Mon­day, I began my pro­gram of revers­ing the losses of a very seden­tary Decem­ber with a 28-mile bike ride down what has become my usual loop: Cruft­labs to Nat­ick and back via Brook­line, New­ton, and Welles­ley. My usual moment of rev­er­ence in pass­ing the Chest­nut Hill reser­voir pump­ing sta­tions was inter­rupted when I noticed the front door to the Boston Low pump­house—a mas­ter­piece of Beaux Arts con­struc­tion built in 1900—was propped open for the first time in prob­a­bly 30 years.

I unclipped and stepped, all alone, for the first time, into the tow­er­ing iron-framed stone cham­ber that holds the steam engines that pumped much of Boston’s water for 70 years. Bare bulbs dan­gling on black cords from the ceil­ing com­peted with high shafts of win­dow light made solid by decades of accu­mu­lated dust. The dim light­ing and the cob­webs did not detract from the mag­nif­i­cence of these machines. Their enor­mity is most appar­ent when you real­ize that they pen­e­trate every floor of the build­ing. The build­ing, for all its ele­gance and crafts­man­ship, its Indi­ana lime­stone and Mil­ford gran­ite, and is like a paper wrap­per around these engines—the heart of the operation.

After some time, I stepped out­side and walked to where a truck dri­ver had just deposited a fresh dumpster.

“What are you guys clean­ing out of the base­ment?” I asked.

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it. Thou­sands of tons of stuff. Scrap.”

A Bob­cat front-loader came bar­relling out of the base­ment door, nearly tip­ping over as it labored to dump a huge piece of flanged cast-iron pres­sure pipe into the dumpster.

“Scrap metal, like pipes, boil­ers… machines?”

“Oh yeah, a lot of metal. Dirt too.”

The worker directed me to the trailer out back for more infor­ma­tion. A super­vi­sor, who appeared to have been awak­ened from a nap by my knock­ing, explained the project.

“We’re get­ting rid of every­thing! All the old shit. All that’s gonna be left is the building.”

“You’re trash­ing the machines, too? The pumps?”

“Every­thing. In six weeks there won’t be any­thing left!”

In The Win­ter of Our Dis­con­tent, Stein­beck writes: “… tourists come to see the archi­tec­ture and what they call `the old-world charm’ of our town. Why does charm have to be old-world?”

These pumps are beau­ti­ful, and noth­ing like them will ever exist again. The pieces—cabinet-grade wood, once-polished brass, ornate instru­men­ta­tion, shapely iron cast­ings con­cerned more with grace­ful lines than econ­omy of material—could still be made today. But these engines have a soul, wrought by the hands of the Machine Age crafts­men who built them. They are tro­phies cel­e­brat­ing the tri­umph of tech­nol­ogy in the era of indus­tri­al­iza­tion. They are World’s Fair show­pieces that daz­zled audi­ences with­out the aid of light shows and spe­cial effects. Today, we so take the relent­less march of tech­no­log­i­cal progress for granted that, even as we mar­vel at the design of the iPod, we cheer­fully acknowl­edge that in 5 years it will be most suit­able for use as a doorstop. Some charm.

But a steam engine can’t live for­ever with­out life sup­port. So when the city grows weary of remov­ing graf­fiti, evict­ing the home­less, pay­ing the bills, and mow­ing the lawn, I sup­pose it’s only fair that we let them go. But lux­ury con­do­mini­ums? Geez.