields correspondence sent to him by tower admirers from Union and beyond. He recognized the local band Splooge for using a photo of the tower on the cover of its 2018 album.
Becker’s focus on the tower can be traced to the mid-’80s, when he started trading pictures and art of the familiar marker with friends.
A scene from Dan Becker's tongue-in-cheek virtual "museum" dedicated to the Union water tower, showing the watersphere with different paint jobs over the years. Dan Becker
“Traveling from the Jersey Shore and traveling back home, that was the sign that you were home in Union,” Becker says. “Everybody knew about it and were able to see it, whether you were on Route 22 or the Parkway or even Route 78, you could see it. That was always a big icon of the town.”
Becker’s home exhibit includes posters, artwork and photography of the watersphere, plus information about the Kawameeh Swamp. The new site for his virtual watersphere “museum” tour boasts an image of an airy, windowed lobby featuring a pastiche of superimposed graphics and photos of the tower. The digital attraction is a playful nod to his home collection.
“The virtual museum has the advantage of 24 hour a day access and higher crowd volumes,” Becker cheekily explains on the site.
He has occasionally hosted visitors (by appointment) at his Texas shrine to the New Jersey tower since 2003.
Dan Becker used this meme to underscore the importance of the Union water tower being a watersphere, not a waterspheroid.Dan Becker
“Watersphere” may seem like water tower jargon, but the designation is key, Becker says, especially when challengers emerge to take the title.
“There are taller water towers, but they don’t build the waterspheres anymore,” he says.
Other towers are usually topped with spheroid tanks. In 2012, the Star-Ledger reported that another water tower in Erwin, North Carolina, was set to best the Union tower’s height by seven to eight feet. It turns out the Southern tower was a waterspheroid, not a watersphere, leaving the Jersey title intact.
You can tell by the slightly flattened top, which resembles an onion or bulb of garlic.
And what of the 220-foot tower that went up in Braman, Oklahoma in 2010? Nope, Becker says. Spheroid again — the tank has the signature compressed top and an incrementally more cylindrical base than the Union tower.
Waterspheroids are more popular now because they are less susceptible to wind, he says, and many are able to hold much more water than the Union sphere’s 250,000-gallon capacity.
Even as it went out of fashion among engineers, Becker considers the spherical nature of the Union landmark a thing of beauty.
“The current ones, they look like a squashed pillow,” he says.
A 219-foot water tank in Erwin, North Carolina is slightly taller than the Union water tower, but it is a waterspheroid, not a watersphere. Becker is careful to make the distinction.Ricky Temple
However, the Jersey sphere is less ornamental than some of its cousins.
“If you look across the country, waterspheres ... like in (Gaffney) South Carolina, they paint it like a peach,” Becker says.
In 1981, New Jersey artist Peter Freudenberg painted the town’s Peachoid water tower, which features a lifelike crease, stem and leaf and was later featured on the Netflix series “House of Cards" (lead character Frank Underwood was from Gaffney, and one plot involved the Peachoid’s resemblance to certain human body parts). In 1980, Freudenberg painted Germantown, Maryland’s Earthoid water tower, designed to resemble the globe.
Sphere-friendly Jersey tomatoes and blueberries, while fitting representatives of the Garden State, are not primarily grown in Union County. Still, when the tower’s designer, Armand Fiorletti, first started working as an engineer in Union, the landscape was quite different.
“It was all farmlands in my day,” Fiorletti, 92, tells NJ Advance Media. After all, Union was once known as Connecticut Farms, the site of a Revolutionary War battle.
Fiorletti, now vice chairman of the planning board in Linden, retired from a 20-year career as county engineer in 1999. In the 1960s, he worked for the Union engineering firm of Grassmann, Kreh and Mixer. He spent two years planning the tower in order to address water pressure problems in town and enhance the well field that was then owned by Elizabethtown Water Company. In 1964, Chicago Bridge and Iron Works (the same company behind the Peachoid) built the watersphere for $89,500.
For its first paint job, the scepter-like tower started out light blue. The hue became richer and almost metallic, Becker says, before its most recent coat of gray.
“I was proud of the project and the publicity it’s gotten,” Fiorletti says. “It makes you feel good. To say, ‘Oh, I was part of that.’”
He doesn’t care as much about the whole “world’s tallest” title — and he suspects there may be a taller sphere somewhere (Becker is doubtful).
“It’s just good to see that it’s still standing,” Fiorletti says. “It’s a novelty in the area now.”
When it comes to local lore and incremental updates, he defers to Becker, who gifted him a model of the tower for his 90th birthday.
Armand Fiorletti, designer of the Union water tower, with a model of the tower that Dan Becker made and gave him for his 90th birthday.Sandra Kubacki
Is there anything about the tower that can stump Becker, the watersphere whiz?
As it turns out, yes.
Christopher DePaola, project manager with the company, has a revelation for the tower’s No. 1 fan:
It’s dry.
The watersphere is no longer used to store water. Actually, its main function today is acting as a cellular tower, given the array of antennas attached to the neck of the landmark, DePaola tells NJ Advance Media. He maintains the tower is actually 210 feet and 11 inches tall, if you’re measuring from the base to the manway opening at the top.
“The tank was used to store water for when it may be needed,” says Denise Venuti Free, spokeswoman for New Jersey American Water. “It hasn’t been used for that purpose since the 1960s. It has been used to alleviate pressure issues in the system but it wasn’t an active part of water delivery to people.”
The Union water tower in 2012. The structure, outfitted with cellular antennas, does not store water anymore, according to New Jersey American Water.Jennifer Brown | The Star-Ledger
After the Elizabethtown system merged with New Jersey American Water’s Plainfield system in the ‘60s, the utility didn’t need to use the tank anymore, she says.
Becker says this news doesn’t pour cold water on his 'sphere fandom. He’ll be updating his website with the information.
“I’m glad to learn about it,” he says. “It’s important to know that it’s not holding any water right now.”
He was also glad to hear a long-sought answer to his question about the tower’s last paint job: 1994, inside and out.
“I find it pretty fascinating that somebody is that interested and has dedicated so much to this,” DePaola says of Becker’s efforts. "Good website content.”
“It’s pretty funny,” he says of the site, which includes a variation on the “woman yelling at a cat" meme that features Taylor Armstrong from “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and Smudge the Cat.
“There are taller water towers,” Armstrong says in the meme, crying and accusatively pointing her finger at Smudge.
“It’s a water sphere,” the cat sagely replies.
Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.
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