This Baltimore sewage building is beautiful. Now it’s getting a $63M upgrade.

Baltimore’s Eastern Avenue Pumping Station was designed with care.

Its exterior is lined with a mosaic of orange and red brick. Great arched windows bathe its interior in light. An old smokestack rises from the mansard roof, where copper plates and a majestic cupola have oxidized into a sea green, occasionally matching the tint of the Jones Falls below.

The gilded pump station is among the stateliest buildings in a city that brims with them. But few of the thousands of commuters who pass by each day would guess that its chief purpose is moving their poop.

“I love this building,” said Chris Stielper, who oversees pump stations for the Baltimore Department of Public Works, on a recent tour. “It’s amazing to me.”

Stielper is the rare Baltimorean who appreciates the Eastern Avenue station both for beauty and for function. He first reported to work there more than 50 years ago and has become a devoted keeper of the building’s history.

Each day, about 20 million gallons of sewage pass through Eastern Avenue. The wastewater drains from tracts in Central and East Baltimore before being jettisoned six miles east by the station’s giant pumps. There, it’s purified at the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Essex.

The same pumps have performed this task since 1960, but soon that will change.

City officials approved $63 million for the building this spring, more than half of which will go toward replacing the facility’s custom pumps. The city plans to spend millions more on electrical upgrades, HVAC and structural improvements.

These upgrades, which the DPW hopes to begin by early 2027, come as Baltimore has raised rates on its water and sewer customers and as fixes to Baltimore’s aging water systems grow more urgent. Earlier this year, a ruptured interceptor in a Washington, D.C., suburb drained hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River, and many of Baltimore’s pipes are significantly older than that one.

Big expenses like those at the Eastern Avenue station could exacerbate rising costs for Baltimore customers, but according to Stielper and Michael Hallmen, the DPW’s deputy bureau head for wastewater, the investment is long overdue. Stielper estimates that these pumps are about 15 years past their lifespan.

When it comes to upgrading Eastern Avenue, Hallmen said it’s spend it now or “spend more later.”

Baltimore’s operation didn’t always look this civilized. Untreated sewage used to empty directly into tributaries like the Jones Falls and Gwynns Falls, which carried waste into the harbor.

Leaders sought to remedy that in the wake of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, building an underground sanitary system and completing the Eastern Avenue station in 1912. At the time, it was considered the largest sewage construction and disposal project in the world.

After years of a harbor fouled by industrial and human waste, the pump station marked a new era for downtown, said Rachel Ellis, head of The Public Works Experience, which runs an infrastructure museum at the Eastern Avenue station.

The grandiose architecture was a statement of civic pride, Ellis said. “Today, you will never see anything like that built — ever — for a sewage pump station."

Designed by architect Henry Brauns, the pump station was built in the Second Renaissance Revival style reminiscent of Medici-era Italy, according to the 2009 book “A Guide to Baltimore Architecture.”

“The pumping station is an essay in eclecticism,” wrote the authors, who called the facility “a handsome building in spite of its utilitarian function.”

For almost half a century, Eastern Avenue’s pumps ran on coal, delivered directly to the building by barge and carried up a conveyor belt to giant bins in the roof of the building. The city installed electric turbines in 1960 that still lift sewage from deep underground, to be pushed east with enough velocity to reach the treatment plant in Essex.

Stielper, who grew up in Northeast Baltimore’s Lauraville, got his first job as a pipe fitter apprentice at the Sparrows Point shipyard. After arriving at Eastern Avenue in 1975, he never left.

Now 70, Stielper manages the DPW’s system of 20 pump stations and works from the Eastern Avenue station’s corner office, where floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the harbor and the Jones Falls. His desk and shelves are cluttered with nautical trinkets, papers and yellowing sewage manuals.

Not on display is a master logbook Stielper once discovered in a storage closet. Inside, a former engineer recorded day-to-day operations at Eastern Avenue, in tight handwriting, all the way back to 1920.

The detail was amazing, Stielper said, but he hasn’t seen the book in years. He thinks it might still be in the building.

“It drives me crazy!” he said. “One of these days, I’ve got to find that book.”