Christopher Menone pointed me toward this image from Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 site, from the section on water network initiatives:
Hey, that cylindrical-shaft-extending-to-infinity thing looks familiar! The image from my blog’s header is from a photo I took at Chateau de Chambord in France’s Loire Valley, aiming up toward the sky in one of the many wacked-out towers that King François I built there, presumably just because he could.